Joey Jacobson's War

by Peter J. Usher

  Leo Passhuis’s photo of AT122 on the morning of 29 January 1942, probably looking northeast. (Courtesy Mrs. Leo Passhuis)

  Belgian labourers dismantling the wreck of AT122 shortly after the crash. (AVOG Crash Museum)

  When the bodies arrived at the hospital, the German authorities demanded their flying suits. The attending nurse refused this demand, and insisted that the flyers be buried in their battle dress as they had been found. No identification tags were found on the bodies. However, a number of personal effects were discovered during the crash investigation. These included a parachute bag, a tin box, a wristwatch, a comb, a couple of knitted gloves, a Player’s cigarette case, a photo of one of the men with (presumably) his wife, a clasp, and a book: The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine. Apparently none of these items, which were all taken by the German authorities, served to identify any of the dead airmen at the time.

  Three or four days later, conscripted Belgian labourers were brought in to break up the aircraft. The pieces were taken to the nearby railway crossing at Lievelde and loaded onto flatbed railcars destined for the Ruhr. There the remains of AT122 would be recycled into new armament that Germany could turn against its original manufacturers.

  The copy of The Rights of Man that was found in the aircraft was Joe’s. Perhaps he had taken it along as a talisman, or even to snatch a few minutes reading on the journey home. The wristwatch and knitted gloves were very likely Selfe’s. As both Selfe and Hodgkinson were married, the photo of the couple could have belonged to either of them. Very likely the Germans destroyed the book and the photos, but kept the watch and gloves.

  Germany had attacked and occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, despite its neutrality, to facilitate an attack on France and eventually England. Hitler regarded the Dutch as Germanic fellow-racials, and he had no desire to enslave or eliminate them as he was already planning to do to the Poles. But the Dutch were a patriotic, religious, and largely conservative people, who did not see themselves as Germans and had no sympathy with Naziism. As the Netherlands had surrendered at the outset, most saw no alternative to accommodating the occupation and continuing their civic duties, however reluctantly. But there was widespread resentment when the Germans replaced the authority of the Queen with that of an Austrian Nazi, and sought to Nazify them through the media and the schools. Organizing for resistance, especially violent resistance, was a skill the Dutch people had not needed to hone for centuries. But many Dutch citizens engaged in small acts of defiance: flying the orange colour of the royal family, naming their daughters after Wilhelmina and Juliana, and listening to the BBC news.

  By late 1941, all political parties had been outlawed except for the Dutch Nazi Party (NSB). But by that time, it was becoming apparent that neither the English nor the Russians were in imminent danger of becoming the next victims. There seemed to be less need to accommodate the occupation, and more hope that an Allied victory would end it.

  The Germans exercised local control of the civilian population through the offices of the burgomeisters, the appointed mayors of municipalities. Traditionally the burgomeisters represented the Crown, and they were the senior local administrators, often responsible for supervising the police. Because the Netherlands had surrendered so quickly, its government had made no preparations for a prolonged occupation. The civil administration, with all its necessary records, thus came under the control of the occupiers intact. A system of identity documents to be produced on demand, and of ration cards, was soon put in place. In 1941, the German authorities began replacing burgomeisters, often with members of the tiny Dutch Nazi Party. The membership of the NSB consisted of at least as many opportunists as committed Nazi ideologues. Few had any training or experience for the job, and they were widely regarded with contempt by the citizenry.

