The Home Front

Jim Hoel, our father, was transported and processed into Stalug Luft III about 10 days after his capture, on May 17,1943. Though he was able to write home, apparently the brief posts he sent were not received until months later.

Although the date is not precise, it appears that Jim's parents, Omer and Olive Hoel, learned as early as May 19, 1943, through newspaper articles and Red Cross messages, that their son was missing in action. They did not learn he was a prisoner of war for another 50 or 60 days. Undoubtedly, thoughts of the worst passed through their minds but Jim's parents were people of faith and had, as all earlier generations do, lived through and learned from difficulties before.

During that frightening period Jim's parents received incredibly moving letters from friends, government officials and local statesmen expressing sorrow and praying for the best. These letters will follow in future posts.

Olive and Omer were tough folk and they withstood this period of "not knowing", with a deep faith that "Jimmy" was not dead.

Olive was born in Sparta, Wisconsin and Omer, as described earlier, in Canby, Minnesota. They met when Omer had some emergency surgery and Olive was his nurse. The fell in love and married. Omer was Norwegian. Olive was Swedish and despite the traditional jokes about antagonism between the two Scandandavian cultures, we never saw anything but love.

When World War I began, Omer enlisted and became an ambulance driver. One day while stationed in New Jersey, his ambulance became stuck on a railroad track and was hit hard by a train, killing all but Omer. He was taken to the hospital where the first report was that he had "a gut that was slit wide open." All present, save one, said essentially, "He's a goner." But one young doctor wanted to "give it a try to save this young man's life".

Olive heard about the accident in Canby and immediately gathered her first born, daughter Milnore, who was six months old at the time, bought a train ticket to Chicago and from there a ticket to New York and then on to the New Jersey Hospital.

Olive arrived with her baby Milnore to learn that one brave doctor's efforts had saved her husband's life.

Our grandmother always seemed to be about three feet tall to us. In fact she was probably a few inches less than five feet tall. But her courage and faith only now becomes clear to me. The letters you will see in the upcoming posts were carefully saved and responded to despite the fact that the better bet was that her son was dead.

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 Letter Home

(A personal note - Perhaps nine years ago, my wife Pam, worked with my father to tape his story. She also went through volumes of American and German documents and an unbelievable amount of letters home from my father before and during his years as a POW. Pam did this because her father’s health was failing and she had done the same with him, recording his life for future
generations. Pam feels that everyone’s life has a story to tell. The fact that all of these documents recording my father’s war years exist today is a tribute to my father's mother, Olive Hoel, who kept every conceivable record. Today, I received from my father the two very large binders of these documents and letters that Pam had organized and I was overwhelmed reading through even a small amount of the documents, particularly the letters home from my father at age 22. As I said at the beginning, I am not certain how this story will evolve but hopefully it will be told now more through my father's own words during the War. Today’s post is simply the letter sent from my father to his mother on May 16, 1943, the day before his B-26 was shot down. It is clear that my father had no idea what was to occur the very next day.)

May 16, 1943

Dear Mother,

The last couple days have been so beautiful outside all the time; so this is the reason for such few letters. We have also found a little action and will continue in it now and then. Things are much as we expected them for which we are glad. And now we are mighty proud of our B-26’s. Your papers probably carried an account of the “un-named” medium bombers who struck with much success the other day.

I suppose to-night you are all sitting about with Mil (my father’s sister, Milnore, who was a WAVE in the service), if she got home for her leave as you said she would. I am quite confident I won't be too long over here. The whole Axis program is meeting with less and less success each day. Soon they will be up against the wall just as their forces were in Africa.

This morning it hardly seemed as if a war was being fought. The sun was out so nice I took a long bike ride on some of the smaller roads. Everyone seemed so cheerful as I met them working about their houses. The country side is just beautiful this time of year. Flowers seemed to grow everywhere and all mixed together to give a beautiful picture. I only saw one car the whole time I was out, and quite oddly enough it was an American Jeep. This afternoon we got back to work and I flew a couple hours leading some new navigators in a formation. As I expected they were lost 10 minutes from the field and they couldn't locate themselves on the map. For us it is quite easy now and we can spend a little more time on such trips sightseeing.

I'm sure the more flying Grant (My father’s cousin) does in a B-24 the less he will like it. There is no support to it and I would dread the thought now climbing up to 20 or 30 thousand feet every time I went on a mission. They have to contend with the cold and the use of oxygen. Everyone of the B-17 or B-24 boys I've talked with wish they could be transferred to B- 26’s. None of us liked them at first but now wouldn't trade for anything.

How are you folks holding up with the rationing? I don't imagine you are starving. We had a dance in the officer's club last night and one of the girls I was dancing with said my hair was turning gray at the temples. I became alarmed so I ran into the boy's room and looked - quite to my relief I found it was just blond. I guess I haven't changed any from last September except that I'm little fatter.

My hut has a door at either end and in this weather we keep both of them open. One is not more than 15 feet from the main highway so people riding by can look right in. I mention this because just a few minutes ago a whole family came peddling their bikes by. I heard the man say to the kids “See, that's where the American soldiers sleep.”

