thedrifter
08-31-03, 09:24 AM
Watch Lost in WWII Is Returned to U.S.
EVANSTON, Ill. - Jim Hoel is very glad to have his watch back, even though it's stopped working since he last saw it — during World War II.
The last time he remembers wearing the old Gallet chronometer was on May 17, 1943, the day he used it while navigating a B-26 Marauder before the bomber was forced to ditch in a canal in the Netherlands.
He knows he no longer had the elaborate watch when he arrived at a German prisoner of war camp a few days later.
The watch arrived at his home this past week in a package sent from England by truck driver Peter Cooper, 56, who found it in the possession of an elderly neighbor in the village of Kirton, about 75 miles northeast of London.
"It's just eerie, isn't it? That was 60 years ago. I've sort of got gooseflesh," Hoel, 82, told the Chicago Tribune.
Cooper said the neighbor, "Tiny" Baxter, 89, told him his mother gave it to him.
"Whether she found it or it was given to her, I do not know," Baxter, a retired carpenter, said in a telephone interview.
The watch, an enlistment present from the bank where Hoel worked before the war, bore his name and Evanston address on its back.
Cooper was able to track him down at his new address using the Internet and friends who had contacts in the United States. He got his neighbor to give the watch to him so he could forward it to Hoel.
Hoel said the B-26 was one of a flight of 10 that encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire while en route to bomb a power plant near Amsterdam. He and three others of the plane's six crewmen survived, as did 16 other fliers from the 60-man mission. He spent the next two years in German prisoner of war camps.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=757&e=10&u=/ap/20030830/ap_on_re_us/watch_returned
Sempers,
Roger
:marine:
EVANSTON, Ill. - Jim Hoel is very glad to have his watch back, even though it's stopped working since he last saw it — during World War II.
The last time he remembers wearing the old Gallet chronometer was on May 17, 1943, the day he used it while navigating a B-26 Marauder before the bomber was forced to ditch in a canal in the Netherlands.
He knows he no longer had the elaborate watch when he arrived at a German prisoner of war camp a few days later.
The watch arrived at his home this past week in a package sent from England by truck driver Peter Cooper, 56, who found it in the possession of an elderly neighbor in the village of Kirton, about 75 miles northeast of London.
"It's just eerie, isn't it? That was 60 years ago. I've sort of got gooseflesh," Hoel, 82, told the Chicago Tribune.
Cooper said the neighbor, "Tiny" Baxter, 89, told him his mother gave it to him.
"Whether she found it or it was given to her, I do not know," Baxter, a retired carpenter, said in a telephone interview.
The watch, an enlistment present from the bank where Hoel worked before the war, bore his name and Evanston address on its back.
Cooper was able to track him down at his new address using the Internet and friends who had contacts in the United States. He got his neighbor to give the watch to him so he could forward it to Hoel.
Hoel said the B-26 was one of a flight of 10 that encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire while en route to bomb a power plant near Amsterdam. He and three others of the plane's six crewmen survived, as did 16 other fliers from the 60-man mission. He spent the next two years in German prisoner of war camps.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=757&e=10&u=/ap/20030830/ap_on_re_us/watch_returned
Sempers,
Roger
:marine: