Hendrik Dolleman
This is a copy of an old yellowed newsclip that my mother saved. As you can see, Hendrik’s name is misspelled. I do not know the source of this photo, and the writing below it was lopped off, for some reason. Sgt. Hendrik Dolleman was involved in a number of rescues with his U.S. Army sled dogs. Perhaps the most famous of the Greenland Ice Cap Rescues was the rescue of crew members from “My Gal Sal,” a B-17, in 1942.
Today, I was very happy to receive an inquiry from historian, Laura Snow, about my late uncle. She found his name on my website, and recognized that he must have been the same Hendrik Dolleman (1905-1990) who served with her father and accompanied Admiral Byrd on two expeditions to the Antarctic in 1939 and 1955. “Dolleman Island,” where research still takes place today, is named after him as mentioned in a 1961 book called Antarctic Command by Captain Finn Ronne, USNR. Dolleman was in charge of training sled dogs.
A newspaper article about Dolleman was saved by his late sister-in-law, my mother, who failed to note the name of the newspaper or the date. She saved only the portion of the article that pertained to him. It said:
S.Sgt. Henry Dolleman, son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Dolleman, 129 Winter Street, who won the Soldier’s Medal with an oak leaf cluster for participation in two polar rescue missions in 1942, is currently stationed at Westover Field, Mass. An article in a recent issue of the “Army Airliner,” the official publication of the Atlantic Division, Air Transport Command, heralds Sergeant Dolleman as being one of two soldiers who, along with Navy BY crew, made the rescue mission.…
He was a hero who had saved six lives in a dangerous polar rescue! A photo of him with his companions, several sled dogs and a penguin can be seen at this web page: http://usas1939.org/ Hendrik is the third man from the left, in the second row.
Born in 1905 in Deventer, Overijssel, Netherlands, Dolleman came to America in 1916 (at the age of eleven) on board the “Nieuw Amsterdam,” leaving from Rotterdam and accompanied by his mother and siblings. A photo of the ship is available at ancestry.com
My Aunt Frances (my mother’s oldest sister) married Hendrik rather late in life and they had no children. He was a career serviceman. The couple both enjoyed their nieces and nephews to a great extent, and also had a lot of cats, both cats they kept as pets as well as strays they customarily fed.
They were stationed in Germany for a time where my aunt became fond of Hummel figurines and collected a great many of them. It was fun to visit her Hummel collection at their west-side Manchester, New Hampshire home, the same house where my grandparents brought up their brood of eleven children. Last I knew, the pear trees that still grow in the back yard are the same ones that provided grandmother with fruit to can for the winter, with the help of her oldest girls.
By the way, the Chinook dogs used as sled dogs in these expeditions was bred in Wonalancet, New Hampshire by breed founder, Arthur Treadwell Walden. Very few dogs of this breed remain today.
Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications
