Watch has the original brown leather strap. On the case back is the
track mark left from the Kitchener-style strap that has rubbed on the
nickel case for 100 years.
2nd Lt. James Richard Hoel enlisted as a cadet in the Army
Air Corps in February 1942 and soon found himself navigating a
B-26 Marauder with the help of his Gallet chronograph, a gift from
his employer before he left for the war.
On May 17, 1943, Hoel’s plane, along with nine others, was
shot down while on a mission to destroy an Axis-held power plant.
Hoel’s bomber received substantial damage from ground fire and
crashed into the Maas River in Axis-held Holland. He and three
other survivors swam to the closest shore only to be greeted at
gunpoint by a German officer and 50 of his men. Thankful to have
escaped with his life and preoccupied by the serious situation at
hand, Hoel did not spend much time mourning the loss of his watch
in the crash.
Now a POW, Hoel was sent to Stal ag Luft III where he did his
part in creating the tunnels made famous by the movie The Great
Escape by helping slowly disperse soil from the excavation around
the yard. Of the 76 who escaped through the tunnels, 23 were recaptured, 50 were executed, and 3 made it to freedom.
As Hitler watched the Allies closing in and he saw his time
was up, he began to consolidate POWs in Stalag VII-A Moosburg, a
single well-protected camp close to Munich, so they could be used
to bargain with the Allied Forces. For many of the 10,000 POWs
walking up to 70 miles through one of the coldest winters in recent
European history, it was a death march. Those who survived the ordeal, like Hoel, had very little to look forward to once they reached
the camp. They were greeted by overcrowding and starvation until
the war ended.
Fast forward to August 27, 2003, when Hoel received a phone
call from England at 6:30 in the morning from a man who said he
had his missing Gallet chronograph lost so many years before in the
crash. The watch, nearly forgotten by Hoel, had spent most of the
last 60 years kept in the drawer of one 89-year-old “Tiny” Baxter
among other World War II memorabilia collected by his mother in
England. While “Tiny” never thought to ask his mother how she
came to own the watch, it may have been recovered while the airplane was being salvaged from the river after the war.
The watch, in a state of disrepair, was restored to its original
working order. Soon, Hoel and his watch found themselves on the
bank of the Maas River at the site of the crash, together with his son
and Peter Cooper, the man responsible for tracking down Hoel after
all these years. Although he was greeted with a hero’s welcome, the
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