Abraham Lamertus van der Stok, MBE

Bram (Bob) van der Stok, oorlogsvlieger van Oranje, Wikipedia NL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_Luft_III

https://www.strijdbewijs.nl/birds/spitfire/stok.htm

Bram van der Stok, MBE (13 October 1915 – 8 February 1993), also known as Bob van der Stok, was a World War II fighter pilot and flying ace, and is the most decorated aviator in Dutch history.

In March 1944, he broke out of Stalag Luft III – a prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi Germany – during the mass break-out known as "The Great Escape". After crossing much of occupied Europe, to reach neutral Spain, Van der Stok became one of only three out of the 76 escapees to reach Britain, along with two Norwegians, Per Bergsland and Jens Müller (who together managed to reach neutral Sweden).

Van der Stok was born in Pladjoe on Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies as the eldest of three sons of Cornelis van der Stok, who worked there as a Delft engineer for the Shell Oil Company , and Annie van der Stok-Snethlage. The family also consisted of his brothers Felix and Johan (“Hans”) who were also both born in the Indies. A fourth child, younger sister Anke, was born later when the family moved back to the Netherlands. Van der Stok Sr. was regularly transferred to the Indies, the Netherlands Antilles and the Netherlands for his work. In India the family lived in Sumatra and Balikpapan, among other places, on Borneo . After this, Van der Stok Sr. and his family left for the Netherlands by parcel boat and settled in Wassenaar . In 1927 Van der Stok Sr. was transferred to Curaçao , where he was appointed director of the oil refinery. After a few years, both Felix and Bram were sent from Willemstad to the Netherlands, where Van der Stok attended the Nederlandsch Lyceum in The Hague , where he met Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema .

After completing the third grade there, he was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland , the Lyceum Alpinum in Zuoz , where he passed his final exam in 1934, which was equivalent to HBS-B in the Netherlands. Back in the Netherlands, he enrolled in September 1934 at the medical faculty of Leiden University . With more interest in sports at the local student sports clubs - he rowed with Njord and played ice hockey - and flying, he left university and, after consultation with his father, eventually decided to follow pilot training at Soesterberg Air Base , where he became a reserve officer. aviator. After his aviation training he continued at theUniversity of Utrecht are still studying medicine.

During and after his basic training, Van der Stok came into contact with the various models of the Fokker factories that were in use by the Aviation Department at the time. As he describes in his book, Van der Stok was a daredevil who liked to play antics with his devices. The standard fighter aircraft of the LVA at that time was the Fokker D.XXI , a reasonably modern fighter of Dutch origin, which, however, would hardly be able to cope with the much more advanced German aircraft. The May Days of 1940 With the threat of a new war, Van der Stok was called into arms in March 1939, although the mobilization only served to maintain Dutch neutrality. Van der Stok was stationed in Soesterberg and could continue to run lectures in Utrecht. However, this situation lasted only a few months and with the increasing threat of war the 1st JaVa (fighter pilot department) to which he was attached was transferred to the military airfield De Kooy near Den Helder .

On the first day of the German invasion of the Netherlands, Van der Stok and his division were already in the air when a German 'Geschwader' led by Hauptmann Dieter Robitsch carried out an attack on De Kooy airfield. In the dogfight that followed, Van der Stok shot at least one German Messerschmitt Bf 109 from the air with his Fokker D.XXI , he himself wrote that he had hit at least two. In the days up to the Dutch capitulation, Van der Stok flew several missions, although it is not certain whether he achieved other aerial victories.

The flight to England

After the Dutch capitulation, Van der Stok continued his medicine studies, but soon tried to flee to England to continue fighting against the Germans. He made a total of three unsuccessful attempts to get to England by sea. In a fourth attempt, on June 2, 1941 , with the help of some friends he managed to get on board the cargo ship St-Cergue , which sailed under the Panamanian flag , which was moored at Pier 2 in the Noorderhaven of Rotterdam . Once on board, he hid under the floor of the boiler house.

