Escaping capture

The annual reunion was held last week in St. Louis MO of the Air Forces Escape & Evasion Society. Ralph Patton, a WW II B-17 pilot, founded AFEES in 1964 after returning from a trip to France in which he retraced the route used for his escape. It was during that trip that he met with Mathurin Branchous, the provincial Resistance leader who had a list of names of Americans who had escaped during the war through Operation Bonaparte.
AFEES is made up of airmen who were shot down over enemy territory in Europe during WW II and had succeeded in evading capture to return to their units. There are currently over 1,000 members and is not so much a celebration of the airmen's escape during the war but rather, the opportunity for these flyers to continue to maintain contact with the many people who assisted in their escape. Each year since the late sixties former members of the Dutch and Belgian underground, partisians from the former Yugoslavia and the French Resistance travel to these reunions to be honored for their actions then and meet the airmen they helped to safety.

"It was almost impossible to evade capture in an occupied country without help." said Clayton David, former B-17 2nd lieutenant, "They felt we were risking our lives to liberate them, so they felt they should risk their own lives to try and save us."

Joke Folmer was the young woman who helped David to eventual safety while she was a member of the Dutch underground. It was only weeks after helping him, one of more than 300 people including 120 airmen, that she was arrested and sentenced to death. She was sent to nine different prisons before she was finally liberated and has been attending the reunions for over 20 years.
Of the 47,000 men in the 8th Army Air Force who were shot down during the war, 25,000 were killed and 18,350 were taken prisoner. Only 2,150 of the men escaped, almost all with the help of people they didn't know, people who risked their lives to get them to safety only because they were American airmen. With the formation of the society these airmen can continue to stay in contact with the people many believe saved their lives in WW II.

This truly was a time when ordinary people did extrodinary things.