Five Stolpe Brothers Serve in Fight for Freedom
Eldon Stolpe • Sioux City
Corporal, U.S. Army Air Corps
Don Doll, S.J. photo • Story by Tim Gallagher
Emanuel Stolpe drove from Obert, Nebraska, to Sioux City one day in 1944 to buy a strip of leather. A store clerk shook his head when Emanuel, a school custodian who fixed shoes for extra income, approached the counter. "Leather?" the clerk asked. "Hey mister, don’t you know there’s a war on?" Emanuel had five sons fighting overseas. Yes, he knew.
The story is a favorite told by Eldon Stolpe, a Sioux Cityan who patched bombers during a three-year tour with the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II.
"My dad came from Sweden and appreciated what he had in America. He believed freedom was worth fighting for. I guess you could say we were loyal."
The other Stolpe brothers were: Cliff, who met the Russian Army while serving in the 69th Infantry; Arvid, in England; Ray, a Marine in the Pacific; and Kenneth, with the military police in Italy.
Eldon was the first home and one later chosen to display their parents’ World War II Blue Star Flag. He graduated in 1940 from Obert High. With few job opportunities, he trained as a sheet metal worker in Sioux City and found work building B-25 bombers in California.
He came home to enter the military on January 5, 1943. Following training operations at Miami Beach, he put his sheet metal skills to work at bases around the country. "I took my B-24 training at Galveston, Texas. The planes trained over the Gulf of Mexico by day and I worked each night replenishing oxygen in the planes."
From there he moved to Boston and shipped out for duty overseas. He arrived in England on Christmas 1943. Eldon assembled bombers for a couple months before moving toward the English Channel. On D-Day, he was at Bornmuff, England, waiting to leave for Normandy Beach. He landed there 19 days after the invasion and spent a month patching bombers as German planes conducted nighttime raids. "We’d leave our tents and jump into the hedgerow for protection. With all of our anti-aircraft guns going it was raining red – but raining up."
The Allies liberated Paris on August 25. Eldon drove an officer in by Jeep one day later. "I saw Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby in Paris." His unit kept moving and spent the winter in Belgium. His New Year began with a narrow escape.
"Our engineering tent was about to be strafed and my crew was inside. I wasn’t, so I rushed and told everyone to get out." The men jumped into a building that had been destroyed. All that was left was a brick foundation they huddled against. "I could see planes coming in and one was smoking. We hit him and he simply turned his plane over and dropped out. It was a thing of beauty, really."
When military police caught up with the German pilot, he was sitting on a rock smoking a pipe. "The war for him was over." Eldon entered Germany early in 1945. The war in Europe ended as he worked as a courier near Nuremberg. He spent the next several weeks transporting vehicles to Marseilles for shipment to the Pacific. He thought that was his next destination. "I was on a ship thinking we’d head to the Pacific, but the captain told us we were heading to Boston."
Eldon married Lois Dahl on October 18, 1946. He picked corn their first year of marriage. He then attended University of Nebraska for a year before answering an ad for a repairman for Bekins Furniture. "I did that for 12 years and then went into business for myself. I’m still doing it."
He and Lois raised four children and now enjoy 18 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. In 2004 he visited Normandy to mark the 60th anniversary of the D-Day Invasion.
"I knelt beside a Cross and a person asked if I was thanking him (the soldier whom the Cross represented). "There are 9,300 Crosses at Normandy. Those 9,300 men paid the way for me to go in. I knelt there to thank them all."