Texas Bronco

During WWII a lot of allied aircrafts came down on the island of Terschelling, in the North of The Netherlands, were I live. Most of them came down in the Northsea, or in the Waddensea, and 24 people were killed in those actions. I want to tell you about one of those planes, a Boeing B-17, that was called a flying fortress, as it was enormous.

It was nr. 41-24589 ‘Texas Bronco’ of the 91st Bomb Group. The plane had been part of a group of 86 bomber aircrafts, that were set out for an attack in daylight on the German industrial city of Hamm in Nordrhein-Westfalen.

The group had left at 09.07 h. from a British airfield. The bombardment should take place at about 11.45 h. They flew over the island of Vlieland, over Workum and the south east part of the province of Drenthe to Germany. Through a coded message from England the commendants heard that the target area was overcasted totally, so they decided to attack a secondairy target, the harbourcity of Emden.

At about 12.30h. the 41-24589 was gone from the formation. This aircraft was flown by captain Eugene B. Ellis. After the attack on Germany, it had been damaged a bit. One of the engines was hit and gone crazy and one wing was torn apart. This was the cause for the plane to get behind with the formation.

The plane was spotted by five German Messerschmidts and they started to attack it. Ellis made the plane go down a bit into the clouds, but immediately there was ice on the plane, causing a delay in the speed. The captain decided to fly as low as possible underneath the clouds and try to get to England. The five German planes did the same thing, however, and attacked again.

From the American plane, two of the German planes were shut down. Again two engines were hit. Ellis decided to do an emergency landing on the first island in sight, which happened to be Terschelling. Meanwhile the three remaining German planes kept firing and killed bomber lieutenant Marvin H. Beisiker and radio man sergeant Michael LaMedica got fatally wounded.

The landing was a success, but when the survivors tried to get the dead and wounded men out of the burning plane, they were surrounded by German soldiers. The remaining eight crewmembers of the ‘Texas Bronco’ became prisoners of war. LaMedica was taken to a hospital in Leeuwarden, where he died and was burried.

The other people on board of that plane were capt. Eugene B. Ellis, technical sergeant Joseph L. Mastroberadino, lieutenant Howard M. Dunham, 2nd lieutenant Kenneth F. Nutch, N.L. Floyd, A. Gaeta, W.H. Howard and R.E. Demars. They were sent by ferry to the mainland. Beisiker was burried on Terschelling by the Germans with militairy honour in grave number 86 in the cemetery nearby the place the plane had landed.

Some of this info came from the book: “We vieren het pas als iedereen terug is” by Johan van der Wal, 2007.
Since I did this post, I have looked on the internet for more info and I now know Beisiker was burried about where the beach-lifeboat shed is nowadays, a lonely place in the dunes near the sea. There happened to be a graveyard. When I was a kid there were no signs that there had ever been a cemtery. If you didn’t know it was there, you wouldn’t have guessed. I just stayed away out of respect, but the graves probably were already emptied then.
My grandfather had to help the Germans burrying dead people there, that I know from my father. It had a great impact on him. I also learned from a forum that the grave of LaMedica is now in Margraten, in the South of the Netherlands, as some of the bodies have been reburried there and the graveyard has been empty here for a while.

There were 2 military cemetries on the island, the first one in the dunes, the second one near the village of West. The second one is still there, with some of the bodies that were first burried in the dunes as well.

My eldest son and friends once found some belongings at the spot of the first cemetery when they were having a beachparty and digging a hole, it is was probably from a soldier. It was a little box with some hairs in in, probably a souvenir from a loved one. My son took it to the museum here, the Behouden Huis. There is no telling of whom it was as there were many dead sailors washed ashore in those days were burried on that spot.

Plattegrond van het kerkhof bij paal 8, situatie 1940 – 1942/ map of cemtery

http://maps.google.com/maps?

 

A short while ago I got an email from a son of one of the surviving crewmembers!  He had read my posting.  He knew the story, but never knew where the plane actually went down.  His father, W.H.  Howard, died  March 17th, 1995. Mr Keith Howard told me in a ps that the plane landed intact, but Captain Ellis set off an incendiary device to destroy the Norton bomb sight in an effort to keep it out of German hands.

