November 11 Personal (2)

  My Mother's one brother and her favourite one ( she had three) decided in 1939 at the out break of war with Germany

to join the RCAF at the age of 29.He was single with a good job but the wanderlust that affected him all his life kicked in.

  After basic training he was shipped overseas in late 1939 to England where after more training he was sent to a newly formed Canadian bomber squadron as a rear gunner.His bomber was a twin engine Wellington ,an aircraft that was made mostly with a form of plywood .

    The squadron's duties in early 1940 was anti-submarine

patrol mainly in the Bay of Biscay dropping 'ash cans'( depth charges.)In fact  his crew  after dropping the cans saw an oil slick appear on the surface and presumed a sub was sunk.

   After the fall of France the squadron was equipped with the Halifax four engine bomber a cousin to the famous Lancaster but slower with a smaller bomb load.He saw action in night bombing of the Ruhr mainly the industrial city of Essen.

    In March of 1942 and returning from a raid on the Ruhr his plane was jumped by a German night fighter near the Zuyder Zee and shot up badly .The pilot  was wounded very badly but courageously held the plane steady so that the rest of the crew could bail out then perished in the crash. He was 19 years old. The survivors were captured and made prisoners of war.I still remember walking into the kitchen and my Mum sitting at the table with a paper in her hand weeping.She had just got a telegram from the war ministry that her brother was missing in action.

   A month later confirmation came from the Red Cross that he was a pow and the postal address of the camp was with it.He was moved around to different camps and was in Stalag Luft III when the tunnels were being started.At that camp he met up with an old miner buddy of his Wally Floody who had some experience in tunneling.

   After a short stay him and others were sent to a camp near East Prussia and from there in the Winter of 44/45 the camp was abandoned and the prisoners driven out ahead of the advancing Russians into the coldest winter in Europe in many ,many years.While hundreds of prisoners died he some how survived the bayonetings ,the bitter cold and the starvation rations.In early 1945 he and some others were found by the British Army. He told Mum that though he weighed 86 pounds he was threatened with being shot as a spy because he at first could not remember his sisters address in Sudbury Ontario. Aw the fog of war.

   I remember going with Mum to the train station to meet him. I had never met him because I was only two when he joined up.In 1939 he had signed up for a ten year hitch.After seeing some of his air force buddies that had survived the bombing campaigns and the pow camps dying in bush plane crashes while flying into radar sites in northern BC ,some thing that he was involved in also, he left the RCAF in 1949. 

   He traveled all over the world with many more adventures and  passed on at the age of 77 in 1987.