WW2: A Tribute to the RCAF-The Royal Canadian Air Force 1939-1945

The fourth tunnel called George

2011-11-23T22:02:00.003-05:00

Frank Stone, seated, with Dr Tony Pollard on the site of George

This is an amazing story that i came across on the internet while surfing that i wanted to share with you. The true story of the great escape remains one of the great stories of the the Second World War. The men who tried to escape from Stalag Luft III at the price of their lives or that wanted to escape for that matter from any other World War two POW German prison camps were truly heroes.

It has lain hidden for nearly 70 years and looks, to the untrained eye, like a building site. But this insignificant tunnel opening in the soft sand of western Poland represents one of the greatest examples of British wartime heroism. And the sensational story became the Hollywood classic, The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen.

Poignant memories: Frank Stone, left, and Gordie King with recovered artefacts including the pistol, below

We are standing in the notorious PoW camp Stalag Luft III, built at the height of the Third Reich, 100 miles east of Berlin. Ten thousand prisoners were kept under German guns here on a 60-acre site ringed with a double barbed-wire fence and watchtowers.

They slept in barrack huts raised off the ground so guards could spot potential tunnellers, but the Germans did not count on the audacity of British Spitfire pilot Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, played by Sir Richard Attenborough in the 1963 film. He was interned at the camp in March 1943. With him were about 2,000 other RAF officers, many of whom were seasoned escapers from other camps, with skills in tunnelling, forgery and manufacturing.

From them Bushell hand-picked a team for his ambitious plan: to dig their way out of captivity.

Three tunnels nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry were constructed 30ft underground using homemade tools. While Tom was discovered and destroyed by the Germans, Dick was used for storage.

The third tunnel, Harry, became the stuff of folklore on the night of March 24, 1944, when Allied prisoners gathered in hut 104 before crawling along the 100ft tunnel to a brief taste of freedom. Only three escaped; 73 were rounded up by the Germans and 50 were summarily executed.

Few could have blamed their devastated comrades for sitting out the remainder of the war. Yet far from being dispirited, a few men began work on a fourth tunnel nicknamed ‘George’, which was kept so secret that only a handful of prisoners knew about it.

Now, for the first time in 66 years, the archaeologists have pinpointed the entrance shaft to Harry after compiling a map of the camp using aerial photography.

‘You have to admire these men,’ said chief archaeologist Dr Tony Pollard. ‘The Germans believed that the deaths of those 50 men would have acted as a deterrent for future escapees. But these men were even more determined.’

With us at the site are two of them: Gordie King, 91, an RAF pilot who operated the pump providing the tunnel with fresh air on the night of the Great Escape, and Frank Stone, 89, a gunner who shared a room with the ‘tunnel king’ Wally Floody, an ex-miner in charge of the digging. They stand, heads bowed, reminiscing about their former colleagues. It is the first time Gordie, who was shot down on his first mission to Bremen in 1942, has returned to the camp since he and the remaining prisoners of war were marched out on January 27, 1945, as Russian forces approached.

‘It has been very emotional,’ he said. ‘It brings back such bittersweet memories. I am amazed by everything they have found.’

A widower with six children, he has vivid memories of working on tunnel Harry, performing guard duty and acting as a ‘penguin’ to disperse the sand excavated from the tunnels, whose entrances were hidden by the huts’ stoves.

They were called penguins because they waddled when they walked.

‘We would put bags around our neck and down our trousers, fill them with excavated sand, then pull a string to release it on to the field where we played soccer, all in a very nonchalant way,’ Gordie said.

‘One of my jobs was to look out of the window at the main gate 24 hours a day and write down how many guards went in and out,’ he recalled. ‘Another was warning watch. If the Germans came into the compound, we would pull the laundry line down and everyone would stop what they were doing and resume normal duties. The guards were not exactly brilliant. They were taken from what we called 4F – not fit for frontline fighting.

I’m thrilled by it all,’ added Frank, who was shot down on his second mission: a bombing raid on Ludwigshafen oil refinery. ‘It’s like a war memorial for me. I don’t want people ever to forget the 50 men who died. The escape was thrilling and exciting but those men paid the price for it.’

Inevitably security tightened after the Great Escape and an inventory was taken by the Germans to gauge the extent of the operation. The roll- call of hidden items is astounding: 4,000 bedboards, 90 double bunk beds, 635 mattresses, 62 tables, 34 chairs, 76 benches, 3,424 towels, 2,000 knives and forks, 1,400 cans of Klim powdered milk, 300 metres of electric wire and 180 metres of rope.

To prevent further escape attempts, the Germans filled in Harry with sand. So effective was the cover-up that when the remaining prisoners wanted to build a memorial for the 50 men who died, the exact site of the tunnel could not be agreed on.

Now, for the first time in 66 years, the archaeologists have pinpointed the entrance shaft to Harry after compiling a map of the camp using aerial photography.

What was most surprising for the team was the structure within the shaft. The bedboards were interlocked to line the tunnel but the sand was so soft that plaster and sandbags were used to prevent it engulfing the tunnel. Amazingly, the ventilation shaft, which was made out of discarded powdered milk tins, was still intact.

Dr Pollard, 46, who co-founded Glasgow University’s Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, said: ‘I was surprised at just how emotional I became when we found Harry. We were the first people to see the tunnel in decades. But it came to a point when we realised we couldn’t progress with the excavation. As soon as you drive a shaft into the sand, it is so soft it starts to collapse. It shows just how skilled those prisoners were.’

After abandoning Harry, the team set their sights on finding the secret fourth tunnel rumoured to have been dug underneath the floorboards in the camp theatre.

Using ground-scanning radar equipment, they found – beneath what would have been seat 13 – the trap door to a space that gave real insight into how the earlier tunnels would have been built.

To the left, between the floor joists, was a storage area for equipment – Klim tins, tools, a trolley and the ventilation pump – and abandoned sand. A few feet away was the entrance to the tunnel shaft, and at its bottom a separate chamber, which archaeologists believe was the radio room.

After abandoning Harry, the team set their sights on finding the secret fourth tunnel rumoured to have been dug underneath the floorboards in the camp theatre.

Down a single step lay the tunnel itself, intricately shored with bed boards, wired for light and equipped with the trademark trolley system used to shift both sand and men quickly and silently through the tunnels. It looked like a miniature railway with trolleys running on tracks linked by rope and pulled along by men at either end.

‘George turned out to be an absolute gem,’ explained Dr Pollard. ‘We found the shaft and excavated the tunnel which ran the entire length of the theatre. It was incredibly well preserved, with timber-lined walls, electrical wiring and homemade junction boxes, and was tall enough to walk through at a stoop. The craftsmanship is phenomenal. You can even see the groove on the top of the manhole cover, where it would swivel and slot into the floorboard above.

