Bernie Wyatt nearly fit perfectly into his cousin Stefan Oancia’s WWII RCAF tunic.
He took one last look. The transaction had transferred ownership of the property. The farm legally belonged to him now. But the old farmhouse had fallen into disrepair and would have to be demolished. So, Clarence Oancia made one last circuit around the house to see if there was anything worth salvaging. Then, Clarence remembered the attic, a loft in the top of the house, and thought he’d better check it too. He climbed the stairs, opened a closet door. And there it was.
“A World War II uniform jacket,” explained Bernie Wyatt, Clarence’s nephew. “[It was] in excellent condition.” (more…)
They called him “Doc.” But Fred Sutherland told me that he didn’t know anything about medicine. Somebody who came to see Fred off at the train station, when he left to join the Air Force in 1941, decided because Fred’s dad was a family doctor in that part of Alberta, that the son ought to be nicknamed “Doc.”
“He called me ‘Doc,’” Fred told me, with some embarrassment in 2017. “So, it stuck. All through the war they called me that.” (more…)
Ted Barris brings lives of 30 Canadians in the Dam Buster raid centre-stage at Alberta war museum. (Richard de Boer photo)
It seemed all the world came to Nanton, Alberta, on the August 24-25, 2018 weekend. This small southern Alberta town – home to about 2,000 people under normal circumstances – played host to a special late summer event. People travelled from across Canada and the U.S. to attend the 75th anniversary commemoration of Bomber Command’s famous Dam Buster raid of 1943.
“They breached the dams,” author Ted Barris said, “and turned the tide of the Second World War.”
Sons, daughters and other relatives of the Canadian Dam Busters pose in front of museum Lancaster.
HarperCollins publishers and author Ted Barris joined the Bomber Command Museum of Canada, at Nanton, in a pre-publication date launch of Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid Against Nazi Germany, Ted Barris’s 18th non-fiction book. The official publication date is Sept. 11, 2018.
In addition to regular patrons of the museum, event organizers managed to attract the members of families representing 16 of the 30 Canadians who participated in the famous raid on the Ruhr River dams on May 16-17, 1943.
In the Second World War, when Nazi Germany threatened the very existence of Britain, the Royal Air Force called on its military aviators, and thousands more from around the Commonwealth, to take the war to its enemies. Under Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Command often put a thousand aircraft per night in the air against Nazi targets. More than 55,000 aircrew died in those actions, 10,000 of them Canadians. Perhaps the most daring bombing attack happened after weeks of secret training of the Lancaster crews to conduct a low-level raid on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams; the crews breached the first two dams, damaged the third, and crippled production in the Ruhr valley substantially. But the cost was dear; 53 of the 133 airmen died in the raid.
An evening for the Dam Buster families at Nanton. (Richard de Boer photo)
On Friday night, the BCMC hosted a meet-and-greet with just the 50-or-so members of the families of the Canadian airmen who participated in the raid. Nearly half of the 30 Canadians who flew from England that night, did not survive this hi-risk mission. Barris spoke to the families at the Friday social, applauding their commitment to come from so far to pay tribute to their fathers, uncles or grandfathers who’d served in Operation Chastise, which unleashed the famous bouncing bomb against the hydo-electirc dams of industrialized Nazi Germany.
Bomber Command Museum’s Lancaster with replica bouncing bomb in the aircraft’s bomb bay.
That evening members of the BCMC Lancaster crew brought out their prized Ian Bazelgette Memorial Lanc (altered temporarily to show the markings of one of the Dam Buster bombers – AJ-M). The crew not only fired up the Lancs Merlin engines, but spun a replica Upkeep bouncing bomb in the Lancs belly complete with aldis-lamp attitude lamps, while 200 museum visitors watched.
On Saturday afternoon, Barris presented a 70-minute talk/presentation to walk the audience – about 700 visitors in the BCMC hangar – through the details of the dams raid, but more importantly to tell the stories of the Canadian airmen who took part. With a number of Air Force personnel in the audience as well, Barris made sure nobody left the room without knowing just how powerful the Canadian role in the attack had been; he mimicked a line in the 1955 movie The Dam Busters, in which a British RAF officer notes in preparation for the raid, “We mustn’t forget the English.”
Barris pointed out emphatically, “No. We mustn’t forget the Canadians!”
Members of the BCATP Facebook group (l-r) Ken Meintzer, Les Mroz and Peter Whitfield at Nanton on Aug. 25, 2018.
I drove into the museum parking lot last Saturday morning. Leaning over the tailgate of the pickup parked next to me, several guys in ball caps and jeans surveyed their precious cargo. I peered into the back box of the pickup, but I couldn’t recognize the rusty tangle of metal and wires as anything I’d ever seen before.
“Can you believe it?” one of the guys said. “We salvaged it from a ditch just this morning.” (more…)
With a line on the grass between them, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (Queen Mum) beyond meet airmen of the Dam Busters squadron at RAF Scampton in May 1943.
Everybody was new at this. Royalty meeting members of the public at such close range hadn’t really happened much before. The organizers of the meeting, however, went so far as to paint a white line on the grass – like marking side lines on a football field – to keep the planned inspection orderly. Two Royal family members walked on one side of the painted line, and members of the military being inspected stood on the other, including a Royal Air Force pilot named Dave Shannon.
“It’s Flight Lieutenant Shannon’s 21st birthday,” his commanding officer told the King and Queen as they paused before him.
“You seem to be a very well preserved 21,” King George VI told Shannon. “You must have a party tonight.”
The King could probably have spoken for the entire British Commonwealth that day, three-quarters of a century ago. (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.
