Once their nationality had been determined, the next step was to find clothing for the men and a place to stay. Her own parents took in some of the airmen. Ed Pollock, a Boeing B-17 pilot, later remembered the Mulder family very well. ‘Our plane, hit by German flak near the German border on December 11, 1943, was on fire, and two of my men were killed,’ he recalled. ‘Of the remaining eight, five were wounded. Tiny came along and took me to her house, where I stayed for three months. I played chess with Mr. Mulder every night. They were wonderful people, and they risked their lives for us.’

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After placing the airmen in a safe house, the next thing to do was to advise the national resistance organization of the new arrivals and send a message to London over the wireless, giving their name, rank and serial number. When it was time for the soldiers to make their escape, Mulder and her fellow workers provided them with false Dutch identity cards, kept under lock and key in the town hall. Members of the underground had various ways of getting the papers from helpful officials. A photographer who could be trusted took the airmen’s photos for the cards. The whole process had to be repeated for Belgium and France, the countries through which the men would pass on their route to Spain and on to London by plane.

‘Many did not make it,’ Mulder admitted. ‘The chain of guides between the Netherlands and Spain broke all the time.’ The weak link was in Antwerp, where a Canadian of German origin offered to help the Nazis by infiltrating the underground. ‘He didn’t disturb the underground movement, but picked off the Allied soldiers and sent them to prison,’ Mulder recalled. ‘He was executed in Belgium after the war as a traitor, but that was too late.’

Communication with London did not always work well, either. ‘The London office was sloppy about letting us know if the men made it,’ Mulder said, ‘but they always sent us messages, urging us to return the men. They said they could build airplanes faster than they could replace crews.’ Tiny shrugged. ‘This was war. They didn’t count lives.’

Frank McGlinchey, the bombardier of a plane shot down on October 8, 1943, explained what happened after he bailed out: ‘I fell about a 1,000 feet before yanking the handle. The parachute opened immediately, and I had one of the softest landings on record.’ The area where McGlinchey came down was near the village of Beetsterzwaag. A group of Dutch farmers, who spoke no English, found him. They understood immediately what had happened and took away McGlichey’s parachute and hid it. The farmers pointed out a route for the young bombardier to follow, and he soon came upon his navigator, Carl Spicer, walking in a field. The two men walked throughout the night and found a barn, where they hid when daylight came.

‘Just as we had hoped, an old farmer came out to begin his day’s work,’ McGlinchey said. ‘We told him our story through sign language. He understood and took us into his house, fed us and took us upstairs to sleep.’

The men were passed from home to home and then hidden in a loft in the Dutch Reformed Church in Wolvega, where Mulder came to get them. ‘The janitor of the church took me upstairs where the two men greeted me with friendly smiles,’ said Mulder. ‘They had no doubt about my good intentions, maybe because they had met only people who were kind and willing to help.’ She told them that their pilot, Bill McDonald, had come down near Lippenhuizen, and had been taken in by the local postmaster.

Mulder took the soldiers back with her to Drachten, using a taxi with a driver friendly to the underground. Spicer stayed with a farm family, the Van Veldens, and Mulder took McGlinchey to her own home. She then bicycled to Lippenhuizen and brought McDonald on a borrowed bicycle to a safe house in Drachten. ‘I remember that he could not ride a bicycle well, and the wheels went every which way,’ she said. ‘I had to grasp hold of his handlebar.’

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