‘It was built at a time of heightened security at the camp. It is a fighting tunnel, not an escape tunnel. It was heading for the German compound from where the prisoners hoped to steal weapons and fight their way out.

The men knew the end of the war was nigh and they were playing a dangerous game. To see what most of the prisoners never saw was a real thrill. The Germans obviously discovered Harry but they never had a clue about George.’

The massive collection of artefacts found inside the tunnel included trenching tools; a fat-burning lamp crafted from a Klim tin; solder made from the silver foil of cigarette packets for the wiring system; a belt buckle and briefcase handle from the escapers’ fake uniforms as well as a German gun near hut 104. They also uncovered the axle and wheels from one of the tunnel trolleys, identical to the one used in Harry, and the remains of an air pump; a kind of hand-operated bellows which drew fresh air from the surface down a duct to the tunnel.

But the piece de resistance was a clandestine PoW radio crafted from a biscuit box and cannibalised from two radios smuggled into the camp.

Tunnel vision: A tunnel reconstruction showing the trolley system, tried out by Frank, 89

Frank was instrumental in making the coil for the radio, which he moulded from an old 78 record. ‘I helped with the work on the construction of the radio, doing the soldering and things like that,’ he recalled, ‘cutting out bits of tins and whatever we needed for the equipment.’

Gordie added: ‘I remember one day walking around the camp with a friend when we saw this huge coil of wire. We grabbed it, covered it up with our coats and took it back to the hut. The Germans could not understand where the wire went. Until then we had had to rely on old tins of margarine with a wick in them, made from pyjama cord, to light the tunnel, but they were smoky, used up oxygen and were continually getting knocked out.’

On the night of the Great Escape, 200 prisoners, allocated consecutive numbers, gathered in hut 104 to make their escape, each a few minutes apart. The leaders were dressed in German uniforms or specially tailored civvies and kitted out with maps, compasses and forged documents.

Gordie, who was slot 140, remembers sharing final words with many of the escapers, wishing them luck and complimenting them on ‘their impressive disguises’.

‘It was quite exciting,’ he said. ‘Only the key German-speaking officers, who had a good chance of bluffing their way through, were given documents and civilian uniforms. The rest of us were so-called hard-a**ers, who were expected to get out and run.’

War classic: Steve McQueen on the set of the classic movie, The Great Escape

According to Roger Bushell’s plan, thousands of German soldiers and police would be deployed to hunt the escapers, preventing them from fighting the Allies. But after 76 men had escaped, the remainder were caught leaving the tunnel by German guards. Seventy-three of the men who got away were rounded up over the next few weeks and 23 were returned to the camp. The other 50 were shot in the back of the head by the guards at the side of the road. Only three escapees, Norwegians Per Bergsland and Jens Muller, and Dutch fighter pilot Bram van der Stok, succeeded in reaching safety. Bergsland and Muller got to neutral Sweden and Van der Stok made it to Gibraltar via Holland and France.

‘Afterwards the morale in the camp was very depressed,’ said Frank, tears in his eyes. ‘It was eerie. We had a period of mourning and held a memorial service. People just wandered around the camp quietly.’

‘A mass of doom enveloped the whole camp as so many of us had friends who were shot,’ added Gordie. ‘My close friend Jimmy Wernham, who came from the same town as me, was one of those who didn’t come back.

‘Before he went out, he took his ring off and gave it to his roommate Hap Geddes, who wasn’t going out, and said, “If anything happens to me, I want you to take this ring and give it to my fiancee.” After the war, Hap took the ring back to Dorothy and struck up a relationship with her. He ended up marrying her. He is still alive and living in Canada.’

Frank added: ‘I hope that what has been revealed will remind everybody what we went through and how we met the challenges. It was a privilege to be involved.’

The train jumpers

2011-11-20T19:39:00.006-05:00

This is an exciting sketch of the means of escape quite frequently practiced by Allied prisoners of War while being transferred between prisonner of war camps. The following picture from a train is both graphic and realistic. The jump involves spirit, perfect timing and steady nerves. The German guards must be caught off balance. They may be at the other end of the corridor or perhaps just looking the other way. There may be planned diversion - the guards attention has been diverted either by a German speaker or a commotion in some other part of the carriage. At the given moment the prisoner makes his jump. A comrade chucks his equipement out after him. It will contain some spare clothing, a bit of food, perhaps a map, most likely a home made compass.

What the Allied prisonners of war had to endure while escaping the German Army must have been quite frightening. An allied prisonner escaping knew that if caught by the German army, he would be handed over to the Gestapo for questionning. This soldier, airman or sailor knew that his life would be in the hands of the Gestapo interrogator. He was either subject to torture or hours on end of questionning or both without very little food or water. Very often, if the prisonner survived the intterogation, he would be sent to Colditz castle. No allied prisonner of war wanted to be sent to Colditz, the old castle on a mountain top near Leipzig, Germany, it was cold, damp and practically with no means of escape.

The only thing an Allied prisonner of war wanted to do is escape to the nearest country either to Spain or Switzerland where the Nazi regime was not in place or very neutral and to be able to contact the resistance and be helped back home to England to fight again against the Nazi regime and bring it to it's knees so the Allies could all end the war and return to a normal life once again but escaping from Colditz was probably as hard to escape as to trying to stay alive during the war on a major battlefield. Life at Colditz was miserable for any Allied prisonner of war.

In Flanders Fields / Poème au champ d'honneur

2011-11-11T08:35:00.005-05:00

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead.
Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Poème au champ d'honneur
Au champ d'honneur, les coquelicots
Sont parsemés de lot en lot
Auprès des croix; et dans l'espace
Les alouettes devenues lasses
Mêlent leurs chants au sifflement
Des obusiers.

Nous sommes morts,
Nous qui songions la veille encor'
À nos parents, à nos amis,
C'est nous qui reposons ici,
Au champ d'honneur.

À vous jeunes désabusés,
À vous de porter l'oriflamme
Et de garder au fond de l'âme
Le goût de vivre en liberté.
Acceptez le défi, sinon
Les coquelicots se faneront
Au champ d'honneur.

