Ron Moyes (left end) crewed up with Hugh Ferguson, Don Walkey, Stu Farmer, Alvin Kuhl and Jake Redinger in 1944. They survived 29 combat operations in Bomber Command.
It happened kind of like choosing a partner at a high school dance, where the girls all lined up on one side of the dance floor and the boys on the other.
Only in this case, during the Second World War, the Commonwealth airmen gathered in a hangar in England – pilots in one group, navigators in another, gunners in another, etc. As RCAF gunner Ron Moyes told me the other night, bomber pilot Don Walkey first picked a navigator, Hugh Ferguson.
“Then, Fergy picked the rest of us,” said Moyes, just shy of his 97th birthday (Feb. 11). (more…)
The Hive in Nanton – just one of many attractions created by local entrepreneurs.
Whenever I get the chance to visit other provinces, I find myself gravitating to smaller towns. Last week, I was travelling through southern Alberta on a public-speaking tour. One of the places where I’d been invited to speak was Nanton (population 2,000), about an hour’s drive south of Calgary.
While there, my host invited me to lunch at a new eatery in town called The Hive. It was part vendors’ shop and part truck-stop café. Inside I was introduced to owner/operator, Kristen Hall.
“Welcome to The Hive,” she said. “It’s what’s buzzing in town.”
I rolled my eyes and groaned.
“It’s always a good idea to start your visit with a laugh,” she said. “Enjoy your stay.” (more…)
Joe English (centre) and his Lancaster crew volunteered for the Dutch Food Drops in April 1945.
He didn’t have to do it. Still in an RCAF uniform and duty-bound to King and Country in April 1945, nevertheless Joe English stepped up. He and his entire Lancaster crew had completed the requisite 30 operations, a full tour, over occupied Europe. They all had done their bit in the war, but Joe and his entire crew volunteered for one more flight.
Operation Manna delivered 10,000 tons of food to starving Dutch civilians.
“The Germans say they’ll permit bombers to fly in low over the big Dutch cities – Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, the Hague,” their RAF commanders told them. “People are starving there. They need us to drop tons of food.”
“As far as I was concerned,” Joe said, “it was about improving people’s lives.” (more…)
F/O Bob Middleton wearing his navigator’s brevet (graduation wings) 1942.
It was kind of like the last breakfast for a condemned man. Whenever Canadian and other Second World War aircrew got word they were facing a tough bombing mission over enemy territory in Europe, the crews were invited to enjoy the most precious breakfast in all of Britain at that time.
“Bacon and eggs. You got bacon and eggs,” my veteran friend Bob Middleton told me on the weekend, “because you didn’t know if you’d be coming back.”
Those nights when Bomber Command aircrews boarded their Lancaster, Halifax, Whitley or Mosquito aircraft to fly most of the night over Nazi-occupied Europe, seem oh so long ago. (more…)
Roger Parliament swears oath of allegiance at RCAF recruiting office, in front of his father, Garnott Parliament
When he turned 18, in 1941, Roger Parliament travelled to a recruiting office in downtown Toronto to join up for wartime service. He’d prepared all his enlistment papers and anticipated vision and hearing tests.
Then, LAC Parliament officially signed up.
But perhaps the most critical part of his decision to enlist in the armed services occurred when he came before the second-in-command at the recruiting office on Bay Street.
“I’ve decided to join the Air Force,” he told the pilot officer he faced.
Across the table from him was Pilot Officer Garnott Parliament, Roger’s father. (more…)
Barn silos on McGill University campus at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue hide Montreal tourist attraction.
At first, it didn’t look like much. From a distance the building looked, well, like a barn. It even had a silo. But on closer examination, I could see signage and some outdoor exhibits. No animals. No straw bales. In fact, when I looked up inside the silo, there was no silage, but a scale model of a vintage airplane.
“There are artefacts in here that you’ve never seen before,” said John Lawson, the chair of the Montreal Aviation Museum. “Welcome to my second home.” (more…)
Ted Arnold instructed aircrew cadets for combat roles overseas in WWII.
