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.

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.