Larry Carter, RCAF Pilot, KIA

2010-11-15T22:01:00.004-05:00

This amazing story was sent to me by someone that wished to remain anonymous. The link to this story was sent through my tribute to the RCAF email address. I thought that this story of courage, should be posted on my blog. This young man's name is Larry Carter as seen on the Flickr link which can be viewed simply by double clicking on the title, Larry Carter, RCAF Pilot, KIA, above. I would have liked to respond to the person who has sent me this link, to know, if i can make a copy of the Flickr page and post it my my blog? Who ever is the rightful owner of the picture and story, if you have any objections or comments, please let me know! In the mean time, i though that it would be beautiful to post this story of courage and sacrifice by a another truly brave Canadian by the way who trained at the RCAF base in Lachine in which, i have made a previous article on my blog. Thank you Larry for your courage.

Larry was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on January 23, 1924. His father was Roy Cuthbert Carter, and his mother was Josephine Stovel. He was one of the best educated of the crew, having achieved his senior matriculation (grade 12). He enjoyed hockey, football and track. Larry enlisted at Windsor, Ontario, on May 20, 1942. His first station was at #5 Manning Depot in Lachine, Quebec, where he learned military discipline, aviation basics, regulations, history, and navigation. Between courses he engaged in endless drills and weapon-handling exercises.

At #3 Initial Training School, Victoriaville, Quebec, it was found that Larry had the aptitude to be a bomber pilot. He was tested on a LINK flight simulator, which was a grueling test of one’s capabilities.

While attending #11 Elementary Flying Training School at Cap de la Madelaine, Quebec, Larry flew De Havilland Moth and Fairey Fleet training aircraft.

At #5 Special Service Flying School in Brantford, Ontario, Larry trained in Avro Ansons (known as the ‘greenhouse’ because of its wrap-around cockpit).

Larry was awarded his pilot’s badge on January 10, 1943. On October 22, 1943, he embarked from Halifax, and disembarked in Britain on October 30, 1943.

Upon arriving in Britain, he was first stationed at No. 3 Personnel Reception Centre in Bournemouth, Dorset, while waiting for openings to become available at advanced training units.

I’m a little bit sketchy concerning his precise training at 26 Elementary Flying Training School at Theale in Berkshire, RAF Gaydon in Warwickshire, 14 (P) AFU at Ossington in Nottinghamshire and Dallachy, Moray, Scotland.

At 83OTU Peplow, he trained on Wellington bombers, and it was here he was killed on a night training mission, July 22/23, 1944.

The commanding officer at Victoriaville found him to be “… a bright-eyed youngster with excellent Service Spirit. [He is ] very anxious to make good as any part of aircrew. Working very hard. [He] is keen, well-disciplined and should do well as captain of an aircraft”

Larry’s body was recovered from the sea east of Afonwen Junction, Caernarvonshire, on August 4, 1944, and he was buried at Blacon cemetery in Chester, on August 4, 1944

The many behind the few: TV's David Jason takes to the skies in a Second World War Spitfire to pay tribute to the Battle of Britain's heroes...

2010-09-05T09:24:00.008-04:00

During the Battle of Britain, those fighter pilots lucky enough to have dodged the Luftwaffe’s deadly bullets always performed a ritual on their way home.

They would wait until they were flying just above the White Cliffs of Dover – the very symbol of everything they were fighting for – and flip their Spitfire or Hurricane in an exuberant barrel-roll of honour.
It was a kind of ecstatic, airborne dance of victory. Recently, while filming my forthcoming ITV documentary on the Battle of Britain, I got to experience just a little of what they must have felt.
Not only did I get to fly a Spitfire – with the help of a trusting trainer, Carolyn Grace, in the front – but I also got to experience the stomach-tumbling joy of the ritual myself.
That day I had already soared high above the English Channel in a plane steeped in military history.

My Spitfire had flown 300 combat hours during the Second World War and had shot down the first enemy plane during D-Day. It had been mind-blowing to imagine the steel required by pilots to keep their nerve, their course steady and their aim true while bullets flew past them in all directions. But the best was yet to come. As we flew back, Carolyn said: ‘Just imagine, you’re returning home after surviving your latest battle with the Luftwaffe. Now look over there.’ And as I did, I saw the White Cliffs looming majestically up from the sea.
‘Shall we do the barrel-roll?’ she asked. The answer had to be ‘yes’. Carolyn took the controls and we flipped in a glorious double somersault, careening above the cliffs with the magnificence of an eagle.

There are not too many things in life that have reduced me to tears but this was one of them. I felt humbled and so proud of those men who fought for us in our darkest hour. It’s an experience that will never leave me.

For me, the making of a documentary to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain was an intensely personal journey. I was born in February 1940 so I was just six months old as the battle raged overhead.

Our soaring and twirling Spitfire was painting the sky with a hula hoop of happiness...

I grew up in London, a city devastated by the bombing. I am, you might say, a Blitz Baby.

I was too small to remember much about it but all of us alive at that time were shaped by the events of the war. My parents, Arthur and Olwen, were honest, working-class people who raised my brother Arthur, sister June and me with the values of that era – patriotism, stoicism, honesty, concern for your neighbours and judging a man by what he did rather than what he had.
My mum worked as a char when I was growing up and my dad was a fishmonger, but during the war years he had another role, too. He was in the Reserves, a kind of Home Guard.

The stories my father used to tell about his service in that organisation had echoes of Dad’s Army about it. We lived in Finchley, North London, and so he and his compatriots in the local division would plonk themselves on top of the nearby Southgate Gasometer with an ack-ack gun and fire at German bombers as they flew overhead.
The problem was that they never actually had any real bullets because they were all being used in the war effort elsewhere. My dad would come home and say: ‘We could have hit them if we had ammunition!’ It wasn’t funny at the time, although he laughed about it years later when he retold the stories.
Thinking back, he was lucky to survive. Can you imagine if a bomb had hit the gasometer? He would still be flying now. When you look at the large casualty figures – four million British homes destroyed and more than 60,000 British civilians killed in bombing raids during the Second World War, two-thirds of those during the Blitz – we were lucky to survive at all. At home we had an air-raid shelter and we were religious about observing the lights-out rule.

One little chink of light could guide a German bomber in, and that would be it. Even now, the rule is so conditioned in my brain that I’ll never leave a light on in the house unnecessarily and I can get quite grumpy when other people do. Yet still, even with these precautions, everyone in London was vulnerable. One night, a German plane scattered bombs all around us: one landed just up the road on the Gaumont cinema, another in Percy Road, the street next to us, and a third in our road, Lodge Lane.
If the bomb had dropped just 150 yards to the right, I wouldn’t be here today. Years after the war had ended, the scarred landscape of London remained the backdrop of my childhood.
Our gang played on the bombsite that had been left in Lodge Lane, while a rival group played on theirs in Percy Road. When it got close to November 5, we would creep over to the rival bombsite to sabotage the bonfire they had been building. We would try to set fire to theirs, they would try to set fire to ours.

