Here’s another story that turns on luck, sent to me by the son of an Engelandvaarder.

This is a Dutch-Paris story in a very roundabout way. The Engelandvaarder, whom we’ll call Jack, made it to Spain with the help of Dutch-Paris. He then trained with the Dutch Bureau Inlichtingen (Information Bureau) and ended up working with the British and American units who identified civilians who had helped Allied aviators as well as hunting down traitors. The American aviator in this story worked for the American MIS-X bureau in Holland and so with Jack.

The American aviator, who we’ll call Frank, was the navigator on a B-24 that was shot up on a bombing raid over Berlin on 29 April 1944. The crew bailed out over eastern Netherlands. Frank was taken up by the Dutch resistance, which moved him from hiding place to hiding place until he reached an apartment in Amsterdam in Fall 1944.

One day when he was in the shower, Frank sang “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” (the show tune from the musical Oklahoma!) when the apartment window was open. Passersby on the street could hear him. Not long after, the Wehrmacht searched the apartment, only barely missing his hiding place because his hostess spoke German well enough to charm the officer in charge. You might say that it was unlucky that someone who would report him would have heard him singing and lucky that his hostess spoke such good German. I, myself, think that it was irresponsible and stupid of him to be singing so loudly in English in that situation. But it might have been the first hot shower he’d had in a long time and he was young, so maybe he was understandably carried away. Still, he did something stupid and the Wehrmacht did their job in investigating. Luck played no role in it.

Obviously, Frank and the Polish RAF pilot he was with had to leave that apartment right away. They ended up in a dugout in the woods back in forests of the eastern Netherlands. It looked like a small hillock with thin trees and brush growing on it. It was big enough for three bunks but not much more. They most definitely did not have a shower. There were five men hiding in there: four Allied aviators and a German deserter.

Here’s the bad luck. On Christmas Eve, 1944, a German truck had a flat tire near the dugout. When the German soldiers got out to repair the tire, they were close enough to see smoke coming out of the chimney of what was supposed to be a solid pile of dirt. The fugitives were captured.

And a small bit of good luck. It was so cold that the Germans allowed their prisoners to walk back and forth on the path to stay warm. They extended their walk with each lap. When they’d gone pretty far and their guard was rolling a cigarette, they made a break for it. Our man Frank was shot in the leg and the Polish RAF man was captured. The others got away.

The local SD (Nazi secret police) tried them both as terrorists (because they weren’t wearing uniforms) and sentenced them both to death. Frank was still alive when the American Army reached him at Westerbork. But the Polish pilot had been shot as a hostage in a reprisal action following the assassination of Rauter, the cruel SS commander of the occupied Netherlands.

Why wasn’t Frank also chosen as a hostage? We don’t know, but it could be because he had been shot in the leg. The Germans were oddly insistent that their prisoners be in good health (or good enough by the standards of the time) before shooting them. Or it could be that Frank was American and his colleague was Polish.

In any case, the fact that a Wehrmacht truck got a flat tire on that particular stretch of forest road when it was light enough to see smoke coming out of the dug out is no one’s fault. That’s just luck.