  In early 1942 the Germans were not yet ransacking Europe for food and labour, but they were tightening the screws on opposition, non-compliance, and especially harbouring or assisting enemy airmen. In response, non-co-operation and defiance were becoming resistance, and resistance was becoming organized. The more that courage became necessary, the more it was forthcoming. A key form of resistance was going underground. Tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens, including some Jews but a much greater number of people who sought to avoid collaboration or labour conscription, would become onderduikers, literally, “under-divers.” They had to find hiding places and false papers. A network began to form of people who arranged for and did the things necessary to protect their fellow countrymen. Many onderduikers went to the agricultural districts, where they were hidden in rural farmhouses for the duration. The churches, both Protestant and Catholic, provided moral and even practical support. But this form of resistance was not without risks. Failure to produce the proper identity papers was cause for arrest. Careless talk in public places could lead to betrayal, incarceration, and even execution. The occupation would become more harsh and cruel as the months passed. But at the beginning of 1942, rural municipalities in relatively isolated areas were feeling the yoke of occupation more lightly than the main cities. The flat, carefully tended landscape, criss-crossed by roads and railways, with only a few small patches of forest, offered little cover to conceal organized partisan and resistance activities. The Germans required only a modest occupation force to maintain control over the rural population.

  In January 1942, the Lichtenvoorde area was patrolled by a small Wehr-macht unit in nearby Borculo. Several radar and searchlight batteries had been constructed in the area during the previous few months as part of Germany’s Kammhuber line of air defence. The office of the burgomeister had been vacant for over a year. The previous occupant had retired, but had not yet been replaced. Meanwhile the town’s employees, none of them members of the NSB, carried on with their work. There was no organized resistance network in Lichtenvoorde as yet, but a few committed individuals had already begun to hide and protect onderduikers, and the hopes of the citizenry rested with the Allies.

  Such was the situation when, for the first time in the war, an Allied bomber crashed close to Lichtenvoorde, from unknown cause, killing all four of its unidentified crew. The news of this extraordinary event spread quickly, and seems to have galvanized a spirit of resistance among the citizenry. Some individuals had already acted in small ways with courage and conviction. Many more saw in this event the occasion to set aside their fears for personal safety. Sullen compliance became active defiance. So it was that the municipality of Lichtenvoorde arranged to honour the unknown men of AT122 by staging a funeral far removed from the simple military burial normally conducted by the Luftwaffe.

  The funeral was held on Sunday, 1 February. The procession began on the hospital grounds, where each coffin was placed in its own horse-drawn hearse. Two of these were provided by the Catholic Church, with the horses wearing black hoods in the local fashion, the other two by funeral homes in Lichtenvoorde and nearby Groenlo. Two members of the local police force led the procession of the four carriages and a unit of about fifteen German soldiers from the hospital grounds down the Dijkstraat to the town’s General Cemetery. Seven to eight hundred people followed solemnly under overcast skies and light snow.

  Lichtenvoorde’s small General Cemetery (for its non-Catholic minority) was, and still is, surrounded by a rectangle of tall trees. Many people climbed into these trees to get a better view. The graveside oration was given by Rev. Van Dongen, minister of Lichtenvoorde’s Reform Church:

  How did these heroes fall and lose their weapons? We are standing here at the graves of four men fallen in the struggle for their fatherland. We don’t know anything else. Their religion is unknown, it is unknown if they are sons of loving mothers, or if they are fathers of children at home, who ask their mother, where is father? All this is hidden from us. Yes, it is not even known if their relatives even know that they are missing. All this makes it impossible to say something about them. Except this one thing. That they have fallen for a cause which they know is a just caus
e.

  In similar fashion, friends and enemies are standing here at the graves around the remains of these fallen flyers. And both honour them in their own way. Both must have been convinced that these people fought for a cause which they considered to be a just cause. If we leave the correctness or incorrectness of their conviction aside, we can still determine this, that these men considered the centuries old freedom to be an inalienable right. That several of their comrades and who knows they themselves also knew to fight for a cause which centres around the principle of whether there will be freedom to preach God’s word and to follow God’s word in daily life. We thus stand at these graves as friends and enemies of these people, and we honour them in their fashion.3

  Rev. Van Dongen read an elegy from the Old Testament and a song of victory from the New Testament. Wreaths were placed at the graves. The German soldiers honoured their fallen enemies with a military ceremony, firing rifle shots in the air. The coffins were lowered into the four graves dug the day or so before. Thus were the unknown airmen committed to the earth.

