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.

The Road to Interrogation

After three days in the Amsterdam jail cells, Jim Hoel and the other three B-26 Marauder survivors were taken into a room and joined by a fifth man, a British P47 pilot who had also been shot down on May 17, 1943. The five men were incarcerated there alone until six German guards entered. These guards were Luftwaffe (meaning air corps), not SS guards and they all had rifles and two of them had potato mashers, which were hand grenades with big wooden handles on them, crossed in their belts.

Jim and the others sat around the edge of the room with a table in the middle and in came an officer and he had a package in his pocket. He opened up the package and which was full of paper containers of gunpowder. The enlisted men then stood up, took off their potato mashers, went over to the table, opened them up, and put in a charge of the explosive powder (dynamite perhaps). They then put the potato mashers back in their belts. Jim was sure this was to arm them so that if they needed to use them, they would; but on the other hand, Jim thought it was to leave a good psychological impression on the Allied airmen to let them know that that the Germans were not fooling at all.

With that, they put the five prisoners in a truck and took them to the railroad station. In May of 1943, there had been little or no bomb damage done anywhere in this area. It was a beautiful spring day. They were taken into a typical European train with the long hallway all the way down one side of the train and then compartments off of that; each compartment probably held six people. Jim and the other prisoners occupied, with the guards, two of the compartments.

The train trip ran from Amsterdam, Holland, down the Rhine River to Frankfurt, Germany, and it was an absolutely beautiful, gorgeous trip. There had been no bombing of any kind along the Rhine River. From this vantage point, one wouldn't have know there was a war going on. (Much later, at the end of the War, Jim travelled this route in the other direction and the region was devastated and unrecognizable from the subsequent bombing.)

The train stopped at Cologne for some time and there seemed to be a lot of commotion in the railroad yards; a great deal of confusion; many people moving around and shouting. It turned out that the previous night, the RAF had bombed Cologne and hit it pretty hard. The men were told that one of the bombs hit the back of the cathedral at Cologne and did severe damage which the Allies claimed never said happened, but in truth, Jim believed it had been hit.

As they were waiting, the German guards who had traveled with Jim and the other prisoners, seemed to relax, undo their belts and weren't as attentive to the airmen as they had been before. Jim figured the reason for was that the Germans knew they would have no way or nowhere to go if they tried to escape now.

About that time, while the train was parked in the "marshaling" yards of Cologne, an SS officer (SS stands for Schutzstaffel which literally means 'protective squadron') came into the compartment. Jim can’t remember what his rank was, but from the minute he entered he was mad and he was mean.

He saw the relaxed way these guards were guarding the airmen and he started sailing into them. He got all of the men, Germans and Allies alike, to stand up, get out in this long train corridor and berated the whole group up one side and down the other. Jim gathered that he was just mad because of the bombing the night before and he was going to take it out on somebody.

Jim was standing next to him and hadn't had a bath for a few days; hadn't combed his hair; and hadn't shaved, so Jim didn't suppose he looked very respectable. At any rate, the SS officer was spit and polish in dress, and as he was waving his arms around, he hit Jim's jacket and suddenly stopped and stood dead still. He looked at the sleeve of his uniform that had brushed against Jim and he brushed it off just as though he had just touched a pig or something or other. And with that, he took a swing at Jim and knocked him down in the aisle.

Jim was pretty mad at this point, pent up with frustration from the crash, the loss of his friends and the last three days in captivity and he didn't know what he was going to do; but one of the guards who was standing right there put his foot out so that Jim couldn't get back anywhere near the SS officer. Jim believes that this guard knew that if Jim had approached him, the SS officer would likely have pulled out his pistol and killed Jim on the spot.

They continued down this beautiful trip until they arrived in Frankfurt, Germany, and this time were placed in the central "gulag", where again, the now five airmen were isolated; each one put in an individual cell. This place was really a jail, and it was pretty sophisticated. If they had to use the bathroom, they pulled a little cord and a guard would come to the door and escort them to the latrine, never saying a word. Nobody talked to us at all.

Eventually, Germans of all ranks began coming in one at a time to Jim’s cell and the interrogation process began.

