Willem Jacob van Stockum - What Air Force Was He In? (Comment)

Dr. Robert Wack signing his book, Time Bomber
at a book fair in suburban Baltimore.

Dr. Robert Wack, author of Time Bomber - a Five Star book on Amazon based on five reviews - recently reported that he had received multiple inquiries from readers of his book.

The readers were curious about details of some aspects of the life of Willem van Stockum, the bomber pilot and time-travel thinker who is the subject of the book.

One question was the flag under which Willem van Stockum flew as a bomber pilot. His life story is accurately told by Dr. Wack except for some time-travel additions that are acknowledged in a note to the reader.

The reader asked whether Willem flew for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) or the British RAF. Here is Dr. Wack's response:

The answer is, both. How could this be? Part of the answer lies in the circumstances of Willem’s enlistment, as well as the relationship between Canada and Britain as part of the Commonwealth, and lastly the specific needs of the war time Bomber Command. Willem initially enlisted with the Canadian RAF purely for logistical reasons: it was the closest place he could go to get into the war. 

In 1940 and early 1941 (before Pearl Harbor), there already were Americans frustrated with isolationism traveling north to enlist, and Willem took that path, leading him to the new recruit depot in Toronto. Canada had already been supplying England with food and weapons since the outbreak of the war in 1939. The relationship between Canada and England was still very close, despite the Statute of Westminster in 1931 granting autonomy to all the Dominions of the Commonwealth. The Canadian RAF assembled units and sent them to England as separate units under British command, and it was one of those that Willem wanted to join. 

However, his value as an instructor was of more interest to his Canadian military superiors, so they repeatedly denied his requests to be assigned to combat units. Eventually, he applied for transfer directly to the British RAF, which was finally granted, resulting in his transfer and assignment to No. 10 squadron at Melbourne Station, a few miles southeast of York. The British RAF took volunteers and assigned units from anywhere willing to send them. No. 10 Squadron was a particularly diverse group, with members from all the occupied countries, as well as other Commonwealth nations. Willem wrote home about other Dutch members of the squadron, as well as French, South African, Canadian, and even American flyers. It was a tumultuous time, with citizens of many countries all joining efforts to defeat the Nazis, regardless of nationality or native origins.

Comment

I would like to add two things to this admirably thorough response:

1. Willem's gravesite is the only one of the 14 gravesites with a non-RAF gravestone. There were other flyers from Australia and Canada - the RAF was desperate for experienced pilots and other airmen then because so many airmen were being shot down and the training period for a pilot is long. Although Willem was flying under RCAF and RAF colors, he was a Dutch citizen (he was in the process of getting American citizenship). My mother, sadly, arrived with her husband and children in 1954 to find there were 13 gravestones and only a wooden cross for her brother, because the Dutch hadn't gotten around to putting in a gravestone. (I have posted her diary entry for that day, December 26, and the next day.) Willem now has a proper gravestone, as well as a monument to him and his crew contributed by the French people who live in the area. To add to the confusion about Willem van Stockum's national identity, he received his undergraduate education at Trinity College, Dublin, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Edinburgh.

2. No. 10 Squadron has an illustrious history. In 2015 it celebrates the 100th anniversary of its creation.

DEATH | Sept. 10–David Grene, Classicist, Friend of Willem van Stockum

Prof. David Grene,
farmer and Greek scholar.

This day in 2002 died David Grene in Chicago, one day short of the first anniversary of 9/11. He was 89.

Grene would have been 100 years old last year. He was born in Dublin on April 13, 1913 and earned his M.A. degree in 1936 at Trinity College, Dublin.

Grene had previously befriended Dutchman Willem J. van Stockum at St. Andrew's College, a preparatory school in Dublin, and thereby became a friend also of Willem's Trinity roommate, my father, New York City-born Ervin R. ("Spike") Marlin.

The van Stockum bookstore, The
Hague. Photo by JT Marlin, c. 2006.

(Willem was named after a van Stockum ancestor, son of well-known publisher, art and book auctioneer, Wilhemus Petrus vS, who is the first buyer of van Gogh art to appear in the van Gogh Letters. That Willem J. van Stockum was a young friend of Vincent van Gogh even before he married a van Gogh relative, Carolien. In 1873-74 letters, when Carolien suffered a serious illness, Vincent expressed great sympathy and he wished Willem a happy August 8 birthday. Vincent's cousin and correspondent Theo van Gogh worked for W.P. van Stockum's corner-bookstore and publisher on the central square of The Hague.)

