Nov. 2, 1922-Jan. 15, 2014
The man who fell to earth
Tuck Belton’s fifth mission over northern Germany in January 1945 was supposed to be a snap, the bomber pilot from Jerome later recalled, with neither antiaircraft fire nor enemy fighters expected.
Expectations proved wrong. Belton’s B-17 was hit by fire from the ground as he guided the aircraft to the target. A severed hydraulic line spewed fluid inside the Flying Fortress. Fire broke out in an oxygen tank. A bomb got stuck with the bomb bay door open. One engine quit and another began running horribly fast, to the point that Belton feared the propeller would detach and hurtle through the fuselage. Losing altitude and fighting for control, he drifted away from the bomber group.
“I picked up the mike to say we’re going to have to get out of here, and the ship exploded,” Belton recalled during a 2012 interview conducted as part of an oral history project sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. “For the first few seconds, I was unconscious. The next thing I knew, I was floating around in the air with my parachute hanging about five feet above my head.”
No one else survived. Belton’s parachute was supposed to be fastened to his chest in two places, but just one fastener was attached, and so he went into an uncontrollable spin when his chute opened. He was still spinning when he landed in a snowy field, injuring his back. Eight or so people were coming toward him from across the field.
“I saw some of them had those wooden cloggers on, so I thought I must be in Holland,” he recalled.
He had landed in the village of Midwoud. Belton’s rescuers, members of the Dutch underground, hustled him to a nearby home, where a woman screamed to take him somewhere else because a detail of German soldiers was in the area. Can you pedal a bicycle? Yes, he answered, but his injuries proved too much. His rescuers put him on a bike, and with riders on either side of him to push him along, they made their way to a farmhouse about three miles away.
After a few days at the farmhouse, he was taken to a shed – Belton called it a chicken shack – that served as a headquarters for Dutch resistance fighters. There was neither heat nor running water, and Belton slept in straw scattered on the ground. A nearby farmer raised ducks and also trapped wild ones, and so Belton ate duck. When there wasn’t duck, he survived on tulip bulbs and the occasional potato. There was plenty of adventure.
“Every moment, you didn’t know what would happen,” Belton said.
After he healed sufficiently, Belton and resistance fighters went to a hospital to retrieve an injured colleague who would otherwise end up in German hands. Belton was given a submachine gun and stationed outside while others went into the building. A German soldier and a Dutch collaborator approached.
“This is the first time I was ever face-to-face with someone where it meant them or me,” Belton recalled in the 2012 interview. “I didn’t know what to do. When he started drawing his sidearm, I just opened up with my gun and shot both of them. When I did, all hell broke loose. The guys come a’pouring out of the hospital. I just took off.”
Belton ran until he reached a small grove of trees. A curious dog responded to his call, and Belton huddled with the animal for warmth.
“We spent that night in that grove of trees in the snow,” Belton said. “I didn’t know if I would make it through the night or not, even with the dog.”
Resistance fighters found him the next day and took him back to the chicken shack. But he didn’t stay long.
Belton was soon moving south toward Allied lines. He spoke only English and so wore a badge that said “Doofstom,” a Dutch word that means “deaf and dumb.” In Amsterdam, he watched, helpless, as the Germans rounded up 10 civilians in retaliation for Belton and his comrades blowing up a plant that had provided electricity to Gestapo headquarters.
“They lined those 10 guys up against the wall and the firing squad shot them – just shot them,” Belton told Illinois Times in a story published last year.
There were several close calls. One came when Belton got a pant leg caught in his bicycle chain. A woman from the resistance was with him on another bicycle. “Hey, wait a minute,” he blurted out to her, in English, on the crowded street. The woman kept on riding – when something went sideways like that, he said in the 2012 interview, you were on your own.
“As soon as I said it, I froze,” recalled Belton, who tore his pants to free himself from the chain so that he could catch up to his companion.
On another occasion, Belton collided with a German officer who was also on a bicycle, knocking the officer to the ground.
“He called me every name in the German alphabet,” Belton recalled in 2012. “Right away, I started giving him the doofstom treatment, whatever that is. Finally, he just gave me a big shove and I just fell over on the ground and lay there like I was hurt and he got on his bike and took off.”
Then there was the bridge with sentry towers on both shores. German soldiers from both ends approached midway across the span, and so Belton and his companions rode their bicycles off the bridge and into the icy river, allowing the current to take them to a warehouse where they got their clothes dry and continued their journey.
Three English soldiers and two Dutch women, all on their way to England, joined Belton for the final leg, a trip down, then across, a river into Belgium and, if all went well, the safety of Allied forces. Their guide warned everyone in the small boat to remain still and quiet. Germans had installed machine gun nests at points along the river, and enemy soldiers twice opened up, spraying the water around Belton with bullets. They were in the boat all night before spotting silhouettes of soldiers on the shore.
“The guide was quite concerned with where we were,” Belton said in 2012. “He told us, ‘I’m not sure I’ve got you where I think I’ve got you.’” They decided to chance it. As they neared shore, they hollered “Columbus,” a code word to signal that they weren’t Germans. The soldiers on shore were French Canadians, and Belton and his companions were soon puffing cigarettes, gobbling cheese and guzzling rum. Nearly 70 years later, Belton grew emotional, choking up as he described seeing American soil again.
“I remember sailing by the Statue of Liberty,” he recalled. “Quite a feeling. I’m proud of who I am. Outside of my wife, it was probably the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Awarded a Purple Heart, Belton got a job at Illinois Bell after returning home. His daughter, Linda Ahlen, says that he never talked about his adventures until the 1970s, when he was invited to a reunion organized by his former comrades in the Netherlands. Belton visited the country several times over the years and exchanged birthday and Christmas cards with his rescuers. The man whom he helped rescue from the hospital came to Illinois for Belton’s 45 th wedding anniversary celebration.
In Midwoud, villagers built a memorial with a propeller from Belton’s stricken bomber. Sylvia Steketee wrote an online message to the World War II Illinois Veterans Memorial Association in 2007 after reading about Belton on the association’s website. Belton’s doomed plane had nearly hit her family’s farmhouse.
“For as long as I can remember, our parents have always told us about the American B-17 that crashed just opposite their home and about the brave airmen who lost their lives,” Steketee wrote. “On the 4 th May – in Holland the day when we remember all those who lost their lives during WWII – we always went to the memorial, a propeller of the B-17, and placed a bouquet of field flowers to honor the young men that fought to free us from the Germans and gave their lives so that we may live in freedom now.”
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