  The horse-drawn hearses of the crew of AT122 at the head of the funeral procession on 1 February 1942, Lichtenvoorde. (AVOG Crash Museum)

  The townspeople of Lichtenvoorde in the funeral procession, 1 February 1942. (AVOG Crash Museum)

  The funeral service for the crew of AT122, Lichtenvoorde General Cemetery, 1 February 1942. (AVOG Crash Museum)

  On the day of the funeral, the newly appointed burgomeister, NSB member Lamers, arrived at the town hall for his installation. He found no one there except two civil servants, who told him that a funeral for British airmen was under way. Lamers proceeded to the funeral. On arrival, he made a Hitler salute, to the astonishment of the townspeople to whom he was as yet unknown.

  Two men secretly recorded these events on film. Albert Westerman was an important and influential person in Lichtenvoorde. His family owned a knitwear factory. Then thirty years old, he was one of the few people in town with a movie camera. He immediately resolved to create a visual record of the events, in the hope that at some future time the parents of the airmen the town was about to honour would be able to see the funeral. As he recalled many years later, the funeral was a protest, “to make a difference between good and evil, to show sympathy with the British airmen who had made a contribution to free us, we valued these people so highly.”4 Hiding in an attic in a building across the street, through a small window Westerman filmed the coffins being brought to the hospital, and the departure of the funeral procession three days later. Another local photographer, Mr. Wekking, was among those who had scaled the trees at the cemetery, and from that high vantage point he filmed and photographed the funeral.

  The cost of the coffins, wreaths, and hearses amounted to 538.50 guilders, a significant sum in those days. The town submitted a bill for these expenses to the German authorities, which they duly paid. The newly appointed burgomeister was not amused by Rev. Van Dongen’s oration. After the funeral, Lamers sent for his arrest. The next day, Van Dongen went to the town hall, where he provided notes of his speech, and was interrogated but let go. A few months later he was ordered to appear again before the burgomeister, who interrogated him again, and incarcerated him in a cell in the town hall. Van Dongen was sent to prison in Arnhem in August 1942, where he spent the next six months before being transferred to concentration camps at Amersfoort and Vught. He was released in March 1943.

  The funeral at Lichtenvoorde was an exceptional if not indeed unique event during the years of occupation. With the burgomeister’s office vacant, the town authorities, including the policemen who would later participate directly in the resistance, were relatively free to act. The nearby occupation authorities either could not or chose not to prevent the community from conducting the funeral. When local people had approached the aircraft and took photos the morning after the crash, they were merely waved away. A year later they might well have been shot on sight. The burial of the airmen would have been kept under strict control of the occupying authorities. Certainly there could have been no public funeral, much less an oration such as Van Dongen’s. And indeed, there was no repetition of a public funeral when three other Allied aircraft suffered a similar fate near Lichtenvoorde in 1943.5

  Rev. Van Dongen’s funeral oration focused on the unknown identities of the fallen airmen. Why none was wearing his air force identity disc, in accordance with procedure, is unknown. The photos of the funeral clearly show four separate graves. Either at the time, or soon afterwards, they were marked with a single cross, labelled “4 Engelsche Vliegers.” A photo taken shortly after the war ended shows three names on the main cross, with a smaller marker below for Harding alone.

  How the Germans actually identified Harding’s body, and how they determined Hodgkinson’s identity, is unknown.6 Possibly one or both had some other identifying items in their clothing. It appears that neither Selfe nor Jacobson did. At the end of the war, in order to determine the fate of its airmen lost over Europe, the RAF sent Missing Research and Enquiries Units, and Grave Registration units into the newly liberated territories. These agencies had more or less completed their work by late 1946. During that time, the Lichtenvoorde graves were exhumed, but the individual identities of Hodgkinson, Jacobson, and Selfe were not established as a result. In accordance with the practice of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, where the individual identity of crews cannot be determined, their headstones are placed in alphabetical order. And so to this day, the three airmen are recorded as buried in a collective grave, and are identified on their headstones, left to right, as Hodgkinson, Jacobson, and Selfe.

