Spicer said later: ‘I owe Tiny Mulder a lot. I was staying at another farm, but in the evenings, she would take me to her house and we would pop corn or have apples. I remember that her father would catch fish in the canal every Friday for a Catholic flier.’

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When the arrangements were in place, the men set out for Spain. ‘I took McGlinchey and McDonald by train to Ermelo,’ Mulder said, ‘and delivered them to a safe house called ‘Red Riding Hood.’ That is the last I ever saw of them. I learned after the war that they had gone as far as the Pyrenees and ran into a German border patrol. They were sent all the way back north to a German POW camp.’

The young agent also accompanied Spicer and a Canadian flier, Fred Boulter, to Ermelo. ‘After the war, I heard that Carl arrived in London on Christmas Eve 1943,’ Mulder said. ‘He and Fred had parted company, and Fred was arrested in Paris and sent to a German POW camp.’

For another downed airman, Merlin Verburg, the crash landing turned into an unplanned homecoming. Verburg’s grandmother was from the northern Dutch province of Friesland, and he recognized the language when he met up with the farmer who rescued him.

Mulder had a sparkle in her eye as she recounted Verburg’s adventure: ‘A policeman told us there was an American shot down, but there were already Germans looking for the downed plane, and there were more airmen on the loose. When I arrived, the farmer had given Merlin some clothing, and there just happened to be a visitor there who gave him his bicycle.’

Mulder decided that it was a time for ingenuity and improvisation: ‘I said, ‘Well, Merlin, we are very much in love!’ So we went off on the bicycles arm in arm! No airman who had come down two hours ago would have a girlfriend already! We rode right past the Germans.’

The most dangerous rescue came with a crew of 10 whose plane was hit and collapsed against a windmill. ‘Everyone was involved in this case,’ said Mulder. The co-pilot was killed, and the rest of the crew roamed the fields during the night. In the early morning, local farmers hid them. The Germans knew about the crash because the pilot had lost a leg and needed professional care. Someone contacted police officials, and the pilot was taken to a German hospital, where he was well cared for.

‘At a farm across the road was a farmer with four sons, who put all of those men in rowboats and rowed them across the river to safety,’ Mulder remembered. From there, she and her helpers rowed the men across a lake to a houseboat where they could hide.

The underground knew the farmers would be questioned and tried to prepare them. They told them what the Germans would ask and how they must reply. ‘We told them to say that they know nothing about it, and that a car came here with Germans in it and took them away,’ Mulder recalled. ‘We told them to say nothing else, only repeat what we told them.’ The lessons worked. Germans searching for the airmen could not get at the truth and released the farmers.

Nevertheless, the situation was tenuous after the 10 Americans had been helped. Villagers expected the Germans to retaliate by conducting a ‘razzia,’ a house-to-house search to find Jews, to take people to work in Germany or to ferret out those who worked in the underground. Mulder was running out of hiding places in the village and asked the monks at the local monastery to take some Americans. There was no time for diplomacy. When the monks hedged a bit, Mulder told them it was ‘only for one night.’ The monks then found room to hide some soldiers. It was almost a week before safe houses were found.

Along with rescuing the airmen, hiding Jews remained a high priority. ‘People in other areas would send word, asking if there was room for a girl of 7 or a couple in their 60s,’ said Mulder. ‘When we asked people to take someone in, they would ask, ‘What if we are found out?’ I told them, ‘Well then, you go to a concentration camp, and the Germans take everything you have.’ Sometimes they would say no, and that was absolutely all right. People who are afraid do the most dangerous things when they panic!’

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