As young lads, around the age of ten, it never occurred to us that these ‘playgrounds’ were created by a bomb and that people must have died there. But now aged 70, I find myself reflecting on the human cost in both civilian and military terms.

We need to remember, for example, that during the war more than 55,000 men in Bomber Command never made it back – 5,000 of those were from Elvington, near York, one of several airfields I visited while making my documentary. Indeed, the life expectancy of a fighter pilot at the height of the battle could be counted in days. And I’ve been thinking not just about the pilots – perhaps the bravest men in the world – but of all the men and women on the ground who helped us defeat the forces of Nazi Germany.

These include the crews who looked after the planes and kept them ready constantly for service. I met Joe Roddis, who had been an 18-year-old flight mechanic in 1940 at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire, now home to the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.

‘Without us, it was no good,’ he said simply. ‘And without them, the pilots, it was even less good.’

Then there was the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, affectionately known as the WAAFs. By 1943, the WAAF’s numbers exceeded 180,000, with more than 2,000 women enlisting every week.

During those dreadful months of the Battle of Britain, from July to October 1940, it was WAAFs such as the redoubtable Hazel Gregory, then aged 19, who worked as ‘plotters’ in radar stations up and down the country. It was their job to map the progress of Luftwaffe planes as they flew towards Britain.

During our interview, I looked into Hazel’s eyes as we sat together 60ft below ground in a bunker in Uxbridge that had been the Fighter Command centre for London and the South East.

‘Did you ever worry that the Germans would succeed?’ I asked her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘There was tremendous spirit and nobody thought for a single moment that we wouldn’t win.’ What better example of the Blitz spirit could you ever encounter?

And let’s not forget the Royal Observer Corps, a band of unarmed civilians stationed at hundreds of observation posts all over the country. While filming, I went to the wartime location of one such post, codenamed Sugar Three. There I met Dennis Bates and John Elgar Winney, two of the 30,000-strong army of volunteers who had spied on the skies through binoculars. ‘What we could do that the radar couldn’t was to tell what type of aircraft were coming, how many there were and what direction they were flying in,’ Dennis told me. They would call this intelligence through on a crackling GPO line to their own HQ, which then alerted Fighter Command, which would scramble Spitfires and Hurricanes.

‘The Observer Corps were vital in the Battle of Britain,’ John added. ‘Without us it could not have been won.’ The most important lesson, then, to emerge from the making of the documentary was that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to so many people. As Terry Kane, another of the veteran fighter pilots I was privileged enough to meet, explained: ‘It wasn’t just the pilots who won the Battle of Britain. In many senses, it was the whole country.’

If Britain had not come together at that time, as it did, to defeat theNazis, none of us would have lived the kind of life that we have been able to live, or had the kind of freedoms I know that I have certainly enjoyed.

So the documentary became not just about those brave fighter pilots immortalised in Winston Churchill’s post-Battle of Britain victory speech in which he said: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

It was also a tribute to the ‘many’ behind the ‘few’: the unsung heroes of the Battle of Britain. Most importantly, I wanted to reveal the human face behind the history lesson, although, of course, the history itself is important.

War had been declared in 1939 and by the end of June 1940 the German jackboot went right through most of Europe, including France and Poland, and it was also well on its way to Russia. Britain was next on Hitler’s hit-list and by August 1940, German invasion barges were assembling on the French coast.

However, they could not set sail until the Luftwaffe had wiped out the RAF, both in the air and on the ground. We didn't feel brave, we just got on with it

It was essential that the RAF prevailed because it was the only thing standing between freedom and the Nazis, and if it had capitulated we would have been annihilated.

Yet we were horrendously outnumbered – 4,000 German bombers and fighters massed against just 600 RAF fighters.

‘But the question of being outnumbered didn’t come into it because you were always outnumbered,’ said Paul Farnes, who was a 21-year-old Hurricane pilot in 501 Squadron at the time. ‘But we had one big advantage: we were fighting over our own country and so we knew all too well what we were fighting for.’

Unwisely, Hitler had not reckoned on the indomitability of the British spirit and the men and women of the RAF. His generals had told him it would be easy, but even after attempting to destroy our airfields before turning his attention to cities such as London, Aberdeen, Bristol, Coventry and Hull, still we would not yield.

Hitler was left scratching his head over his force’s inability to defeat us. In the end, I suppose he said: ‘OK, we’ll come back to that later’ which was a big mistake because he never got to do that. The Battle of Britain was not just a defining moment in our nation’s history, it was also the absolute turning point in a war that ultimately saw the Nazis defeated.

But I also wanted to take a closer look at the men and the machines – the pilots and the planes – that gave the Luftwaffe such a run for their money in 1940. I’ve always had such tremendous respect for the men who fought in the Battle of Britain and I am a patron of the RAF Benevolent Fund.

I also have a pilot’s licence myself, although in my case, until I flew the Spitfire, I had only ever flown helicopters. I got my licence in 2005 after my wife Gill bought me a flying lesson as a birthday present.

I found myself so completely hooked on flying that I was determined to get the necessary qualifications. A couple of years ago, I bought my own helicopter, a Robinson R44. I use it occasion-ally to fly myself to sets where I am filming or to business meetings.

From Buckinghamshire, where I live, I’ll fly for an hour to Norwich, perhaps, or to the south coast. But I never fly more than that. It’s more than enough in terms of the mental workload because it takes a lot of concentration. So I’m lost in admiration at the way our pilots were able to fly up to six sorties a day. And they did it without any of the mod-cons that pilots have today. They would have been alone and freezing cold, heading towards an enemy that had only one objective in mind. It was a shoot-or-be-shot situation. It would have taken nerves of steel. During my visit to RAF Coningsby, I was shown the oldest airworthy Spit-fire in the world. It is the only one still flying today that fought in the Battle of Britain. A team of proud fitters showed me the workings of this magnificent plane, including its eight guns.

Each was loaded with 350 bullets, which seems impressive but this gave the pilots only 12 to 14 seconds of fire-power, after which they had to come back to base to reload before going out again.

‘Ninety-seven per cent of the bullets missed. We were very bad shots,’ Tom Riley, another of the veteran fighter pilots, recalled with a smile. ‘But the only thing to do was to get as close as you could to the bloke in front. If you could almost touch him you could probably hit him.’

Like so many of the pilots, Tom had been heartbreak-ingly young at the time that he risked all for his country. He was just 19 when he flew his first Battle of Britain mission. The average age of fighter pilots was 22.

Amazingly, the pilot in command of one of the squadrons that bombed Dresden later in the war was only 24.It’s difficult to imagine young men in their early 20s these days being able to stand so much responsibility.

But, perhaps, if the enemy was at our door, as it was then, they would find the courage.Back in 1939 these young men had joined the RAF as volunteers and learned to fly in Tiger Moths, but with the outbreak of war they were called upon to defend our skies in Spitfires and Hurricanes against the Messerschmitts and Dorniers.

It was not what they had signed up for and so, in that sense, their lives were not given for this country but taken by it, because no fool ever actively wants to go to war.And yet they discovered such tremendous heroism and tenacity within themselves, although they would never dream of boasting about their own achievements.

‘I don’t think anybody felt particularly brave,’ former Hurricane pilot Paul Farnes said. ‘It was what we had been trained for. It was our job and we just got on and did it.’During my interviews, I wanted to find out what – aside from luck – separated those who survived from those who died.

According to Bill Green, a fighter pilot with 501 Squadron who flew 29 missions himself before being gunned down and baling out, it was the exhausted and the inexperienced pilots who were first to be shot down.

‘Most of the casualties were inexperienced pilots joining the squadron one day and being shot down the next,’ he told me. ‘The ones who stayed alive usually had a great deal of experience.’

Paul Farnes added: ‘The really good pilots all had a sixth sense. They didn’t need to look round to see where the danger was – they felt it instinctively and dodged the bullets.

‘Those who had intuition survived and those who didn’t got shot down, I’m afraid. It was brutal.’

At RAF Hawkinge, now the Kent Battle of Britain Museum, I saw just how brutal things were for myself. The museum still holds the remains of 650 crashed aircraft – a propeller from a German Dornier 17 is riddled with bullets, showing just how many shots it must have taken to bring down such an aircraft. But while our planes did fall, the British spirit never faltered, and in its own way, life went on. People still fell in love, babies were still born, and the young still tried to enjoy themselves.

For example, after working at Fighter Command at Uxbridge, Hazel Gregory would travel into London to go dancing. Was she worried about the bombers, I wondered. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘We were young and we wanted to have fun.’So in the midst of it all she wanted what probably every ordinary young woman wanted at the time: to meet a good-looking pilot or soldier and have an innocent dance.

They all wanted to forget about the worries of the war for an evening and just have a good time. Again, I felt totally moved by what she told me.There is an emotional thread that runs through the documentary – the same emotional thread that still binds us and tugs at us 70 years after the events of that fateful period.
We are still fascinated by that time – by the Second World War in general and the Battle of Britain in particular – because it was our finest hour. And it was the spirit of the men and women just like Hazel and all the fighter pilots and those who ensured that they could keep on flying that made it so.
Flying high above the White Cliffs of Dover at the end of the documentary, the soaring, twirling Spitfire painting the sky with a hula hoop of happiness seemed to embody the very spirit of those brave men and women and of the Battle of Britain itself.

After the barrel-roll of victory, I retook the controls and we headed homewards.‘You certainly know how to affect a man’s heart!’ I told Carolyn.

And, oh, how she did.

David Jason: Battle Of Britain will be shown on ITV1 on September 12 at 7pm. Albert’s Memorial, a drama about Second World War veterans in which David Jason stars, will be shown on the same evening at 9pm.

Veterans gather on clifftop to celebrate 70th anniversary of Battle of Britain

2010-07-12T08:01:00.000-04:00

Veterans who took part in the Battle of Britain gathered on a clifftop in blazing sunshine today at an event to mark 70 years since the start of the historic conflict. Around 5,000 people attended the open air service at the Battle of Britain memorial at Capel-le-Ferne near Dover, Kent. As well as the ceremony, which included the Act of Remembrance and wreath-laying, there were flypasts by a Spitfire and Lancaster bomber and a parade involving veterans and current air cadets.

A Hurricane was unable to fly due to technical problems. The event was attended by Prince Michael of Kent, who took the salute, along with the RAF's most senior figure, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton. 'There's been a complete mixture of people here, young and old, lots of families, aircraft enthusiasts,' spokesman Malcolm Triggs said of the annual event was the biggest memorial day yet.

'It's particularly important for youngsters to understand the history and to see the veterans here and be able to get an idea of the bravery they showed. 'This anniversary is a very significant event,' he added. He said 19 veterans were in attendance, with some of them taking part in the parade. During the summer of 1940, nearly 3,000 British and Allied airmen took on the Luftwaffe and ended up preventing a German invasion of England.

Then prime minister Winston Churchill famously said of their actions: 'Never was so much owed by so many to so few.' Officially the conflict took part between July 10, 1940 and 31 October that year, when the Luftwaffe called off bombing raids due to mounting losses and bad weather. A total of 544 British and Allied airmen lost their lives during the period. It is thought that only about 100 of the veterans who took part in the battle survive. "LEST WE NEVER FORGET"

A call to reason for the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster

2010-06-20T08:12:00.014-04:00

I wanted to post on my blog a call to reason! Something to the South of us in The United States is troubling me very much! It is the Oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Our Father's and Grandfather's have won many wars againts tyrants such as Hitler, Mussolini and people who wanted to rule the world without a democracy!! I think that this oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is like a war and we are not winning it right now! This spill is gushing millions of gallons of oil, methane and a lot of garbage that is killing wildlife and marshes and destroying the lives of thousands of fishermen, people related to the tourist industry in the United States and many more other working class people. This is all very sad!

BP and the American Government must do everything in their power to stop this oil spill before it gains the Gulf Stream and heads out to the Atlantic Ocean. This oil spill has already done enough damage and is now affecting the livelihood of people in Louisisana, Alabama, Florida and will eventually stream North with the Oceans current! I don't even want to think if there is a major hurricane in the Gulf although scientists and the people of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predict that this hurricane season could be one of the worst on records due to the Gulf water and the Atlantic ocean being warmer than normal due to the oil absorbing the heat of the sun rays in the ocean.

I always like to talk of our veterans and all of their great accomplisments and history but this is oil spill is too important not to mention to the world through my blog and the way i feel about this disaster! This oil spill will go down in history as being humanities worst man made disaster!

Please, help in any way you can!! Please donate to an accredited Wildlife funds, I have posted on my blog a logo of the National Wildlife Federation on the top left side, all you need to do is click on the logo to be re-directed to the National Wildlife federation to help maintain the eco system of the Gulf of Mexico and the wildlife. There are other sites where you can donate to help the people of The Gulf, write to your member of Parliament if you are in Canada or the United Kingdom, write to your senetor if you live in America and tell them that this spill must be stopped urgently because it is killing the Wildlife in the Gulf and destroying the Eco system of the Gulf of Mexico and destroying the people's lives.

