Ring Belonged To Flyer Downed In WWII Italy

It was during the final days of the allied air campaign in Europe. Sgt. Harold Holmquist of Placerville (CA) was a crewmember aboard an American B-24 on a raid over Munich. The aircraft was shot up, severely damaged. The pilot and copilot tried valiantly to get it back to its base in Italy, but they couldn't make it. The bail-out alarm sounded and, as the Liberator began to plummet toward the ground, seven parachutes dotted the sky. But Sgt. Holmquist wasn't underneath one of those life-saving canopies. He died in the aircraft before it struck the ground in Plaus, Italy.

A Thoughtful People

The people of Plaus rushed to the burning wreckage. Eventually, when the flames died down and the smoke cleared, they sifted through the remains. Four bodies were found. The mayor of Plaus paid for their coffins and their funerals out of his own pocket, rather than see them buried in a mass grave by the German army.

The villagers created a "memory box" to hold the few valuables they could salvage from the wreckage. Among them, a small man's ring, silver and blue. Inside the band, it bore the inscription, "1936 D.L.D."

Almost 60 years later, the people of Plaus solved the mystery of the ring's owner. It was Sgt. Holmquist. They surmised that the initials "D.L.D." were those of his wife, whose maiden name was Dorothy L. Dysle. So, they opened the memory box and returned the ring to Holmquist's daughter, who was only a baby when her father's B-24 went down.

"Isn't it amazing?'' Linda Holmquist Darrach told the Sacramento Bee. "I'm grateful to the people of Plaus, especially for what they did at the time of the crash." Linda's daughter examined the ring and suggested it was her grandmother's girl scout ring, resized to fit her grandfather.

The people of Plaus, a German-speaking town of about 500 people, gave the ring to Holmquist's cousin, an AAF navigator who had trained at the same base as Holmquist back in 1944. The field where Holmquist's body was found is now an apple orchard, about 20 miles from the Swiss border. There's a plaque there, built about two years ago. It reads in German, "In sorrow, in death and in mourning, all men are the same."

FMI: http://usaaf.com