Tomorrow – The Interrogations

Jail in Amsterdam

Sometime later, now it was early evening on May 17, 1943, Jim Hoel and the other three B-26 Marauder survivors were put in another truck which drove right into the heart of Amsterdam into what Jim considered to be the largest public building in the middle of Amsterdam. There, they were all put in jail cells in a basement.

It was an old building and these cells looked like the old gulags of torture days. Each was a concrete cell in itself and had a massive steel door. Each prisoner was placed in an individual cell, again, so they couldn't talk with each other. They hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. In the room was a bed (just a wooden bench) and a chair and a window way up on a wall with some bars on it that you couldn't get to anyway. They spent their first night in captivity in this Amsterdam jail.

Jim and the others stayed in this jail for 3 days. During this period, all they knew was that their B-26 Marauder had gone down and that their turret gunner and tail gunner had either been killed prior to the time that it went down or killed in the crash. It is still Jim’s belief that with all the fire that hit their Marauder, the rear end of the airplane probably drew most of the heavy fire and they probably were killed or wounded prior to the crash landing in the Maas River.

They had no idea what had happened to the rest of the squadron, except for Colonel Stillman’s lead plane, and they all assumed that all on board his B-26 were killed in the crash. This was the only crash they witnessed before they went down. As far as Jim and the other three were concerned, maybe all of the other B-26 Marauders on the 450th and 452nd Squadrons were back at the base, safe and sound.

Meals consisted of a piece of dark bread in the morning with a cup of ersatz (Jim thought, correctly, that meant “fake”) coffee. (During the War, "ersatz" became a frequently used pejorative description used by the thousands of U.S., British, and other English-speaking soldiers, primarily airmen, who were captured and placed in POW camps. POWs were served Ersatzkaffee or “substitute” coffee by their German guards, who had no real coffee to offer. Obviously, this substitute drink, a Getreidekaffee or "grain coffee", was not a favorite of the POWs, who missed their real coffee.). At noon, Jim and the others were served a bowl of watery soup and at night, another piece of bread.

One day, a German guard brought a fish to Jim, five or six inches long, on a plate with a little sauce next to it. The fish had been cleaned (the insides taken out), but it hadn't been cooked in any way. So the guard sat it down at Jim’s door and he saw that Jim didn't seem to know what to do with it, so he opened the door. (Food was typically slid under the door in a little slot in the door of his cell.). The guard who seemed like a nice guy stepped in and without a word, he picked the fish up and dipped it in this little sauce and then went as if to bite and to chew it. When he left, Jim picked up the raw fish and ate it as shown. It wasn't too bad at all.

During these first few days, Jim’s parents had probably received news of the May 17, 1943 322nd Group’s May 17 Ijmuiden Mission disaster but had no idea whether Jim was dead or alive. Jim’s first chance to write something home was on May 21, 1943 when he arrived at Staling Luft III. He wrote a brief note on a type of post card with the word “Kriegsgefangenenlager” at the top left, which means prisoner of war camp. Jim’s message home was brief:

Dear Folks – I hope you haven’t worried too much about my welfare. We met up with a bit of bad luck but I’m most thankful to say I’m O.K. now. We have been put in a German camp where we will evidently be held for the duration. As soon as I find out how you can write I will let you know. All my love, Jim.

It appears this post card was mailed on May 29, 1943. It is not clear when Omer and Olive Hoel, Jim’s parents received it.

A Glimpse of Freedom

As described in Jim Hoel’s letter to his mother written during the late evening of May 16, 1943, it hardly seemed as if a war was been fought as he rode his bike through the English countryside appreciating the beauty of the English garden in the early summer. Our father always created beautiful gardens in our yard as we grew up and his love for our gardens perhaps originated in these peaceful settings. He also wrote that he expected the Axis to crumble soon. He was optimistic, but unfortunately he was wrong. The next day, May 17, 1943, Jim was a captured airman after his B-26 Marauder was shot down. Sitting on the banks of the Maas River he had no idea what would happen next

Three of four hours later a small pickup truck with a canvas top on it backed up to the German "gun emplacement" and again, Jim had no idea what was going on. The four survivors from the B-26 Marauder were then summoned. Four guards from the truck came over. They had rifles drawn and they pointed to all four of the men to get into the truck, which they did.

The four Marauders sat in the truck, on the inside, with the four guards toward the back, and started driving someplace but at that point they didn't know where. Wherever Jim and the others were, it was clear that it was a rush hour because all around the truck (it had to be Amsterdam or a suburb) were bicycles, just dozens and dozens of bicycles. They were all workers evidently travelling home from work. The four Americans would occasionally, when the guards were looking out in back, give a “thumbs up” to this Amsterdam crowd and they would all wave and shout and cheer. Eventually, the German guards knew something was going on, so they stopped that in a hurry by turning around and threatening Jim and the others.

They were taken to what appeared to be some type of police headquarters. It was a stucco building and the Marauders were taken to the second floor into a room with three guards sitting there and holding them at bay.

One of the guards took one of the Jim’s crew out of the room. Jim had no idea where he was taken and the German guards still wouldn't let the Americans talk to each other. The first airman didn’t return. A little while later, the second guard took a second airman out of the room and they didn't come back. Still later, the third guard took another airman away, leaving Jim alone in the small room.

In an instant, Jim recalled what little escape training he had received. An RAF flying officer had given the Americans a short briefing on what happens. And all of a sudden, it dawned on Jim, that he had said, "The only and best time to escape is immediately when you've been captured". To this point Jim and the others had no opportunity to escape - until now. Jim then recalled that the RAF officer had also said, "The only other time is just any time after you've been captured whenever you see a good opportunity. But do it before you get into Germany because once you get into Germany, you're literally locked in a German prison and chances to escape diminish dramatically.”

All of a sudden it dawned on Jim and he walked over to the window in this second story building with the idea that he might just drop himself out of the window and take off. He looked down and there was a cobblestone street down below and rather than being just a second story, it was a high, high second story and he thought, "Well, I might drop myself down there and might break an ankle or something or other."

Before Jim had any chance to make up his mind one way or the other, the door opened and he turned around. One of the guards had returned, saw Jim standing by the window evidently looking like he was going to do something. The German guard got very nervous and he pointed his gun at Jim. Jim thought he was going to shoot him and put his hands up and said, "No, no, no." And at that point, Jim didn't know who was the most nervous, the German guard or him. At any rate, Jim sat down and that was the end of that.

The next opportunity for escape would not occur until much later with the carefully engineered and constructed tunnels at Stalug Luft III.

A Personal Note

I have received a surprising number of emails from people around the globe who have thanked me for this Blog. Most of these responses have been from people who never had the chance to know their fathers who died in the War or from people, much like me, who took their father's World War II experiences for granted while growing up and raising their own families. Their fathers passed on before they had the chance to truly understand their experiences and lessons learned during the War.

As I responded to a very thoughtful email today, I explained how very lucky I am that my father is alive today at 87, and of course lucky to be here myself. Had a few things gone differently on May 17, 1943, I would not be here today. I am also getting to know my father so much better these days, visualizing as I write, his life at 22 years old.

I mentioned in an earlier post, in passing, that as my father was sitting with is back to the bulkhead, bracing for the crash, he was not afraid. I asked him today what was the basis of that sense of acceptance, was it a faith in God, a surrender to the inevitable or something else. He didn't have an easy answer. My father is a much too humble man to suggest that bravery was an explanation.

He finally said that he never believed there was any way to survive a B-26 crash. As will be described in later posts, many B-26 airplanes crashed during training in the United States and over seas and my father had never seen one person survive one of those crashes. My father, I believe, simply accepted his inevitable fate. This forces me to look deep into my own heart and wonder how I would have responded in these circumstances.

The certainty in his mind of his impending death, forced some form of acceptance and as he says "I was at peace." He told me, as many have said before, "My entire life in 30 seconds or so flashed before my eyes, from a young boy to the present." As I mentioned earlier, his only true regrets were the telegrams his parents would soon receive, the first, a "missing in action" message, and later "killed in action."

My father always stresses that the real heroes were those who never returned and as you can imagine he gets very emotional these days as he recalls all the friends and true heroes who died so young.

As I explained today in response to one of many emails, I have been sitting on my father's tapes, documents and pictures for much too long. I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to write this story with my father today.

It is ironic perhaps that this was my father's first time in Europe. A short distance to the north, The Hoel family had left Norway, and made the hard journey with my great-grandfather, Olaf Hoel, to Minnesota in the late 1800's. I will talk about that tomorrow and the many struggles my father's earlier generations experienced that perhaps contributed to my father's courage that day.

