UNTOLD STORY
Latham woman learns of father’s dramatic sea rescue more than 70 years later
LATHAM, N.Y. >> A daughter’s determination, a journalist’s passion and the power of social media helped to connect two families across the continents to bring full circle a story that began 75 years ago when a Danish fisherman put his own safety aside and pulled a Troy man from the North Sea.
Linda Berkery heard only tidbits about her father’s service as a pilot in World War II. She knew his B-17 crashed in the North Sea and that he pushed his journal as a prisoner of war into the hands of a German housewife while making a 50-mile march between prison camps. Berkery knew the journal was returned, and the housewife received a re- ward.
What she didn’t know was that the actions of a Danish fisherman saved her father’s life.
William Styles was a wellknown area funeral director who died in 1975. The graduate of LaSalle Institute served with the 100th Bombardment Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps — the predecessor of today’s Air Force — in World War II, but Berkery INSIDE: William Styles is the first veteran to be featured in a weekly feature spotlighting the men and women being honored on banners that will hang around the city of Troy from Memorial Day through Veterans Day. A3
said he spoke little about his service, leaving her and her sisters, Janice Styles-Hall and Carol Hi-
rata, to create their own child-like versions of his story.
In March, though, Berkery, who lives in Latham, learned the truth about their father’s rescue when she found her father’s POW journal while gathering information to have his service memorialized on a banner to be hung in Troy by the new Troy Military Banner Committee. She discovered a picture of her father with an article from a Denmark newspaper, as well as a handwritten letter from Denmark, posted August 3, 1949, taped to the inside of that journal.
On July 25, 1943, the plane carrying Styles and nine other crew members was gunned down about 50 miles from Denmark and crash-landed in the North Sea. Sven Lundager Pedersen, skipper of a small fishing boat had just cast his nets when he saw the plane descend into the water. The fisherman pulled up his nets and navigated the sea to rescue the four surviving American crew members.
“I never grasped the absolute significance of that day,” Berkery said.
Decades later, she found herself reading the skipper’s handwritten words from that nearly 70-yearold letter: “I remember you well. … I am sending you a newspaper article and have marked you with an X and myself with XX. I am also sending you two pictures. … I hope you remember me and ask you to write to me and tell me how you have been doing in the past years. Also please information about your three friends. I will end the letter with the warmest greetings to you and your family.”
Berkery learned of the risk involved in saving the Americans through a Danish newspaper article translated with the help of Facebook. The boat’s crew rescued the survivors, splinting broken bones as best they could by making splints from a broken crate. The fishing boat waited for a rescue, but when that didn’t come, Pedersen directed his crew to head to Esbjerg, a seaport town in southwest Denmark, where arrangements had been made to provide medical help for the survivors. The article went on to explain that the rescue had been observed by a German fighter plane, and when the boat arrived at shore, the Germans demanded custody of the Americans.
“Despite protests and demonstrations, the Germans took them into their custody,” the article read.
“We are all connected by this one thing, a 12-hour period,” she said. “What a great tribute that is to the Danish people.”
She said more than 50 people provided information that helped piece together what had happened that day, including 26-yearold Mathilde Jespersen, who had started as a journalist at JydskeVestkysten in Esbjerg just a few months before receiving Berkery’s email.
“When I first read the email from Linda, I knew it was special, and I knew that I had to write the story and find the people, and I firmly believed that it was possible to find them,” Jespersen said. “I brought it to my editor, and thankfully he agreed. “[ Being] responsible for bringing so many people together, I guess I never really thought about it like that, but I suppose I do play a part in it, which I am very proud of and honored. … I have a few stories that I’ve written so far and people I’ve met, which I pack into neat little packages, and I keep them in a corner of my heart. … This story and these people are right there in the corner of my heart, and their story always will be.”
In the two months since Jespersen’s story was published, Berkery said she has already connected with the daughter of a surviving member of her father’s crew, as well as the skipper’s family, who had been unaware of their father’s heroic act.
“Without him, these servicemen would not have survived,” she said.
Styles and his wife, Jane, had four children, while Richard Carey, the other surviving crew member whose family Berkery connected with, had 10 children.
“These men now have children and grandchildren, legacies that would have died if he’s not had the courage to rescue them,” Berkery said.
The families are now exchanging letters and sharing mementos, including two silk scarves imprinted with a map, which soldiers carried in their evacuation kits in case they were shot down. Styles’ scarf is now back in his family’s possession.
“To have something very tangible that my father held in 1943, to be able to touch it, that’s mind- boggling,” Berkery said.
Surviving members of the 100th Bomb Group are planning a reunion this fall, and Berkery said she hopes to someday thank Pedersen’s family in person.
“It took a lot of guts to do what he did,” she said.
This Memorial Day, Style’s grave is decorated with both an American and Danish flag, a tribute to one man’s decision that changed a family’s history in 12 hours. Berkery said Pedersen’s actions were not unlike her own research.
“In many ways, what started as a whim became a real journey of the heart,” she said.