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.

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

The "Ditch"

There has been a great deal written about the ill-fated May 17, 1943 Ijmuiden Mission which was named after the target that day, a power plant in Holland. None of the 11 B-26 Marauders from the 450th and 452nd Squadrons of the 322nd Bomber Group returned that day.

More on this later but it is important to note that this mission was an exact repeat of the very first mission in Europe by the 322nd flown three days earlier on May 14th. Reconnaissance photos had apparently shown that the bombs from the Marauders had missed their target on that date, though there is still dispute to this day on this point. Unbeknown to Jim Hoel who was to fly in his first Mission on May 17, the 322nd Group Commander, Colonel Robert M. "Moose" Stillman, who had led the misson on the 14th, argued vehemently with higher command that repeating the mission three days later with the Germans now precisely prepared, was a suicide mission. His pleas were denied but despite this, Stillman still insisted on leading the May 17th Mission.

Robert F. Freeman, in his book, B-26 Marauder At War, quoted this exchange just before the 450th and 452nd Squadrons of Marauders were to take off on May 17th:

"For Stillman, convinced the mission was sheer folly, yet determined in his duty to personally see the target hit this time, it was a dispirited departure from the intelligence section. Von Kolnitz said "Cheerio" as Stillman was leaving. 'No, it's good-bye', the commander responded. Ignoring the prophesy Von Kolnitz said, 'I'll see you at one-o'clock.' 'It's good-bye' repeated Stillman and walked out."

Jim knew none of this when his plane went down on May 17th though there were general feelings of gloom amongst the airmen that morning sensing they would meet stiffer resistance.

Jim's B-26 hadn't been over the coast long (maybe only a few minutes) when it became apparent that there was some kind of trouble. When the pilot called for him to "Go back and see what's the matter with the radio operator," Jim was sitting in the nose of the airplane. When Jim got to the radio operator, he didn't know whether he had been hit by flack though it didn't appear so. He might have been jostled some way or other, but he was sort of wide-eyed, and standing up in the radio navigating compartment. Jim sat him down in his radio seat and strapped him in, and about that time, the pilot said, "Standby, I think we're going to ditch (meaning in the water)."

With that, Jim reached up and opened the hatch on top of the airplane and the radio compartment and then sat down with his back to the bulkhead between the pilots' compartment and where he was sitting in the radio navigating compartment. The training that Jim and the others had gone through taught the tail gunner and the turret gunner, when they heard on their earphones that that they were going to crash or prepare for an emergency landing, they were to come walking through the 2 bomb bay doors and each of them sit, one between Jim's legs and the other between the radio operator's, all with their backs to the front of the airplane so that they could take the blow of the crash as they hit.

But the gunners never came through. Jim felt that they had plenty of time to do it. He's always thought that. But they never showed up. And about that time, the airplane hit the water.

Another rule in landing was, when you hit the water in a crash landing, don't ever stand upright because chances are that there will be a "skip" that you will hit the water and skip a little bit and then you are going to hit the water with the second blow which is going to be devastating and the final stop of the airplane.

Jim didn't stand up for the simple reason that he was sitting, waiting for the second blow. It seemed like an hour-it might have been a few seconds. At any rate, there wasn't a second. When the Marauder hit the water, it was nosed right and stopped immediately. As a result, Jim was immediately almost over his head sitting in water, but as he started to get up, he couldn't. There was something that seemed to be in front of him and he ran his hands around whatever it was. it was a 500-pound bomb that had come through the bulkhead and was sitting there on something, but it was not sitting on Jim's legs. It was just in front of him, and luckily he was able to slide out from under it.

By now, Jim was up to his neck in water standing up, while the radio operator, was standing in the hatchway going out. He was hollering something about his foot being caught. Jim knew that if he didn't get out, Jim wasn't either, so he wrapped his arms around his legs and gave the radio operator a tremendous boost up and that loosened his foot from whatever it was caught in. The radio operator went sailing out and Jim was immediately behind him.

Jim's May West (the emergency vest worn on your chest) had 2 compartments to it--one on each side and each one of them had a carbon dioxide bottle. For some reason or other, one of Jim's compartments was inoperable. It probably had small flack holes in it and when he pulled the tubes, it wouldn't hold air so there he was. Jim had gotten his heavy chest protector off, but he couldn't get the leg ones off, and he was about to sink. Just then the radio operator started wrapping his arms around Jim and he realized that he hadn't pulled his Mae West, so Jim reached down and pulled both the carbon dioxide bottles on the operator's vest and that was enough to sustain and hold both of them afloat.

They were in this huge, wide, straight canal and it seemed clear that the squadron had missed its planned landfall considerably. They had no idea what this was or where they were. In later years Jim learned that it was known as the "Nieuwe Waterweg River". It is a wide, wide shipping canal that runs adjacent to the Rhine River into the North Sea.

By this time it appeared the Marauder had completely disappeared. Here they were, the two of them floating, but as they looked around they saw the tail section of the airplane floating right straight up (standing straight up in the air) and what evidently had happened was that when the plane hit the water, the force was so great that it broke the airplane in two parts. Jim guessed that the first half was from the turret gunner's area forward, and that the front part of the airplane hit the water and just kept going down. The tail section without that much of the fuselage stood up and in doing so was sort of floating because it had air in it. But it was sinking fast and they could only watch it go down.

The two of them thought they were the only two alive when suddenly with a bang on their bottoms the copilot popped up. He was choking a little bit because he had been under water for quite some time. But he seemed all right and said "I'm fine." Then a couple of seconds later, the pilot of the airplane burst to the surface and he was just absolutely choking to death. They all looked at him and they said, "My God, you've been under water so long, come over here, let's help you some way or other." They then noticed that the steel helmet that he had on, when we hit in the crash, was pushed way back on his head so the strap under his chin was choking him. The other three reached up and undid the strap and with that he was still coughing a lot, but he was okay. Four of the six crewman were alive floating in the Nieuwe Waterweg River.

The four survivors started swimming slowly to the shore on their right.