Uncle 'Red'

 Its mind boggling what can be found on the internet.!! Take the other day ,I was thinking about my favourite Uncle now deceased these past 24 years . He was the family legend in his time because he had more narrow scrapes and escapes in his life than anyone that I ever knew.He bailed out twice over England from the burning bombers that he was in.He managed to survive the hazardous place he was in on the bombers as 'tail end Charlie' when the unlucky ones were usually blown clean away from the bomber by German fighters.Finally over Holland in 1943 his bomber was shot down by a German night-fighter.The pilot  and navigator were killed and the rest of the crew captured after bailing out.
   Getting back to the internet I decided to see if I could find anything about the plane he was on.that night I knew it was a Handley-Page Halifax  four engine bomber and I knew that it was returning from a raid on Essen. In my search I stumbled across a website called Lost Bombers and because I knew from the letters he sent from the pow camp to my mother which are in my possession that he was shot down about April 30th 1943. I was able to find his bomber on the website.and amazingly the name and rank of the German fighter pilot that shot it down.
  A search of the fighter pilot's name told me that Uncle's bomber was his 23rd kill.This young man ,he was twenty three years of age, and went on to record 54 kills before he was ambushed by a British Beaufighter night-fighter over the Zuider Zee on the night of September 29th 1943 and killed..

   My Uncle was in three German pow camps.The second camp that he was in was the northern most camp in the German Reich and today the site is located in what is now Lithuania.In July 1944 ahead of the advancing Russians some 900 of the prisoners including Uncle were loaded into cattle cars and taken to Memel and then forced into a merchant ship for a 60 hour voyage to Swinemunde and from there by cattle car and forced march in which the men endured bayoneting and shooting to Stalag Luft lV in Poland..
  Then in February 1945 the camp was evacuated ahead of the Russian Army and in one of the most bitterly cold winters in history Uncle and his comrades were force marched west under guard  for 86 days all the while enduring bayoneting,,beatings shootings of the sick and starvation rations Finally after marching in a zig zag route covering about 600 miles (960km) the British Army found them.Nearly all the men had lost one third of their body weight.Uncle who was five foot six and weighed 162 pounds when captured told Mom that he weighed  100 pounds when rescued  by the British.

   This episode I described  was one of his narrow escapes. After the War  he trained as a RCAF  radar tech and spent time flying into northern Canada to work on the Pine Tree Line which was a forerunner of the Dew Line  part of NORAD. After seeing friends that had gone through with him, missions over Germany ,the pow camps, the infamous Black March then dying in bush plane crashes while flying into the radar sites on the Pine Tree line he quit the air force.

    I could write a small book about his experiences. He told me some of them but mostly he talked to his sister ,my Mom and only if he became overwhelmed by them . For a few years he kicked around, spent time with some of this old air force buddies some of whom were Americans that served with him in the RCAF before and after the USA entered the War. Eventually and shrouded in mystery he hired on with the Department of External Affairs and spent time in Europe,the Middle East, and South East Asia..After he retired I asked him what he had did on the job. 'Listened to the radio a lot' no more questions.

    What night-fighters pow camps  bush planes couldn't do to him the big C did.At the age of 77 his luck of the Irish finally ran out..