Grene adopted the United States as his own country as soon as finished his degree at Trinity in 1936. He was a professor of classics at the University of Chicago from 1937 until his death. He co-founded the Committee on Social Thought in 1941, teaching with people like Saul Bellow, Marc Chagall and T. S. Eliot, until his death. The University of Chicago's Committee web site says:

[Key leaders were] the historian John U. Nef, the economist Frank Knight, the anthropologist Robert Redfield, and Robert M. Hutchins, then President of The University. Their premises were... that students should learn ... by acquainting themselves with a select number of classic ancient and modern texts in an inter-disciplinary atmosphere, and should only then concentrate on a specific dissertation topic. Over the years, temporary and permanent members of the Committee have included Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, John Coetzee, Mircea Eliade, T.S. Eliot, François Furet, David Grene, Friederich Hayek, Leszek Kolakowski, Edward Levi, Paul Ricoeur, Charles Rosen, Harold Rosenberg, Edward Shils, Mark Strand, Karl J. Weintraub.

Grene was co-editor with Richmond A. Lattimore of the acclaimed Chicago series on the Ancient Greek Tragedies, having early on become well known for his accessible translations of Herodotus' History; Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes; Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Electra, and Philoctetes; and Euripides' Hippolytus. His memoir,  Of Farming and Classics was published posthumously (Chicago, 2006).

Grene's obituary in The New York Times notes that the writer Saul Bellow suggested Grene must have been "on a first-name basis with Sophocles and Aristophanes". It adds:

Mr. Grene's two residences reflected his seemingly separate lives: for more than 50 years, he spent half his year on a working farm (he did the work) in Ireland and the other half teaching at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought...

Grene said he was attracted to Herodotus by his shrewd advice on farming.

April 9, 2008. My nephew Chris Oakley with jig-punk singer
Gregory Grene in NYC. We spoke about Spike Marlin's letter
about Pic Gwynne, September 25, 1942. Photo by JT Marlin.

Grene is the father of Gregory Grene, lead singer and accordionist for the Irish jig-punk band The Prodigals - "one of the world's greatest Celtic bands".

Gregory and his twin brother Andrew (who in 2008 was a peacekeeping strategist with the UN in Haiti) are the sons of David and his second wife Ethel, a doctor who translated  some poetry from the Dutch and also assembled David Grene's memoirs.

By his first wife, Marjorie Glicksman, a well-known Heidegger scholar, David Grene had two children, Nicky (Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin) and Ruth, a scientist at Virginia Tech.

Wedding photo, Spike Marlin and Hilda van Stockum with Pic Gwynne next
to Hilda. She and Willem vS were then planning to marry. Photo by Willem?

Gregory shares our interest in Willem van Stockum and Pic Gwynne, who was the love of van Stockum's life. They did not marry, a story told quite accurately in Robert Wack's time-travel novel, Time Bomber which was published by Boissevain Books this year.

Spike Marlin wrote in his letter to my Mom on September 25, 1942 that he had met Pic on Dublin's Grafton Street and spoke to her briefly, finding her to have become "schoolmarmish". This is the same impression that Gregory had from his father - that a light went out in the lives of both Pic and Willem when they did not get her father's blessing on Willem's proposal of marriage in about 1933 (Pic Gwynne was at the wedding of Hilda and Spike in 1932 - see photo).  Willem's disappointment in love seems to have contributed to his volunteering for the air force in WWII and his death as a bomber pilot in the week of D-Day, 1944.

On February 18, 2008, my wife Alice Tepper Marlin and I had a wonderful and nostalgic dinner with Gregory and Smitha, with their lovely daughter Andi on hand for the beginning of the evening. David Grene apparently spoke with Gregory many times during his life, with feeling, about Willem van Stockum and especially about Willem's disappointment in not marrying Pic Gwynn, the daughter of the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. Willem's own great-great uncle (i.e., the uncle of Emily Boissevain) had also served as Provost of Trinity. But Provost Gwynn apparently did not favor the marriage and - since Willem and Pic chose not to follow the example of his great-grandparents, and elope - that was the end of it. David said that Willem never got over the disappointment. (See references to Pic in Willem's Letters, December 6, 1934 and January 26, 2005). It was after the shock of having to say goodbye to Pic that David Grene and Willem went together on an extended tour of Spain, perhaps in 1933 or 1934, before Willem went to join his sister in North America.

