Introduction by Bruce Bolinger
For the last eleven years I have been researching the aid given to downed Allied airmen by the Resistance during World War II in The Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Most of my research has concentrated on two subjects:
- An American airman, Tom Applewhite, a bombardier on a B-17, “The Wild Hare,” who was shot down near Heusden, east of ‘s-Hertogenbosch (also known as Den Bosch), on 11 November 1943. Thanks to the aid of three escape and evasion lines, one Dutch and two Belgian, plus the British Embassy in Madrid, he reached the British naval base at Gibraltar two months later.
- A Dutch escape line, the Smit-van der Heijden Line, headed by Karst Smit, a marechaussee (Dutch Royal Military Police), stationed first in Hilvarenbeek and then in Baarle-Nassau, and his partner, Eugene Van der Heijden, a teacher from Hilvarenbeek. The two towns are located near the Belgian border.
These two subjects are interrelated because Tom Applewhite was the last person to successfully pass through the Smit-van der Heijden Line. The next man in the line, Nello Malavasi, a member of the crew of “The Wild Hare,” and his guide, Willem Schmidt, were arrested by the Germans in Turnhout, Belgium, on 15 November 1943. This led to the rapid arrest of many members of the line and its destruction.
I became interested in this subject for several reasons:
(1) My great-uncle, Arthur Schrynemakers, a Dutch national living in Brussels during the war, hid Tom Applewhite for over a month from November-December 1943, as well as two Jewish families and two members of the Luc-Marc intelligence line.
(2) Schrynemakers’ son, Arthur Britton, was responsible for the arrest of Heinrich Himmler.
(3) A cousin, Charles Henri Schrynemakers, was a member of Service D, a Resistance organization in Liege that, among other things, intercepted denunciations sent in the mail and warned people before the denunciations reached the Germans. As a mailman, Charles was ideally situated to participate in this. Later he was also involved in armed Resistance.
(4) Another cousin, Georges Moeren, was a member of the Forces Belges en Grande-Bretagne (Belgian Forces Great Britain) during WWII.
(5) My oldest first cousin, Ralph Hichens, was a top turret gunner and flight engineer on a B-17 in 1944. (See http://www.wwiimemorial.com/registry/search/plaq.asp?HonoreeID=1649081&print=y for a brief account of his service. For more details, see http://384thbombgroup.com/php/person.php?PersonKey=1714.)
Below is a photo of Ralph and the other members of the crew of the “Stag Party.” Click on it to get an enlargement.
Back row from left to right:
The original purpose of this website was to enable people with shared interests to contact me. But as I added material to it I realized that a second purpose would be to provide people who are doing their own research with some useful tools. Examples would be the advice on use of the Textual Research Room at the U.S. National Archives, the lists of Belgian and Dutch helper files by box number, the translation of the questionnaire used in The Netherlands for airmen, sources for information on aircraft crash sites, the directions on how to access the escape and evasion (E&E) reports online, and links to other useful websites.
The website was established March 31, 2010. At the outset I would have been happy with a few hundred hits. By Feb. 23, 2012, according to WordPress, the company that hosts this website, the cumulative total was 62,107 with the highest number any one month being January, 2012 with 4,362, and the highest any one day being 326. This response and the emails that I have received have given me the incentive to add more material, which I hope to do regularly.
Because I have been adding so many pages to the website–for a total of 228 as of Jan. 30, 2012–it became apparent that visitors probably would have difficulty navigating through the site. For that reason, in November 2010, I switched to a new layout which provides cascading menus at the top of each page as well as the menu in the right hand column, which has a clearer hierarchy than before. In addition, I have been adding internal links in pages to other pages to allow visitors to go directly to something that interests them. The new logo combines the Oct. 31, 1943 photo of “The Wild Hare” and some of its crew (Tom Applewhite is the third from the left in the front row), a scene of B-17 vapor trails from an Air Force Historical Research Agency photo, and a map of the major escape routes from Sherri Greene Ottis’ book, Silent Heroes, Downed Airmen and the French Underground. Follow the links to see where they appear elsewhere in the website.
I am particularly grateful to Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications for guiding me through the process of setting up a website, answering scores of questions, coordinating the creation of a very effective logo, and modifying a basic WordPress theme to my specifications. McBuzz Communications specializes in search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is a Google AdWords and Analytics Consultant. I recommend him to anyone seeking to improve the effectiveness of his or her website.
Further Research
Between May 23 and June 20, 2010 I made my fourth research trip to Europe, spending four weeks in The Netherlands and Belgium visiting WWII archives, doing interviews, and visiting the places where the Smit-van der Heijden Line was active. Cities and towns visited included: Amsterdam, Den Bosch, Zwolle, Leiden, The Hague, Baarle-Nassau, Goirle, Poppel, Zutphen, Enschede, Tilburg, Turnhout, Arnhem, Utrecht, Antwerp, Herentals, and Brussels.
The following photo, taken by John Meulenbroeks on June 5, 2010, shows our group of historians after retracing the route of escaping airmen across the Dutch-Belgian border. We began at the home of Ad and Anneke van Rijswijk in Esbeek and followed the paths through the forest of the Landgoed de Utrecht, across the border, and ending at the former farm of Jeanne Willems of Weelde.
From left to right: Bruce Bolinger, A.C. de Bruyn (our host at the “In den Bockenreijder”), Anneke van Rijswijk, Ad van Rijswijk, and Kees van Kemenade. The “In den Bockenreijder” was the location of the Dutch student hideout where Allied airmen, Dutch Jews, Engelandvaarders, and others hid before being moved across the border into Belgium. It is now a popular spot for outdoor recreationists. It also features a fine memorial by the Werkgroep Heemkunde Esbeek commemorating the students and others who were part of the escape line.
In June 2011, I made another trip to National Archives II (NAII) in College Park, Maryland, the location of the escape and evasion reports of American airmen in WWII and the military intelligence files on their helpers. I spent a week there copying files and will be incorporating what I learned in the pages of this website. The information in the page on use of the Textual Research Room at NAII and the new page on Appendix C’s, part of the escape and evasion reports, already reflect this.
In May I plan to attend the annual meeting of the Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society (AFEES) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That will be followed by another trip to NAII in September. In addition to copying Dutch and Belgian helper files, I will be searching American prisoner of war debriefings of members of Applewhite’s crew and airmen who were helped by the Smit-van der Heijden line but who were later captured by the Germans. I have posted two interviews, one of Charlotte Ambach, member of Service EVA and other Resistance groups in Brussels, and the other of Bill Bettinson, 3rd Radio Officer on the Norwegian ship “Lisbeth,” and will be adding one for Amanda Stassart, a guide for the Comet Line. The first of two lists of the prisoners on the Phantom Train/ Ghost Train is now part of the website. Click here to view it. I will add more material on the Luctor et Emergo/Fiat Libertas line, and will finish posting It’s the Little Things, a report on escape and evasion during WWII by the Air Force. During much of 2011, my wife and I were distracted by all that is involved in moving to a new home. We are now settled in to the new house and I should be able to devote more time to this website.
A new addition to this website is Ed Renière’s autobiographical account of his boyhood in Brussels during WWII. Click on his name to access it.
