IT IS OFFICIALLY an enclave, real Dutch territory. With a chain around it that serves as the border, which you can only cross without permission if you are Dutch. It’s located right behind the airport in Jackson, Mississippi, near Dutchman Row and Holland Avenue. It is minuscule, section 41 of the Cedar Lawn cemetery. The city donated it to Holland, and the Dutch government is responsible for all maintenance. Herman Arens is buried here, as are Roy van Pelt, Fred Maatman, Harry Lange and a whole bunch of others.
Son of a preacherman, Piet van Erkel, was one of the first Dutchmen to find his final resting place here. He was just 23 and had been married to Inazelle Pierce for only three months. That wedding (with Lieutenant Van der Molen playing Ave Maria on the violin) had been quite an event in Jackson, given that the bride came from a prominent local family. Moreover, it was the very first marriage between a local girl and one of the 688 Dutch pilots who had landed at Jackson.
It was May 1942, and the boys had flown in, via Kansas, from Australia. They had mostly come from Indonesia, which they had escaped when Japan invaded there. They were all pilots, aircraft mechanics or student pilots. In Kansas it was not possible to fly all year round, due to weather. In Mississippi it is. The idea was to get them ready for service in the Australian or British Air Force.
JACKSON COUNTED relatively few young men in 1942 — many had enlisted and were serving out of state. So when Jackson’s women woke up one May morning to the news that some 700 Dutch guys had arrived overnight, it was the talk of the day. Especially when the gents lined up for a parade. They were tall, handsome, blond, they spoke with an accent, and they were surprisingly gallant. “They had wonderful manners,” Willowdeen Newell would later remember, “they knew how to treat a lady.” Willowdeen was 15, but insisted she was 17, and fell for Private Jan Veenstra, 18. They got married.
After the Van Erkel and Veenstra weddings, many more followed. During daytime hours it was all training and hard work at the Hawkins Field army airfield, but at night the men went out. They handed out pins, Dutch Wings, to girls who were available for dating. Those who did not wear a pin were not bothered. The others had no problems hooking up with a guy. They got married, started families, more often without than with the permission from the officer without whose green light one really shouldn’t marry – and finally many a young father left for the front.
THE FRONT, that was either the European theater, and then you flew for the RAF, or you joined the Australian Air Force, and you took on the Japanese. Most survived and returned to Jackson after the war. In retrospect, most of the deaths, 30 in all, occurred during training flights over Hawkins Field. That had a psychological cause, the experts suggested later. The Dutch were so frustrated about having been kicked out of Holland as well as Indonesia that they became reckless with their freedom in the air. Risky stunts, like flying three feet above treetops, losing control on a steep landing, things like that.
That’s how Piet van Erkel came to his end, during a training flight with a student pilot. Inazelle was inconsolable. But she remarried three years later, to a respectable American car dealer, and when she passed away in 2006, her obituary didn’t say a word about Lieutenant Van Erkel. However, her nickname spoke volumes. Nobody ever called her Inazelle. She preferred to be addressed as Pete, ever since that day in ’42. As a lifelong salute to her first great love.
* “Dutchmen socializing with local young women,” the local newspaper wrote.