A few days later the ship was detained by the British cruiser HMS Devonshire , after which Van der Stok, together with Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema and three other Dutchmen, Peter Tazelaar , Toon Buitendijk and Gerard Volkersz , set foot ashore a few days later in Tórshavn . From there they traveled on to Scotland. There, Van der Stok was interrogated at the British Intelligence Service, after which he had to report to the Dutch military authorities in London .

Van der Stok then reported to the Air Ministry in London, was appointed as a Pilot Officer (second lieutenant) with the RAF , and was ordered to report to the 91st Squadron, which was stationed at Tangmere airfield in West Sussex . There, Van der Stok took a conversion course to familiarize him with the Supermarine Spitfire . After this conversion course, a transfer to No. 41 Squadron at Westhampnett , which not only had a defensive role, but also carried out reconnaissance flights and sweeps over the English Channel and France .

The captivity of war

In service with No. 41 Squadron, Van der Stok shot down a Luftwaffe Me-109. On April 12, 1942, however, he was shot down with his aircraft during a fight with German Focke Wulf FW 190s over Sint-Omaars and taken prisoner. In his own words, Van der Stok shot down an FW 190 during this air battle with certainty and the Germans who captured him would have told him that he had “shot down two of them”. However, evidence for this is lacking. After his arrest, he was transferred to the recently built prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III in eastern Germany , where plans for an escape were already underway.

The escape Stalag Luft III .

At the arrival of Van der Stok, an organization had already been set up in Stalag Luft III to prepare an escape. Divided into groups, the prisoners were engaged in collecting useful materials, forging documents and digging an escape tunnel, which incidentally was discovered and destroyed several times, so that a new tunnel had to be dug. It was planned that some 220 prisoners would escape through a tunnel at night on a tight schedule.

The escape took place on the night of March 24, 1944 : 77 prisoners managed to crawl through the tunnel and escape before the tunnel was discovered. The other 171 prisoners were caught. The Gestapo opened a manhunt for the escaped prisoners. Two escapees were immediately picked up during the flight, twenty-one escapees were found within a few hours and returned to Stalag Luft III and the remaining fifty escaped officers were handed over to the Gestapo . On Hitler's personal orders, fifty officers became, entirely against the Geneva Conventionsin, executed to serve as an example. The remaining 23 were detained by the Gestapo and eventually sent to other camps. Seventeen of them returned to Stalag Luft III, four were sent to Sachsenhausen , and two to Colditz Castle .

Of all the officers who managed to escape from Stalag Luft III, only three eventually reached neutral territory: Bram van der Stok, Per Bergsland and Jens Müller. The Norwegians Bergsland and Müller rowed from Denmark to neutral Sweden . To avoid checks, Van der Stok did the opposite of what he thought the Germans would expect. Instead of going west, he took the first train eastward, deeper into Germany.

Van der Stok traveled by detours to Utrecht, where he was put on the pilot line to Spain via old college friends. After an imprisonment of twenty months and a long journey of many weeks along Leipzig , Apeldoorn , Utrecht , Maastricht , Brussels , Paris , Dijon and Toulouse he finally came into Madrid on. After initial internment, Van der Stok was given the necessary papers to travel to Gibraltar , from where he was sent back to England with a DC-3 .

The events surrounding the escape from Stalag Luft III would later be romanticized in the Hollywood classic The Great Escape .

Escape & Evasion Report F / Lt. Bram van der Stok, RAF Archives In the Escape & Evasion Report of F / Lt. Bram van der Stok, interview dated 11-12 July 1944, it can unmistakably be read that Bram van der Stok was captured by the Germans on 12 April 1942 near the town of St. Omer (Sint-Omaars, Northern France), and that he, at the end of his escape route through Europe, on July 10, 1944, he left from Gibraltar for England, where he landed at Whitchurch Airport (Bristol) on July 11, 1944. This Report is an important piece of evidence that the data mentioned in his book War Flyer of Orangeturn out to be incorrect. The book would suggest that Van der Stok was back on English soil for D-Day and that he was involved in D-Day as a pilot. This now appears to be demonstrably incorrect. Well after July 11, 1944, Van der Stok only started flying again. During the last few months of the war, Van der Stok was the squadron commander of the Dutch 322 Squadron operating within the RAF .