The last time I spent time with Ted Arnold was in 1991. He had contacted me about his Second World War story. So, I travelled to Port Hope and interviewed him. We communicated again later in the year when he was holidaying in Florida. And while I thought of him often after that, I never actually saw him again. His son Rick contacted me some years later.
“We were wondering if you could help us?” he asked.
I said I would try and then Rick explained that his father had slipped through the cracks at Veterans Affairs Canada. Partly because he was born in Argentina, but mostly because he fell into an odd category as a veteran, the system had denied him veteran status, and therefore funds to cover the expenses at an assisted-living facility in Ontario.
“As you know,” Rick Arnold went on, “he’s not entitled to a veteran’s pension.” (more…)
It’s a repeating theme in much of his published work, but this week perhaps more than most, Ted Barris’s focus on unheralded Canadian heroism during the Second World War appears to have some resonance.
In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the famous bombing raid against the Ruhr River valley war munitions factories of the Third Reich, Ted Barris offered his first ever talk/presentation on the story of the famous “Dam Busters” raid at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton.
About 500 museum members, history buffs, some veterans and the general public filled seats in front of the museum’s WWII Lancaster inside the main hangar to hear the talk. Barris borrowed a comment from one of the Royal Air Force officers featured in the 1955 movie The Dam Busters who told Guy Gibson, the wing commander of No. 617 Squadron, “We mustn’t forget the English” when hand-picking airmen for the raid.
“We mustn’t forget the Canadians,!” Barris emphasized in response.
During the 50-minute presentation, Barris drew on research, interviews and narrative featured in his forthcoming book, Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany, to be published by HarperCollins this year. The raid on May 16-17, 1943 required 19 specially modified Lancaster bombers to travel at treetop altitude – less than 100 feet off the ground and the water – from Scampton air base in Britain to the Ruhr Valley in the heart of Germany to attempt to destroy the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams. They breached the first two and damaged the third, but in the course of the combat operation lost eight bombers including 56 airmen.
Barris pointed out that of the 133 airmen specially chosen and trained in seven and a half weeks prior to the raid, nearly a quarter of those were Canadians. Thirty aircrew – pilots, navigators, flight engineers, wireless radio operators, bomb aimers and gunners – came from nearly every province in the country. What made the story equally important as a Canadian story, Barris pointed out, was that nearly half those chosen for the raid received their training in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan operated principally in Canada between 1939 and 1945.
“The elephant in the room is that almost half the Dam Busters received their air training in Canada,” Barris said, “and that’s not been recognized before.”
The Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, who staged the presentation, houses among the largest collections of air-worthy wartime aircraft, including the Mynarski Memorial Lancaster, which towered over Barris and the audience during the presentation.
Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany is due for release in September, as a Patrick Crean Edition book from HarperCollins Canada.
“Sentimental Journey” B-17 Flying Fortress on tarmac in Hamilton.
I was battling rush-hour traffic. Ironically, I was listening to a Toronto radio station’s traffic reporter tell me I was in gridlock. Then, my cell phone rang. I read the call identification. It was one of my teaching colleagues at Centennial College. And he was excited.
“She’s here!” he said, with more energy in his voice than usual.
“Who’s here?” I asked.
“Sentimental Journey. She’s going to be in Hamilton all this week,” he continued.
It was Malcolm Kelly on the phone. He’s the co-ordinator of Centennial’s sports journalism program. And second only to his love of sports is Malcolm’s love of airplanes. (more…)
Lancaster in front of Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alberta.
I had hardly oriented myself to the place. Wood smoke from the recent B.C. fires had left Nanton, Alberta – a small prairie town south of Calgary – in a palpable haze. Nevertheless, aviation enthusiast Karl Kjarsgaard, who lives and volunteers there, had something he wanted to show me. Inside the newly renamed Bomber Command Museum of Canada, he led me to a storage area above the workshop. He opened a cardboard box and pulled out a metal bar about 18 inches long.
“This aluminum ingot has Canadian blood in it,” he said. “There’s 1,400 pounds of melted down aluminum in this box… and some of it is about to become famous.”
