Sunday, August 31, 2003 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

Watch survives WWII, follows him home

ASSOCIATED PRESS

EVANSTON, ill. - Jim Hoel is glad to have his watch back, even though it had stopped working since he last saw it during World War II.

The last time he remembers wearing the old Gallet chronometer was on May 17, 1943, the day he used it while navigating a B-26 Marauder before the bomber was forced to ditch in a canal in the Netherlands.

He knows he no longer had the elaborate watch when he arrived at a German prisoner-ofwar camp a few days later.

The watch arrived at his home last week in a package sent from England by a truck driver, Peter Cooper, 56, who found it in the possession of an elderly neighbor in the village of Kirton, 75 miles northeast of London.

"Its just eerie, isn't it? That was 60 years ago. I've sort of got gooseflesh," Hoel, 82, told the Chicago Tribune.

Cooper said the neighbor, "Tiny" Baxter, 89, told him his mother had given it to him.

"Whether she found it or it was given to her, I do not know," Baxter, a retired carpenter, said in a telephone interview.

The watch, an enlistment present from the bank where Hoel worked before the war, had his name and Evanston address on the back.

Cooper was able to track him down at his new address using the Internet and friends who had contacts in the United States. He persuaded his neighbor to give the watch to him so he could forward it to Hoel.

Hoel said the B-26 was one of a flight of 10 that encountered heavy antiaircraft tire while en route to bomb a power plant near Amsterdam. He and three others of the plane's six crewmen survived. He spent the next two years in German POW camps.