  When Percy and May Jacobson travelled to Europe in July 1950, they arranged through the Netherlands War Graves Committee to visit Joe’s grave. It was then still a most unusual event in Lichtenvoorde to receive visitors from abroad. Burgomeister Waals met them at the railway station and brought them to his home for lunch. They met Ter Haar, the now retired policeman who had found the wreck, and Hendrik Leemreize, whom Percy described in his diary as an “underground worker of fame.” Leemreize took them to visit his parents’ farm, then to the cemetery to see Joe’s grave, then to visit Albert Westerman, who showed them the film of the funeral, and finally back to the burgomeister’s for supper. There they heard more accounts of the occupation years, and the lingering bitterness about the “Quisling Dutch,” who went unpunished afterwards. The Jacobsons boarded the train for Amsterdam at 8:00 that night.

  It had been a full day for them, and a deeply emotional one as the photograph at the cemetery reveals. May made no mention of her feelings in her diary, but Percy wrote:

  Ordeal for May when we were shown moving reel of Joe’s funeral and burial … coming back in train May looked white my heart went out to her. … Tough day but lightened by goodness and kindness of all we met. (PJD 30 and 31 July 1950)

  Both commented profusely on their hosts’ bravery during the occupation and their generosity on that day.

  Their visit was an important occasion for those in Lichtenvoorde who had begun the story over eight years before. Leemreize had subsequently sheltered a number of downed airmen and spirited them to safety. He had also taken on the task of caring for Joe’s grave without knowing anything about him. Now he was meeting his parents. Westerman had dreamed that he would one day be able to show them the events he had secretly filmed, and on this day his dream came true. Not only had he survived the occupation, so had his movie film. According to their hosts, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission had initially suggested moving the graves to a common air force burial ground, but the town refused. These were Lichtenvoorde’s graves to care for, theirs to remind them of what they owed to the dead flyers, and of what they had risked to honour those dead flyers and to protect and save the survivors who later parachuted down in their midst.7

  Percy died the following year, but May, “the Jewish mother from Canada,” returned several times in the early 1950s to visit the Waals, the Leemreizes, and her son’s grave. An
d so May came to know Hendrik’s wife, Anna, after they married in 1954, and their only son, Theo. She remained in touch with Anna for years afterwards, and left a small sum to the benefit of their son Theo. Over fifty years later, he still had the small gifts she had given him. In this way, Joe’s mother also became part of the Lichtenvoorde story.

  Stories have a way of changing and growing over time. Previously untold parts are added, some memories are triggered but others fade. So too does the evidence disappear from the landscape. The site of the crash no longer resembles the photos taken seventy years ago, although the bomb craters can still be seen in a forest that was once a field. Artifacts from the wreckage are displayed at the local Crash Museum, devoted to Allied bombers who met their fate in the vicinity.

  About fifty years after the event, another element was recorded. Willem Geurink of Lichtenvoorde had been a member of the resistance, and had hidden people during the war. He was a neighbour of the Leemreizes, and knew them well. In 1993 he began setting down his memories of the occupation in a memoir and in a series of letters to his family. By then Hendrik Leemreize had died, but his wife, Anna, whom he had married some years after the war, was still alive. In his letters, Willem explained the importance of Joe Jacobson’s grave to Anna, and why she continued to place flowers on it every year.

  According to Geurink, Joe was shot down twice near Lichtenvoorde. The first time, he had parachuted to safety and was picked up by the resistance. He spent several nights at the Leemreizes in their concealed basement. Then Hendrik and some others took him halfway across the Netherlands to Baarle-Nassau near the Belgian border. There he was passed on to resistance people from Belgium. Only when Joe was shot down a second time, this time fatally, did Leemreize learn that the Belgian resistance had succeeded in returning Joe to England. It was for his role in saving Joe the first time, among other acts, according to Geurink, that Hendrik Leemreize had been decorated after the war, and this was why the Leemreizes had forged such a bond with the Jacobsons.