Reality Sets In

This is a picture of our father at the site where he swam ashore after the crash of his B-26 Marauder on May 17, 1943. It was taken by my brother Gil in 2005 when he accompanied our father on his first trip back since his Marauder ditched in the the Nieuwe Waterweg River.

When Jim Hoel finished his interrogation at "Gulag Luft" and his meeting with the German Corporal who grew up blocks from Jim in Evanston, Illinois, all he knew for certain regarding the Ijmuiden Mission and his particular flight was that Jim and the other two officers, the pilot and co-pilot, had survived. From the point of capture, officers and enlisted men were separated and the radio operator in Jim's B-26 Marauder, an enlisted man, had been separated from the others. They had no idea where he was taken.

That was the way the European armies operated, so only Jim and the other two officers were interrogated at Gulag Luft. Following the days of interrogation, as the young men were enjoying their first time together and their first taste of freedom in the Gulag Luft yard, a pilot of another plane on the Ijmuiden Mission, Lieutenant Colonel Puritan, walked into the yard and joined the other young men.

The plan for the May 17, 1943 Ijmuiden Mission was to have the B-26 Marauders split off; five of the planes were going to the target in Ijmuiden, Holland and the other five to a target in Harlem, Holland. Lieutenant Puritan was leading the five planes that were targeting Harlem.

Jim and the others, for the first time, began to glimpse the true nature of the tragedy of the May 17, 1943 mission. Only Lieutenant Puritan and his co-pilot had survived the crash of his airplane. The rest of the crew had been killed. Jim and the others knew that Colonel Stillman's plane had gone down and Puritan reported all of them dead, as Jim had to accept as he had seen the crash. Jim knew that his plane was down with four survivors. He also now knew that Puritan's plane was down with only two survivors.

Then Puritan added, that when he saw Stillman's plane go down, he saw the next B-26 Marauder in formation move forward to take the lead. In doing so, however, that plane collided with another B-26 and they both exploded. Puritan believed that all of the airmen on those two planes had been killed.

Jim knew at this point that they were on their way to a permanent camp, though he didn't have any idea where. All Jim did know was that five of the 322nd Group's B-26 Marauders out of ten airplanes that had crossed the North Sea on May 17, 1943 had gone down. Neither Jim nor the other airmen had any idea at that point that all ten planes had gone down and 40 airmen friends were dead. The "adventure" that these young soldiers envisioned when entering the Army Air Force after Pearl Harbor had turned to tragedy.

When Jim and the others were loaded onto a train, they had no idea where they were going. They rode on the train all day long, going east, and finally stopped at Sagan, Germany, a hauntingly desolate area. In fact, it was in this very area that Napoleon made his last stand fighting the Russians as he was being driven back. Most of what they saw was a reforestation project that had been started perhaps 30 years earlier; row after straight row of pine trees that seemed to go on forever. Jim didn't see anybody as they were placed in trucks and taken to a camp. They didn't run into any civilians of any kind. Sagan was a very small town; a railroad cross section that lived off of that.

After a ride of another half an hour, Jim and the others arrived at what was known as Stalag Luft III. They entered the gates of this prisoner of war camp to find it was a British officers' RAF camp and this is the place where all of the American officers shot down and captured year to date, were housed.

They would soon hear from others who were brought to Stalug Luft III of the true extent of the Ijmuiden disaster and learn of the deaths of so many of their friends and fellow airmen.