bank the airplane hard to the left to avoid crashing into the town center and ditched it safely into a turnip field at Zomerweg 41 , south of Jabbeke. A monument commemorating the crash was erected on the side of the road near the crash site by the citizens of Jabbeke in 2009 and he was named an honorary citizen because his action saved countless lives in the town center of Jabbeke. Of the ten-man crew, four were killed while in the plane, five were quickly captured by German forces on the ground, with Sundlun the only crew member able to evade capture. Sundlun made his way across Belgium and France by stealing bicycles in the morning near the market centers of small towns and seeking aid from local Catholic priests in the evening. After six months time cooperating with the French Resistance under the code name Salamander, he made several attempts to enter Spain near Biarritz, and later near Foix. But after deciding that there was too much danger of capture or loss in the snowy Pyrenees, he made his way on stolen bicycles north-eastward across France and escaped into Switzerland on May 5, 1944, near Fêche-l'Église. Before escaping into Switzerland, he was engaged with the Maquis in acts of sabotage near Belfort against German Army units under the command of Russian defector General Andrey Vlasov. Once Sundlun entered Switzerland he turned himself in to Swiss authorities and was interned along with other Allied military officers at a hotel in Davos. Within a few months, he was recruited by Allen Dulles to work out of the U.S. Embassy in Bern under the auspices of the Office of Strategic Services in the early preparations for Operation Sunrise. Later under the orders of Dulles, he reentered France to act as a bombardment spotter for the Allied invasion of Marseille in mid-August 1944. After a brief service as a pilot of C-54 Skymaster cargo planes into Karachi, and over "The Hump" to Kunming after VE Day, he ferried bombers (B-24 Liberators and B-29 Superfortresses) from the U.S. mainland to Tinian in the Mariana Islands and into other bases in the Pacific Theater of Operations. In August 1945, Sundlun attained the rank of captain, and left active service at the end of the war. He received the Purple Heart, Distinguished Flying Cross, and Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters from the U.S.