Now thát is news! So Texas Bronco will keep me busy for a while I think…

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Row the boat

Yesterday, May 22, was the day of the annual launch race from Harlingen – Terschelling. Hundreds of rowers finished in our harbour. Who won? No idea really. But it was a great fest.

As we watched the rowers drink their well earned beer, still in their launches, a small boy of about 6 on the quay watched with interest.

“One day it will be your turn,” I told him. He shook his head.
“I can’t,” he regretfully said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t like beer!”

School outing

Today my son (16) came back from a 5 nights trip, via France to London with his school. He and one of his classmates stayed with some very nice people there, he had a wonderfull time. He even went into that horrible big Eye thing, he visited the British Museum, and after a six hour ferry voyage to The Netherlands, and a bus trip, he returned to the island by watertaxi; as the kids that live here on the island were too late for the ferry, they decided to do the expensive thing. We, the parents, payed the ferryman on the quay, because they were all broke, but it was worth the 30 euro offcourse. Thank you Nicky and Lenka for your hospitality!

Haiku

The dove makes a nest
waiting for springtime romance;
cat climbs up the tree

Two cats watching birds
a suddenly opened can
Gone is the instict

if any more emerge from my toes, I will put them up here also

Cat as purse

A woman here in the Netherlands had a cat that she euthanized herself, the cat was an abused poor thing that she had taken in, but it was crazy so it looked humane to her to kill it. She just hit it on the head. Ok, wrong way to euthanize.

And then she made a purse of the cat and she told people on the internet what she had done, with pics. So she got a lot of hate mail, she put the hate mail in a book with the names and adresses of all the hate mailers, and even pics of You tube movies they had made, and published it. Now the question is, can she do this?

I think it is a weird story. Imagine to have your cellphone on vibration in that purse. It would prrr???

She claims it is art to do that with the cat and the book is to be considered art too. Other people find it very sick. I personaly think it is a bit sick, but not very different than the production of mink coats. But she might have gone to the vet with the cat to put it out of its misery. Everyone has his/her opinion of course.

Eurovision songcontest; some of my favorites

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoUvO4g7Xzo

Mothersday

I got up early just to go into my youngest sons bedroom and stare at him sternly.
“It is Mothers day. It is a tradition. I want my present.”
His eyes opened, he sighed,  and wham:
“Mothers day is the invention of moralistic confused Kapitalists who wanted to emphasize the mediocar role women play in the bourgoisie households!”
“I want it.”
“Too bad.”

Later I phoned my second son.
“It is Mothers day. It is a tradition. I want my present!”
“Is it May already? What did I get you last year?”
“Nothing.”
“So why alter a tradition?”

I tried son 3.

“Hallo, it is Mothers day.  It is a tradition. I want my present.”
“Who is this?”

sob

ma en ik

pic taken today!

African Mothersday

She walks the dusty road
Two children she carries on her back
A bucket on her head
She is going to the well

She smiles as she passes by
A mother in her teens
The day is young, and
The temperature already hell

How strong are you I wonder
How do you do all this
We never see your tears
And you will never tell

The colours that are you
Mix with the trembling air
Become part of the endless row
That is walking to the well

I wrote this this morning, on Mothers day.

How my mother changed world history – without even knowing it!

Terschelling, Netherlands, June 1964

She was skipping the rope that, on the other end, was tight up on the stoop bench, while she stood across the street and my friend was jumping. She had been jumping for such a long time, she started to pant. That’s the thing I remember best about that sunny day. That, and the heat.

Mama was a pretty good ’skipper’, you could rely on her rhythm and esteem, and as long as she didn’t sing any ancient old skipping songs, she was the best. Every now and then the skipping was interrupted to let a bicycle pass by, but that didn’t matter.

I was sitting and watching and then that, obviously German, tourist came strolling along, a slender man of about forty, with his daughter who was about my age I suppose, about six. They stood by and watched the skipping for a while. Now my mother didn’t like Germans, but she loved kids, and so, with a friendly arm gesture that wouldn’t take “No” for an answer, she invited the chubby girl to do some skipping with her. The kid could do with the exercise, I suppose.

While the girl jumped clumsily, the man sat down beside me on the sun warmed bricks of the street and stared at my mother. He asked if I spoke German and didn’t wait for an answer. He asked why I didn’t skip. “Ankle,” I explained, in Dutch, but he understood anyway.

“Is that your mother?” he asked. I nodded. She was.

“I know her,” he said, to my surprise. “I am sure of it. I was in love with her, many years ago.”

I thought I had misunderstood him, but he had really said it. In love. Okay, he was reasonably handsome, but I already had a father, somewhere at sea, and so I decided not to encourage him, in any way. So I said nothing.

“She probably doesn’t remember me,” he went on, “but in the summer of 1939 I met her in Hamburg. I was on my way to Berlin to kill Hitler. Do you know who that was?”

“Yes.”

“Because of her, I never went to Berlin. I forgot my mission, so to speak. But I don’t think she ever noticed me.” And that was it. His daughter had enough of skipping and collected her father with an almost jealous glance at me.

He rose and walked away, without as much as a ‘goodbye’. It was now my friends turn to skip the rope and my mother jumped up and down like a girl, although she was already forty.

I tried to imagine how that man would have shut Hitler, from a cheering crowd perhaps, blood everywhere, sirens. And because of my mother, he had not.

Later that day, as we were still outside because it was too hot in the house to sleep, I told my mother about the German. She didn’t believe me. And our neighbors who were sitting across the street didn’t either.

“If it is true and he said that, then he is a nut,” my old neighbor said, spitting some stuff from his lungs on the street. “A German nut!” We all laughed, someone turned on the transistor radio and we never thought about it again.

And we also never saw the German and his daughter again. A year ago I went through my mother’s stuff and I found some photo’s, picturing her as a young girl, and the ship she and her family lived on. They had many friends, I suppose, because there were several pictures with my mother in the middle of a happy young crowd.

And then I saw this young man, a boy still, standing somewhere in the back, handsome, slender. It was him, the German!

I flipped the photo over. On the back was written: Hamburg, summer 1939.

This story is fiction, based on true events.  It was my first English story, written last year for Helium and also placed on Growing Bolder.

Dangling shoes

From the bedroom window I can see the lighthouse, but also a tree with a pair of shoes dangling on their strings on one of the branches. They have been there for years now. In summer, they are a bit out of vision, but when all the leaves have fallen, they appear again.

If I look outside, thinking about nothing much but sentences to write, questions arise. How long can a pair of shoes hang on a treebranche? Without rotting? And the shoestrings, how long can they survive all sorts of weather before they land on someones head? Why do they hang there anyway? Who did it?

I think perhaps it happened after the local marathon here, that for a reason I don’t quite grasp, always takes place in November, when the weather is worst. Was someone happy he made it? Or were those shoes part of the container full of sportingshoes made in Asia that stranded here some years ago and someone just had too many of them, combing the beach? The beach was full of shoes then. It was on national tv for days. Even now you can find them on sale here and there on the island.

During the autumn holidays, from my bedroomwindow I overheard a man, a pensioner with not much to do I suppose, and two German tourists, a man and a woman with a small rucksack. They looked as if the had the intention to go and walk quite a bit.

The stopped under the tree.

“Look now!” the woman said surprised. They stared above them with a sort of eagerness only tourists have. They were willing to take in everything on their walk, not just the fresh air, but all of the environment. Even a pair of unimportant shoes.

“We do that with old shoes, it is for good luck,” the pensioner said in his best German, trying to make them believe it was a sort of local tradtion.

They didnot believe him I think. After all, shoes dangling on tree branches, that is not so unique, you can see that everywhere in the world I suppose.

They smiled politely, or scared because he, coming out of the blue, started to talk to them just like that, and walked away rapidly. The couple also got into an ugly and loud argument later on in the street. I couldnot overhear what is was about, although my window was open by then. But it was bad!

I closed the window and started thinking. Perhaps the pensioner was right somehow. Perhaps someone had really thrown these shoes in the tree for good luck. People do the funniest things that way. Perhaps it had helped, even.

A day later I saw the tourists again, they were strolling in one of our 2 streets with shops, walking hand in hand. The argument was over, I suppose. And the man had purchased a pair of obvious “Beach shoes” somewhere, that was dangling on his rucksack.

Now had he thrown some old ones in a tree for good luck? I wondered.

He looked quite happy. And so did his female companion. Had one thing to do with the other?

Those shoes will keep dangling for who knows how long. I am used to them. They are a part of the tree. As if they have always been there. For good luck.

This was posted earlier on the site Growing Bolder