There are so many stories to follow that I get impatient to tell them all right now. I will give you a glimpse of one that occurred just following my father's interrogations by the Germans. Hearing that one of the prisoners, my father, was from Evanston, Illinois, a young German soldier who had not been involved in the interrogation asked his superiors if he might have a word with Second Lieutenant Hoel.

It turns out that my father and this now German soldier, both 22 years of age, had grown up in the same neighborhood in Evanston, Illinois. As the result of a cruel "invitation" to "Dual Citizens", young German men living in the United States, who still retained their German citizenship, were a few years earlier invited to take a free vacation to their homeland. Shortly after arrival they were "conscripted" into the German army and unable to return home.

The ironies of war.

Alone

As Jim and the other three survivors started swimming slowly to the shore, they had no idea of the extent of the tragedy of the May 17 Ijmuiden Mission. They had seen, just before their B-26 Marauder was forced to ditch, the lead plane in the Squadron piloted by “Moose” Stillman, snap roll and crash upside down into a sand dune and knew that none of the six crewman on that B-26 could have survived. (Some time later, when Jim and the others were official prisoners of war at the Stalug Luft III camp, Moose miraculously walked in one day and his first words to the entire group of prisoners, many of whom thought they were seeing a ghost, were, “Who’s the son-of-a-bitch who’s been spreading the word that I’m dead.”)

Later that day at the Bury Saint Edmonds base in England, all anxiously awaited the return of their bombers. The Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) had been 1250. No word had been received when the ETA came and went and intense apprehension spread throughout the base. Shortly after the ETA, a listening post of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) reported that they had intercepted a German radio transmission confirming that two B-26 bombers had been shot down and crashed in the North Sea. These bombers were attempting to return home from the target. At 1330, no planes had returned and it became obvious that all were lost, ten out of the eleven B-26 bombers that set out that day had been shot down. One of the eleven had turned back before crossing the coast and made it safely home on one engine. Forty of the sixty airmen in those ten planes lost their lives that day.

But Jim and the others knew nothing of this of course. It was a long and tiring swim in the wide Maas Canal and as they approached the shore, they saw standing along a steep embankment 50 or maybe 75 German soldiers with their rifles all drawn. As the survivors pulled themselves up on the bank, standing in front of them was a very good looking and surprisingly nice young German officer wearing what Jim guessed was his summer dress uniform because it was a white coat. In fact, he was immaculately dressed. With his gun pointed at them, he said, "I think for you gentlemen, the war is over." What was going to happen now, they didn't know, but for the moment they were just thankful to be alive.

It turns out that this phrase, “I think for you the war is over”, was taught to German soldiers and used regularly when capturing American or British soldiers. The Mighty 8th Air Force Museum in Savannah, Georgia has created a full scale replica of one of the Stalug Luft prisoner of war quarters, which were originally intended to house eight prisoners. These quarters accommodated four times that number toward the latter stages of the War. Over the arched entry way to this Museum display, this German “Welcome” phrase is inscribed.

Jim and the others crawled up the bank and were guided over to a position where the German’s had placed defensive guns right along the canal. There must have been eight or ten 20-millimeter guns at that one location. The airmen began to understand at that point, looking at these guns, what they had run into in the air.

The four airmen were divided and told to sit along the bank about 40 feet from each other. They were kept apart so they couldn't talk to each other and perhaps develop some plan of escape though that would have been impossible. Likely, they also didn’t want Jim and the others to discuss any common approaches to the interrogations which were soon to follow.

It was now about noon. It was a sunny day in May, and yet the air was still a little cool and the water in the canal had been frigid, so they all remained cold. Though the German soldiers were intent on keeping the airmen apart, the soldiers in the unit stationed at this point were nice enough to come out and give each one of the men a blanket that they wrapped around themselves; and there they sat wondering, "Okay, what happens next?" Despite the outward civility of the German soldiers, for all the airmen knew, they could at any moment be shot in the back of the head.

They sat like this, each alone in his own thoughts and fears, for three or four hours, perhaps grateful to be alive, but saddened looking at the Mass Canal where two of their friends remained and who would never return. They still had no idea how many friends had been lost that day

A Flood of Memories

A number of years ago, on a Veteran’s Day, my father, was asked to talk to our church in Chicago about his experiences during World War II. I sat with my family in the front row amidst a number of other veterans and their families, most in their 70’s and 80’s. In front of us on the floor sat the congregation’s youngest members, children ranging in ages from 4 to 10.