Gregory Grene found me through the Internet, because I had posted the previously cited transcribed letters of Willem van Stockum. They letters mention David Grene a few times, including in an invented story of a robbery.

Monuments Unveiled to 14 RAF Airmen Who Crashed 70 Years Ago

Top photo shows two of the relatives of the crew of the MZ 684, JT Marlin (your
blogger), nephew of Willem van Stockum, and Pamela Turney, great-niece of Fred
Beales. The newly unveiled monument to the 70-year-old crash is in Entrammes.

Two monuments were unveiled on June 10 in memory of the two planes downed that early morning on a mission in the Laval area.

One was at a pear farm in Entrammes, Mayenne. It was dedicated to the MZ 684 Halifax bomber and its crew. The pilot was Willem J. van Stockum, my uncle.

The other was at Saint-Berthevin, dedicated to the MZ 532 Halifax bomber and its crew.

Comment

Uncle Willem was the person who brought my parents together. He roomed with my father at Trinity College, Dublin in 1929-32. When my father discovered that Willem had a sister, he set about wooing her.

They were married in 1932, had their first child in 1934 (my sister Olga will be 80 this year), and ten years after they were married they got me (#5 out of 6 children).

When Uncle Willem died in 1944, a light went out in the lives of my parents. It was unspeakably tragic for them and for my Granny who lived with us.

"Time Bomber", by Robert
Wack, centered on the life
of W. J. van Stockum.

When we came to visit the graves in 1954, the 13 RAF-administered British and Commonwealth graves had tombstones. My uncle's grave just had a simple wooden cross. I remember my mother burst into tears because she couldn't understand why her brother was singled out for not having a tombstone. It turns out it was because Willem was still a Dutch citizen (he was seconded from the Royal Canadian Air Force but he had applied for American citizenship). The Dutch Government had asked my mother what she wanted to have on the tombstone and she said: "Greater love hath no man..." The tombstone arrived in due course, but my mother never came back to see it. My brother Randal and I have been back several times. The Dutch tombstone is very impressive, but it does not have on it the epitaph that my mother requested.

On the other hand, my uncle is the only one so far of the 14 members of the crew to have a book written about him - Time Bomber, by Robert Wack. I recommend it. The story is based mainly on factual material about my uncle and the life he led until it was ended. The additional elements that have been added to the story, what we could call the sci-fi meta-story, make several important points that are hard to discuss any other way.

WILLEM VAN STOCKUM | Sci Fi Bio: "Time Bomber"

The cover of Time Bomber.

May 19, 2014–The print edition of a time-travel novel by Robert P. Wack has just been published, titled Time Bomber.  (An earlier edition was available, only as an eBook, under a different name and cover.)

Time Bomber is based on the life and research of a real person, Dr. Willem Jacob van Stockum, son of Captain Bram van Stockum and Olga Emily Boissevain.

Dr. van Stockum, a brilliant University of Maryland mathematics professor who had previously worked with Einstein at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, becomes frustrated with American indifference about the war in Europe before Pearl Harbor. He abandons his promising academic career to join, first, the Royal Canadian Air Force and then a bomber pilot in Britain's Royal Air Force. Van Stockum flies RAF missions over Nazi-occupied France, behind the Normandy lines, before and after D-Day. On June 10, 1944, his plane is shot down.

All this is factual.

In the novel, van Stockum is not killed when his plane is shot down. Instead, he is rescued by stranded American paratroopers. While they fight for survival in the French countryside, they meet up with ruthless French Resistance fighters and two strangers who are not what they appear to be.

Willem’s pioneering academic work on time travel and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity pose intriguing “what if?” questions – which earned him a chapter in a book on time-travel theoreticians – compelling him to face the implications of his academic work and the consequences of choices in a universe of infinite possibilities. These questions can be posed and answered only in a sci-fi context, which is what attracted Wack to the subject.

The paperback book, nearly 400 pages, is published by Boissevain Books and can be purchased from Amazon USA for less than $12.50 plus shipping. The book can be purchased from Amazon UK for £8.19, with Free Delivery in the UK on orders that exceed £10.