50 Years Later, Man Thanks Lifesaving Pilot

It was called the “Hunger Winter.” In the final months of World War II, 12-year-old John Eikelenbloom and many others in the Dutch city of Rotterdam were starving.

Perhaps that’s why he remembers so vividly the April day 50 years ago when more than 100 American B-17s filled the skies, dropping wooden crates filled with tins of precious food.

Earlier this month, Eikelenbloom got to say thanks to one of the pilots who led the food drop.

It was a chance meeting in a Seattle law office.

Eikelenbloom had made an appointment to update his will with attorney Don Sullivan. In conversation, after conducting their legal business, Sullivan asked Eikelenbloom about his Dutch accent.

“I asked him if he had ever been in Rotterdam,” Sullivan recalled last week.

The question brought back a flood of memories.

It was 1945, and the Germany army occupying The Netherlands turned desperate. Soldiers bombed bridges and rail lines, cutting Rotterdam off from the outside world. The little bit of food available was seized at gunpoint.

People ate tulip bulbs, caught pigeons or begged scraps of bread.

Eikelenbloom himself did what he could to help bring food home to his mother, sister and two brothers. By spring, thousands had died and many others were losing hope.

Until one morning, “the sky was filled with these huge planes. To a little boy, they looked like spaceships,” Eikelenbloom said.

They were B-17s, called “Flying Fortresses,” the American’s mainstay bomber of the European war.

“They were so low, we could see the pilots clearly. They were waving at us,” he said.

Among those waving was 1st Lt. Don Sullivan, 23, a pilot leading the humanitarian mission.

One by one, the bombers opened their bay doors and dumped out wooden crates that shattered as they hit the ground, spilling out cans and cans of food.

Eikelenbloom said he and a friend used a stolen German bayonet to pierce the cans. They couldn’t read English and first opened containers of mustard and syrup. Then they hit the chocolate bars.

“I ate so much candy I made myself sick,” he said.

Eikelenbloom also managed to grab a 15-pound can of meat, which fed his family for days.

A few weeks later, the war in Europe ended. The Germans surrendered, and the Allies delivered more supplies to Rotterdam.

Eikelenbloom moved to the United States in the 1950s and has lived in the Seattle area for about two years.