This was before my father was reunited with his watch but I had heard many of my father’s story about his wartime experiences before and I confess that too often that day and on other days of worship, my mind wandered to the afternoon’s activities in my yard and my plans for the coming week. Unfortunately, I’m certain that many of my friends with busy lives were also at least partly pre-occupied with next Thursday or some upcoming event that was so very important.

But as I looked to my immediate left and right and to the floor before me, I couldn’t help but notice that the very young and the very old, those nearer to the entry and exit ramps of life, were immersed in my father’s tale. I thought for a moment about one of my father’s admirable traits, the ability to focus on what was in front of him at any given point in time and appreciate each moment for what it is. Perhaps this is because, as a result of his experiences, he feels in part that every new day is a true gift for him, one more that others won’t ever have; one more that he came so close to missing. Maybe he feels he owes it to those who didn’t return from the war to live each day as best he can and worry less about next week or month or year.

All of us in the congregation were brought back to the moment as my father finished his talk by describing his return from the war and sailing into New York Harbor past the Statute of Liberty. We joined him as he fought back tears explaining how that national symbol was so important to him, at that moment in 1945, because it represented something that at one point in his life he thought he might never experience again, freedom. Tears streamed from the faces of those around me who had also fought and known those who died in World War II. The children were transfixed as they pictured the image in their minds. And the rest of us, for a brief time at least, let the importance of next week’s business slip away.

In one instant, on May 17, 1943, my father’s life changed forever. He was 22 years old at the time and on his first mission. He describes this day best in his own words.

The Nieuwe Waterweg River, Holland - May 17, 1943, 10:55 AM

Our B-26 Marauder was flying less than 50 feet above the North Sea to avoid German radar. At this altitude things happened fast at over 200 miles an hour. As our plane passed over the Dutch coast what looked like a massive 4th of July fireworks show loomed before us. Ahead to the left, our lead plane was hit and in an instant was gone, snap rolling and crashing upside down into a sand dune. The shock of my friends’ certain deaths swept over me but a burst of tracers brought me back to our own problems.

Our radio operator, was shouting and our pilot frantically yelled for me, the plane’s bombardier-navigator, to find out what was happening in the rear of the plane. I crawled back from the nose and an enormous blast stunned me as flak ripped into the side of the plane.

The pilot shouted for us to get ready for a crash landing. I quickly strapped our radio operator into his seat, opened the ceiling escape hatch and fell to the floor bracing my back against the pilot’s bulkhead. I didn’t know of a single survivor from any B-26 crash. Yet I felt strangely peaceful. My only regret was for my parents, as I pictured them receiving the inevitable “missing in action” and, later, “killed in action” notices.

The plane smashed into the Nieuwe Waterweg River at 250 miles an hour and split in half on impact. The front section sank like a submarine in a few seconds and I was underwater. I was underwater but able to stand on the plane’s floor and push our radio operator out of the hatch ahead of me. We struggled to the surface for air. In a moment, our pilot and co-pilot burst to the surface and the four of us swam towards shore. Our turret and tail gunners never made it out of the Marauder.

When we reached the river’s bank, a young German officer was waiting. He pointed his rifle at us and in perfect English stated the obvious, “For you I think the war is over.” On a hill behind us twenty more German soldiers pointed their weapons at us. We had no idea what would happen next. I glanced at my wrist to check the time but my watch was gone.

Evanston, Illinois, USA - August 27, 2003, 6:30 AM

The ringing woke me at 6:30 am. At 82 years old, I wasn’t usually up at this hour. I reached for the telephone and fumbled with the receiver, “Hello.” “Is this Jim Hoel?” the distinctly British voice asked expectantly. “Yes,” I replied, confused. “Did you fly in a Marauder airplane in the war?” I again said yes though I hadn’t thought about the Marauder for some time. “We’ve got your watch,” the caller said excitedly. I was ready to hang up and go back to sleep but asked “Just what watch are you talking about?” My watch was sitting on my bed stand. “The one you lost when your airplane crashed in 1943.” I was stunned. All of a sudden, 1943 seemed like yesterday.