After most of the Netherlands was liberated, Van der Stok finally had the opportunity to visit his family. His two brothers had been active in the resistance during the war but had been arrested and died in the concentration camps of Mauthausen and Neuengamme . Van der Stok's father was also arrested by the occupier in connection with Van der Stok's escape from Stalag Luft III and tortured in the process, causing him to go blind, among other things. In the Leidschenveen district of The Hague is a “Van der Stoklaan” named after the brothers.

After the war

After the war, Van der Stok said goodbye to the Dutch Air Force to return to the University. He took his doctor's oath in Utrecht in 1950. Van der Stok married Lucie Walter in London in November 1945, to whom he was engaged shortly before his first trip as an England vessel and they had three children. They were married until 1969. In 1951 they emigrated to the United States, where Van der Stok specialized in obstetrics and gynecology at Syracuse University , New York . Then the family left for the state of New Mexicoand in 1957 Van der Stok became an American citizen. Within a few years, he had a large medical practice in New Mexico, and in 1964 he was elected president of the New Mexico Medical Association.

Van der Stok, whose surname had meanwhile become Vanderstok, did not retire. Among other things, he worked as a ship's doctor on a large passenger ship called SS Lurline that sailed up and down between San Francisco and Honolulu. He also received an offer to work for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama, in the United States space program. Here he worked, among other things, on projects for the space laboratory - including physiological blood circulation problems in a weightless environment. In 1970 he moved to Hawaii where he joined the Coast Guard. Van der Stok died on February 8, 1993 in Virginia Beach.

In the book "De aal van Oranje" by Jan van Lieshout about Father Lodewijk Bleijs (traveling companion of Bob van der Stok in France after his escape from Stalag Luft III) it is shown that the data that van der Stok mentions in War Flyer van Oranje about under more his return to England on 23 May 1944 is not correct. Van der Stok and Father Lodewijk only reached Spain in mid-July, according to van Lieshout. In The Weapon of Military Aviation during the Second World War in Great Britain , 12 July 1944 is mentioned as the return date of Van der Stok in England, while he himself mentions 20 May 1944 and claims to have seen the preparations for D-day in England, and was on D-day at an English airfield.

Awards

Bram van der Stok was decorated several times by Dutch and foreign governments as a fighter pilot in the Dutch air forces in May 1940, then as an RAF pilot and twice as an England sailor. He is the only soldier to receive the four awards for bravery and merit instituted during the Second World War, the Bronze Lion (June 15, 1946), the Bronze Cross (October 5, 1944) , the Airman's Cross (September 21, 1942) (with the number "2"), and the Cross of Merit (September 3, 1942), bore. Belgium honored Bram van der Stok with the Officer's Cross with Palm of the Order of Leopold(March 24, 1947). He also wore the Belgian (March 24, 1947) , French and Polish (May 9, 1945) [8] " War Cross " with a palm on the ribbon attached to the Belgian cross and three British stars for participating in the war. just as many fronts. Shortly before his death, Bram van der Stok was awarded the Resistance Memorial Cross . Bram van der Stok was also an Officer in the Order of Oranje-Nassau . The British king made him (honorary) Member of the Order of the British Empire (19 November 1947)].

He received a total of the following awards : NLD Order of Orange-Nassau - Officer BAR.pngOfficer in the Order of Oranje-Nassau with the swords [note 1] Bronze Lion Bronze Cross Cross of Merit Flyer's Cross War Remembrance Cross with 2 buckles Resistance Remembrance Cross Distinction for Long-term Service as an officer with year mark XV Cross for demonstrated marching skills (Four Days Marches Cross ) Member of the Order of the British Empire ( UK ) (Member of the Order of the British Empire (Military Division)) 1939-1945 Star with 3 campaign stars ( UK )