You can contribute to Gulf Aid Acadiana. Gulf Aid Acadiana was founded by three friends with the help and support of many other friends. Singer-songwriter Zachary Richard is recognized for his committment to environmental and cultural causes. Author of 18 albums in both French and English, as well as several collections of poetry, he is best known for his efforts to promote the French language and Cajun culture of Louisiana. Their link is

http://gulfaidacadiana.org/

I wish i could help in the Gulf as a volunteer but being here in Canada is impossible for me! At least, if i can do anything through my blog, it will already be a step for me in the right direction. Our veterans have helped win World Wars and bring peace againts tyranny and madmen but this is another kind of war that we all must participate in so we can win it! For the people of the Gulf, for the wildlife and this beautiful planet EARTH that we all live on!

God bless you all and let's win this war in the Gulf like our veterans did! It is urgent and the Gulf of Mexico is being polluted by the minute and will take generations as of today to bring it back to it's original state so every hour and every minute counts! This is very urgent!

Thank you for your help and your call to reason in this sad situation in the Gulf of Mexico. Let's win this war once and for all and let's do it fast!

A forgotten Spitfire hero

2010-04-13T21:31:00.014-04:00

As a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, John Mejor risked his life for his country, England. He went on to devote his working life to conservation, helping to preserve the nation’s heritage and landscape.

But in his hour of need, when he might have expected something in return, the state he gave so much to has forgotten him. The 88-year-old grandfather, who requires round-the-clock nursing at a home because of dementia and diabetes, has had the funding for his care withdrawn despite the advice of his GP.
His family now fear they will have to sell the house where his 94-year-old wife Cecile lives to cover the care home costs. On Thursday his daughter Sally Mejor, 54, said: ‘My father made great sacrifices for his country, he is a war hero and deserves better than this. I feel totally let down and hurt that he has been treated in this way.

Sally Mejor with father John Mejor, 88, is being forced to sell his house after the NHS withdrew full funding for his care.

‘It is a complete nightmare, a disgrace and an insult. He was, and still is, a very dignified man.’

Mr Mejor was moved from his house in Exmouth, Devon, to a care home 18 months ago because his family could no longer look after him following a series of mini-strokes.

At first his NHS Trust paid the £800-aweek costs at the nearby Linksway Care Home under its ‘continuing health care’ scheme. Mr Mejor was eligible for the scheme, which is not means tested, because of the assessment of his GP.
But now his health needs have been reviewed by a different doctor acting for the trust. Officials say he is no longer considered a ‘severe’ case and will only receive £106 per week towards his care.
Miss Mejor, however, says her father’s condition has not improved and his GP does not agree with the findings.

Miss Mejor, who lives at the family home in Exmouth as her mother’s full-time carer, said: ‘I cared for him myself for the first five years of his illness and if I could manage to continue I would. At no point was it said there would be any timeframe or, that should his condition improve, even slightly, it would be pulled from us.
‘If there was plenty of money to cover it, I would be willing and happy to pay. But because there isn’t, I have to stand up for him.’

Mr Mejor was born in Belgium but moved to Britain as a young boy and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery in the war. During a mission over Malta in 1942, in which he shot down German bombers, he was forced to bale out over the sea after his plane was hit – but returned to battle the very next day.

His last operational flight was on D-Day, and after the war he rose to the rank of wing commander, in charge of a squadron of Vampire fighters. He retired in 1964 and set up the Devon Conservation Forum and the Devon Historic Buildings Trust.

Mr Mejor flew a Spitfire like this one above in the Second World War during the battle for Malta

Miss Mejor said: ‘What worries me is the money we are going to have to find for his care is going to have an effect on my mother’s life.

‘I’m fearful for her future, too, because we’re going to have to sell this house and she very much wanted to spend the rest of her life here.’

The family could apply for the NHS to pay for the residential care, but this is means tested and it is highly likely they would be unsuccessful. A health care source said that because Mr Mejor’s health was thought to have improved, extra funding would be an issue of social care – such as help with washing and dressing – rather than health care. This would make it a matter for the local authority, not the NHS.
On Thursday NHS Devon said the cost of Mr Mejor’s care would still be covered while an appeal was heard. This could take several months.

Parveen Brown, who is responsible for continuing health care funding at NHS Devon, said: ‘There is no question of funding being suddenly cut off, or of houses having to be sold abruptly.

‘We deal with these issues as sensitively as we can and we will offer our support throughout.’

Means test rules in England state that anybody who has been assessed as ineligible for nursing care must pay for residential care if they have assets worth more than £23,000. Last month it was revealed that at least 3,000 elderly people a year are forced to sell their homes to pay for residential care. There are fears that cash-strapped health trusts will use public spending cuts as an excuse to reduce funding further in England.

South Normay-April 12, 1940 by Fl/Lt. M.W Donaldson, Royal Air Force

2010-04-11T10:33:00.001-04:00

This is the account of a bomber pilot whose bombers formation attacked and sank the German cruiser "Karlsruhe" Flight Lieutenant Donaldson who is a Canadian flying with The Royal Air Force, hails from Lethbridge, Alberta, held a short term pre-war comission in the R.A.F.

This is a day i shall not forget in a hurry as it landed in Gafangenenschaft where i have resided. I was in a night bomber squadron, but owing to the invasion of Norway and our almost complete lack of long range day bombers we were called up to operate in daylight.

A German heavy cruiser (later identified as the Karlsruhe) had been damaged in the early morning hours by our Navy, but owing to heavy seas and bad visibility had made good escape. We were ordered to locate and destroy her. After a sticky trip across the North Sea the 12 of us arrived over the south coast of Norway and opening up into a wide view of sanctions commenced a sweep. I was a little worried about our formation as operating over ennemy territory with heavy and consequently slow aircraft, we ran every chance of meeting fighters. However we carried on and after two hours sweeping we sighted our quarry lying in Kristiansand harbour. "What very shortly proved to be a very costly mistake was made here as our leader ordered us into sections astern, aircraft astern which presented a long line of single bombers to the ennemy, any one of which could be engaged without assistance from another, and it also cut down our firepower to a bare minimum.

Opening the bomb doors we fused our bombs and commenced our run up. The picture is and will be clear in my mind; a cloudless sky, height 12,000 feet, airspeed 180 miles per hour, the cruiser appearing as a small gray silver of steel dashing headlong for the open sea and a pumping up of A.A. for all she was worth. Leading the last section of three, i was just coming onto the target when low and behold enemy fighters, six Messerschmiths 109's. Needless to say they attacked my section and in less time than it takes to put in writing my No.3 airman was shot down in flames and all hands were sadly lost. My No.2 and i managed to weather the storm, ran up, bomded, and as i did a turn to the west saw a direct hit scored just forward of my funnel. But i had very little time to observe as i was unable to catch up to the rest of my formation owing to the increased speed and the heavy and accurate attacks of the ennemy.