Ken Tulpin wrote the other day. He said he was getting along okay but thought he'd have to spend the summer out there. I guess he's put on a lot of weight which he certainly could use. I have a few other letters I'd like to write tonight so we'll close this now.

Love,

Jim

Twelve hours later my father's B-26 was shot down , 40 of his squadron friends were killed and Jim Hoel's life changed forever.

Origins

Please click on the slide show under "Related Links" titled MARGRATEN Netherlands American Cemetery Slide Show . It is a moving tribute to my father's recent visit with my brother Gil to find the graves of our father's fellow airmen and friends lost during the War.

As Jim and the three other crewmen sat for those three or four hours on the shores of the Maas Canal, Jim doesn’t specifically recall all that went through his mind. After all, that was 66 years ago. Soon Jim and the others would be loaded onto trucks and transferred to an interrogation point. Jim did think of his parents, Omer and Olive Hoel, living in Evanston, Illinois, and worried about them receiving the “missing in action” telegram and how long it would be before they learned that he had survived, if he did.

Jim might have thought of his grand-father, Olaf Hoel, the first of our family to set foot on these shores in July of 1868. Born in Tonset, Norway in 1841, Olaf was the eighth of ten children and he had come through New York Harbor, no less excited, I’m sure, than my father, when many years later, he was to return from the War, through the Harbor.

Starting with the invasion of Norway three years earlier on April, 9, 194o, the country remained under both the military occupation of German forces and civil rule of a German commissioner. Norway’s occupation by Nazi Germany ended on May 18, 1945, after the surrender of German forces in Europe. This period of occupation had a significant impact on Norwegian society, and it was years until Norway considered itself as having passed on and into the "post-war era."

Olaf Hoel made his way to the Midwest, where on July 16, 1876, he was ordained a minister at Washington Prairie near Decorah, Iowa. In August of that year, Olaf moved to Canby, Minnesota where he became the Pastor for the St. Stephens Congregation of Canby. For the next 36 years, he served this congregation and was the “area’s pioneer pastor” as well. Reverend Hoel eventually served 11 churches in his circuit ministry and was increasingly called upon to minister to Norwegian settlers spread over a wider and wider area. In a 1928 letter, Reverend Hoel describes the challenges of a circuit ministry:

“The parishioners were found in a radius of seventy miles, so a great deal of traveling had to be done. This we did with a pony and a little open buggy. There were no roads, but by aid of a compass we were able to find our way over the prairies. By starting at daybreak, we often did not reach our destination until in the middle of the night. Many were the times the way had to be fought through prairie fires and snowstorms......We speak of tiresome rides nowadays, but few can imagine how tedious and lonesome the trips over the prairie were – no roads and seldom, if ever, meeting a person on an entire trip.”

On August 19, 1876, Olaf Hoel married Mary Lund of Canby. They brought 8 children into the world, the youngest of whom was Omer, Jim's father. The children were born before Olaf moved to Canby but it was in Canby that Reverend and Mary Hoel have left a legacy that my family cherishes today. Mary’s brothers built a home and sold it to Olaf in 1903. As described at the time, it was “one of the best resident properties in Canby and had, without a doubt, the finest surroundings.” The “49 day wonder” Victorian home was built in 1891 and eventually enlivened with decorative balconies, a turret and gingerbread trim. The home remained in the family for the next half century and when finally sold went somewhat into disrepair.

But in 1976, the town of Canby recognized the potential and looked “into the possibility of starting a Canby Museum” with the Lund-Hoel House. The town purchased the home and over the years to follow was able to retrieve, from members of the Lund and Hoel families, most of the items and furnishings that were in the home at the turn of the century, including Olaf's Bible and his daughter Nella Hoel's “prized Everett upright piano.” Eventually, the home looked as it had when Olaf’s family first resided there.

The “Lund-Hoel House” is now a museum on the National Register of Historic Homes. In 1991, Jim’s father, Omer, the last remaining child of Olaf and 97 years old at the time, visited Canby to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Lund-Hoel House. After walking through the home and directing the rearrangement of furniture so that it was “the way it was then,” Omer sat under a broad chestnut tree in the back yard surrounded by most of the residents of Canby and told stories of his life in this home.

As Omer, my grandfather, spoke, I glanced over at my father who used to run around the stone fence surrounding the home when he was a boy and I thought of the challenges that my great grandfather, grandfather and father had survived and overcome so that I could be there that day. I was reminded then, and often since my father’s watch appeared, of a quote I heard once from a now forgotten source, “You’ll never untangle the circumstances that brought you to this moment.” Perhaps not, but how fortunate we are for those things like the discovery of my father’s watch and the Lund-Hoel House that keep looping us back to the past so that we might discover stories that enrich our lives and strengthen us today.

Jim was born in Canby on September 2, 1922 and moved to Evanston, Illinois in 1932 where he remained until he entered the War.

Tomorrow – Moving into the German Prison of War System