Bram van der Stok, (13 October 1915 – 8 February 1993), also known as Bob van der Stok, was a World War II fighter pilot and flying ace, and is the most decorated aviator in Dutch history.
In March 1944, he broke out of Stalag Luft III – a prisoner-of-war camp in Nazi Germany – during the mass break-out known as "The Great Escape". After crossing much of occupied Europe, to reach neutral Spain, Van der Stok became one of only three out of the 76 escapees to reach Britain, along with two Norwegians, Per Bergsland and Jens Müller (who together managed to reach neutral Sweden).
Early years
Van der Stok spent his childhood between Sumatra, the Netherlands, and the Dutch West Indies, where his father was employed with Shell Petroleum. After finishing his primary education at the Lyceum Alpinum in Switzerland, he studied Medicine at Leiden University with the intention of pursuing a career as a physician.
While at Leiden he was an enthusiastic sportsman with a particular interest in rowing and ice hockey. In 1937, he joined the Reserve of the Netherlands' Luchtvaartafdeeling (Army Aviation Group) – a precursor of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, training on the Fokker S.IV, while continuing his medical studies at Utrecht University.
World War II
When the Netherlands was attacked and invaded by the Third Reich in May 1940, Van der Stok – now flying with the Netherlands' Air Force's renamed Luchtvaartbrigade (Army Aviation Brigade), scored his first victory when he shot down a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt Bf 109 while on patrol in a Fokker D.XXI over De Kooy airfield, and also took part in an air attack on the Netherlands' Waalhaven Airport, which had been seized by the Germans and was being used by the Luftwaffe for operations.
After the Netherlands' defeat and occupation by the Wehrmacht, he made three unsuccessful attempts to follow the Dutch Crown in its withdrawal across the North Sea to England. On the fourth attempt, he managed to reach Scotland in June 1941 as a stowaway aboard the Swiss merchant ship Saint Cerque, which had sailed out of Rotterdam, along with Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema and two others.
Following a refresher and conversion course with the Royal Air Force's No.57 Operational Training Unit, he was posted to its No.41 Squadron in December 1941 flying the Supermarine Spitfire, with which he went on to achieve six confirmed kills amongst Luftwaffe aircraft up to April 1942, qualifying him as a flying ace.
Capture, imprisonment and escape
On 12 April 1942, during an operation code-named 'Circus 122' over occupied North France to attack the railway marshalling yard at Hazebrouck, Van der Stok was shot down while flying a Spitfire Vb BL595. He parachuted down safely at Saint-Omer in the Pas-de-Calais, but was immediately captured by a Wehrmacht patrol.
He was subsequently incarcerated in the newly built Stalag Luft III where, with his medical training, he worked in the prison's medical facility. While at Stalag Luft III, he made three escape attempts. The first was inadvertently spoiled by another prisoner who drew attention to the escaping Van der Stok while retrieving a stolen German cap from the roof of a hut. The second attempt was thwarted when the German guards noticed that a forged pass he was using to get past them was out of date. His third attempt, on the night of 24–25 March 1944, was as a part of the mass break-out later known as "The Great Escape", in which he was the 18th of 76 prisoners to leave the escape tunnel.
In his memoir he describes the moment he came out of the tunnel on 24 March, writing:
After the break-out, Van der Stok travelled from Breslau train station to Dresden where he was stopped at several checkpoints, convincing the Germans that he was not one of the escapees. He then travelled to Utrecht through Oldenzaal and met up with a member of the Dutch underground, who briefed and equipped him for a bicycle trek to another safe house run by the Belgian Resistance. After arriving there, he was given the paperwork of a Belgian, and then travelled by train via Brussels and Paris to Toulouse, where the French Resistance put him with two American lieutenants, two other RAF pilots, a French officer and a Russian, and took the group across the Pyrenees to Lleida in Spain. The British consulate in Spain accepted the Allied escapees and, three months after the break-out of Stalag Luft III, Van der Stok reached British Empire territory once again by arriving in Gibraltar on 8 July 1944. He was subsequently flown from Gibraltar to Whitchurch Airport in England on 11 July 1944.