Being completely unable to hold them off, having neither the speed nor the firepower i came down to sea level, that at least protected our belly. The two of us had only just arrived there and got properly formed up with No.2 and simply exploded in mid-air in a mass of flames and in the twinkling of an eye had dissappeared forever under the cold gray surface of the sea. I was just about to throw in the towel then and there as with all my section except myself shot down, one of my gunners killed, the rest of us all hit and bullets and cannon shells simply raining in from all directions, we were a gone goose. But one dosen't surrender in the air and fight on we did.

After about three-quarters of an hour of concentrated hell my starboard engine took fire and i was forced to turn north and try to make the Norwegian coast. On the run in, the Jerries figuring we were cold meat threw caution to the winds and attacked relentleely right up to 20 yards. It was a bad mistake on their part as we still had a certain sting in the for of two Vickers K's. By simply heroic work my remaining rear gunner bounced three of them in quick succession with the result the remainder held off to a more respectable distance. Just as we were approching the shore, a well placed burst brought us crashing down in flames in the sea. By the grace of God and a lot of luck, we in the aircraft who were alive as we were shot down all emerged alive and kicking from what had a few seconds before been an aircraft.

Well there it is Jerry, you will no doubt think it is just one big moan--probably it is, but one does hate like hell to be as throughly thrashed as we were and have practically no means of fighting back but let me tell you the war is not over for me. I will continue fighting to my last breath!

The WW2 RAF poster boy now aged 91

2010-03-28T21:05:00.004-04:00

The dashing young airman who became the poster boy of the RAF during World War II has been revealed – 65 year after the conflict ended.

Squadron Leader Ian Blair, now 91, was 22 years old when the famous snap was taken in 1940 after his daring flying in north Africa earned him a medal.

But he didn’t realise his fame until two years later when, on a break in Bournemouth, he saw his face on a propaganda notice warning 'Careless Talk May Cost His Life'.

Flying ace: Squadron Leader Ian Blair with the classic World War II poster he unwittingly posed for at age 22

The poster, aimed at raising morale on the Home Front and spreading vital educational messages, was one of the most enduring images of the war.

Last week, a recently unearthed stash of mint condition pictures sold at auction for more than £25,000 after attracting bids from around the world.

Mr Blair, from Brentwood, Essex, who was born the year the RAF was formed, yesterday told of the moment in 1942 when he first saw the poster.

He said: ‘I wasn't even aware that it had been produced. The photo had been taken two years earlier, in North Africa, when I was a 22-year-old corporal.

‘I didn't think anything more of it, and then all of a sudden, there I was, hanging on the wall of a post office.’

In the famous image, Mr Blair is smiling in his airman's kit as if he hadn't a care in the world.

But just the day before, the former air ace of 113 Squadron had saved himself and a comrade with an act of bravery that won him the coveted Distinguished Flying Medal.

Dashing: Mr Blair was pictured in north Africa in 1940 after earning the Distinguished Flying Medal for bravery

He said: ‘I look cheerful in the photo. I always look cheerful. But it doesn't tell you the true story - the full picture.

‘The day before, we had been sent out to bomb an enemy airfield at Derna, about 400 miles west of Alexandria.

‘We were in a Blenheim bomber, and I was the observer. That's the guy in the front who does the navigation and drops the bombs.

‘But as soon as I had released the bombs, a fighter-plane attacked us.’ Glasgow-born Sqn Ldr Blair still has the blood-stained flight log he made that day. The pencil entries end suddenly.

He said: ‘There was an almighty bang. When I looked round, the pilot - a chap called Reynolds - was slumped forward on the controls.

Hero: Mr Blair with his medals on his dress uniform

‘I think it was the very last round that killed him. It was really unfortunate. His luck had run out.

‘Then the aircraft went into a steep dive.’

Despite having never flown an aircraft in his life before that moment, the young airman - paid one shilling and sixpence per day extra to fill in as part-time air crew - took charge.

He said: ‘From that moment the only thing going through my mind was survival. Everything happened so quickly, and we had to get the heck out of there.

‘I managed to pull the pilot's body off his seat and get the aircraft under control. But we still had to get home and land the thing.

‘My gunner, Hank, sent a message back to base saying: “We're in dire trouble here, the observer is flying the aircraft.”

‘Lo and behold, when we got back to base there was whole gallery of people, cars, ambulances and fire tenders all lined up waiting for the ultimate - but it didn't happen.

‘I had spent a long time watching pilots, and made a textbook landing. We came down in a shower of dust.

‘Perhaps I was a bit over-confident. The air officer commanding the base apparently said: “If that guy can fly an aircraft without a pilot's course, let's send him on a pilot's course.”’

He was presented with his DFM by George VI.

Mr Blair, who joined the RAF as a boy entrant apprentice aged 16 in 1934, went on to fly Spitfires against the Luftwaffe, and was shot down twice before the war ended.

He said: ‘They say that if you walk away from a landing, it's a good landing.

‘I spent 11 months in hospital after one crash but the strangest effect was psychological.

‘Each aircraft has its own smell. After the incident in the Blenheim, I couldn't bear the smell of Blenheims. It was the same after I was shot down in a Spitfire.

‘The quack prescribed a daily glass of milk with three drops of iodine. My friends were quite envious because nobody else got milk.’

Iconic: The well-known propoganda poster was among a selection recently sold for £25,000 at auction

After the war he served in Singapore and Malta and retired from the RAF in 1977, having served for 44 years.

He was an honoured guest at the RAF's 90th birthday celebrations two years ago, where he was introduced to the Queen.

Today, he says his thoughts are with British servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said: ‘I know how difficult it is on the ground with Improvised Explosive Devices. The sense of the unknown must have a terrible effect on their morale.

‘You can't compare the two eras though. Back in my day we never had enough equipment. The finances were always a problem. There was never enough money for anything.

‘The trouble with the politicians was that they wanted the Forces to do too much with not enough people.

‘What really impresses me nowadays is the computerisation. The mind boggles.

‘When I was a navigator, we had to work out our courses laboriously. Now you just press a button.’

In his tenth decade, Mr Blair - who had four children with his late wife, Vera, and has ten grandchildren and two great grandchildren - shows no sign of slowing down.

He regularly tours the country giving PowerPoint presentations to schools and veteran's associations on his wartime experiences.

He said: ‘I can't leap into a Spitfire with careless abandon as I used to in my younger days. But I do enjoy sitting in flight simulators.

