Jan Lefeber sent a nice picture of  2nd Lt Erwin J. Bevins who was co-pilot on a B-24 that was hit above the Netherlands on December 22nd 1943. The airplane crashed near Bakhuizen in the province of Friesland, in the northern part of the Netherlands.

Bevins was photographed on a children’s bike, somewhere in the Netherlands. Bikes are still main means of transport in the low country, though during the war for many people it was the only way to get to another place. Many Dutch used the bike to transport food from the east of the country to the west during the last winter of the war, when starvation was high because of the scarce food.

Bevins stranded in 1943. A Friesian underground worker, named Rense Talsma, picked him up. One of the many addresses Bevins frequented as an onderduiker, was the farm of Albert and Hanna Koeslag in the village of Laren. He traveled to Laren by train, according to his own account. He got food and shelter in the months July and August. At the Koeslag farm Bevins was with 7 other evaders, Bevins told the US Military and Intelligence Service (MIS) after the war. He also remembered that Koeslag (which he erroneously spelled as Kooslag) had eleven or twelve children.

From Laren he moved to the village of Nijverdal, where he stayed until the Canadian liberators came in April 1945. According to the notes he made for the MIS, hetwas treated for appendicitis by local practitioners

Then he moved with Lt Ted Weaver and 30 Dutch civilians to a castle, where the 2nd Canadian Division took him and his companions. On April 9th he finally was ‘released’ to return to his own regiment. At that time he may have been a record time onderduiker. For almost one and a half year, he had been hiding with the Dutch underground.