Alberton bookseller steeped in dad’s history since making WWII connection
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Wales spent June and July touring Europe, more than 1,600 miles of it on bicycle and another 5,000 by train. Her destinations were many throughout the British Isles and the continent, but the one that made it all worthwhile came early on, in the Dutch town of Baarn.
There she met Gerrit Zwanenburg, the man who as a teenager saw her father’s plane shot from the sky during World War II.
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“I walked in the door, and within five minutes he points up in the air and says, ‘I saw your father fall from the sky.’ And he’s got big tears running down his face,” says Wales.
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Zwanenburg relived with Wales how he, as a 15-year-old boy, heard anti-aircraft fire shooting at the “Holy Mackeral,” the B-17 that Kenneth Wales was navigating. Zwanenburg and his 11-year-old brother hurried to the crash site, where they found a life vest and parachute. Wales and the other survivor of the crash had already been apprehended and taken to the police station in nearby Harlingen.
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