‘I have always been interested in flying. My first flight was when I was ten. I paid three shillings to go up with my hero, pilot Sir Alan Cobham.

‘And at Sir Alan Cobham's flying circus I met WE Johns, who wrote the Biggles books.

‘Were the books true to life? Not really. Well, perhaps to some degree.’

Looking for Spitfire/Typhoon veteran pilot Eric FTS Cooke RCAF

2010-02-14T15:10:00.000-05:00

Looking for Spitfire/Typhoon veteran pilot Eric FTS Cooke RCAF of King City, Ontario, Canada

Greetings to all in cyberworld.

A gentleman wrote to me from England who was in Royal Air Force in World War 2 and is looking for a good friend of his who was in The Royal Canadian Air Force. This veteran has a letter dating back to 1987 ..he was 60 years old that year. Eric Cooke is from KING CITY, Ontario...Eric Cooke served in the RCAF During the war. They were very good friends and they joined the service together...I was RAF. We met up in London during the war, 1944, 1945. Eric Cooke flew spitfires and Typhoons in Europe.....we met again in cambridge England, both were married by this time......I did speak with him by phone once...but no contact since...his wife BERNICE....children I know not.... Eric Cooke worked for the local government E.M.O. for 12 years.....I am 83 years of age and would like to hear again of my very good friend Eric Cooke.

If anyone in cyberworld has ever heard of Mr. Eric Cooke or knows where we can find him, be friends or family, can you please let us know. This gentleman looking for his good friend is Mr. Ray wade who was in the Royal Air Force Navigation school during the war.

Any news what so ever would be truly appreciated for this World War 2 British RAF veteran. If ever, i can help two veterans meet again after all these years will be an honour and a very gratifying experience for me because our veterans need all the recognition they deserve.

Thank you to you Mr.Wade and to Mr.Cooke.

A Great World War 2 movie,The Battle of Britain 1969

2010-01-24T16:38:00.007-05:00

A Great World War 2 movie, The Battle of Britain 1969

Hello to all!

I dont know, if you are like myself but i do like to watch once in a while World War 2 movies, especially the ones that are more historically accurate. The 1969 movie, The Battle of Britain, i think is one of those great World War 2 classics! The reason that i wanted to write about this movie classic, that i am posting today on my blog is to try to help people understand and know what World War 2 history was like! I want to continue to help the world as best as i can about World War 2 history and also of it's consequences, this is the reason, i have created my blog about the Royal Canadian Air Force, The Royal Air Force and all of the other Air Forces of World War 2 and of our soldiers and seamen. I would like people to know what their fathers and Grandfathers accomplished during the war and of all their courage in the air, at sea and on the ground, so we do not forget their sacrifice!

There are other great World War 2 movies, i could write about such as Dark Blue World and Nine O'Clock high. but today, i will talk about this great classic, The Battle of Britain! With a string of career actors such as Christopher Plummer (Canadian fighter pilot), many Canadian fighter pilots flew for the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Michael Caine (as squadron leader Canfield) , Trevor Howard (Air Marshall Keith Park), Laurence Oliver whom by the way gives an extraordianary role as (Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding) and Robert Shaw ( as an unnamed Squadron Leader, referred to as "Skipper") The actors who play German pilots and personel also play a very good role! We must not forget the very good Polish and Checkoslovakia pilots who flew for the RAF during the Battle of Britain.You will get to see the determination of the German Luftwaffe for the control of the skies over The English Channel and Britain. The movie is directed by Guy Hamilton. This movie is a great Historical reenactment of the air war in the early days of World War Two for control of the skies over Britain in the summer and fall of 1940 as the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force determine whether or not an invasion of Britain can take place.

It is in the month of August 1940, Adolf Hitler is planning to bomb England into submission to his dreams of a 'Fortress Europe'. Standing between Britain's freedom and Hitler's terrifying plans is the R.A.F - dedicated RAF and Commonwealth including Canadian pilots who took to the skies again & again in the face of overwhelming odds. The German Luftwaffe's planes outnumber the R.A.F's by more than 2 to 1 - 650 planes of the R.A.F. vs. 2,500 of the Luftwaffe! These odds. however, do not deplete the determination of the R.A.F. to stop Hitler, and as the Luftwaffe launches wave after wave of Heinkel 111 bombers against British cities, the R.A.F. responds, under the leadership of Air Vice Marshal Park and Squadron Leaders Canfield and Harvey who lead the newest pilots of the R.A.F. into confrontation after confrontation with the Luftwaffe's experienced veterans, with the aim of driving Hitler's forces away from Dover's white cliffs for good...and back to occupied France.

This movie is very accurate and if you want to have a good history lesson with great actors, this movie will remind you of all of the great sacrifice our veterans have done for us so we can be free today! This movie is highly accurate and one of the reason being is that while filming the movie, many veterans such as Douglas Bader (RAF), Adolf Gallant(Luftwaffe) and other veterans of the Commonwealth and Luftwaffe were consultants for the movie. This was done so because it was important that the movie be done of the greatest accuracy! I have included three of the DVD covers so if ever you want to buy or rent the movie, you will recognise the DVD or Blue Ray cover. I hope you will enjoy this movie as much as i did and let's all take a moment to thank a veteran when we see one! We owe our veterans all of our freedom for if ever Britain fell to Germany, the war most likely would have been lost by the Allies for we would have lost the only soil that we had as a footstep to Europe! Don't forget D-Day was launched from Britain on it's southern coast to invade France and to help free Europe.

Let's not forget to thank all of our veterans past and present when we meet one!

Canada and the world we love!

2010-01-17T00:15:00.002-05:00

Canada and the world we love!

Hello to eveyone in cyberworld. Welcome to the year 2010. I wish you health, peace, hope and happiness. If you are living in the western world, chances are that you are doing fairly well? I sure hope so! Like i said in my previous blog, 2009 has been a tough year and many people have lost their jobs and because of this, hardship follows for a while? Here in Canada, times can be tough sometimes for us but we can always have help from many private or governmental organisations. We, Canadians are known to be tough and how to get out of hardships, this is what makes us strong and united!

In the wake of the massive earthquake in Haiti, my heart goes out to the people of this little island in the Caribbean ocean. I do not want to mention all of what they are going through. All you need to do is open your television and we are bombarded with all the information that we need to know! There is so much suffering and death that the images we see on CNN and all the other news medias are reminiscent of a horrible war scene. In Haiti, this is not war, it is famine on an unimaginable scale, misery and grief. We should be all so greatful not to be living under those horrific circumstances. So sad!

Today, while watching the news, i have heard that our first Canadian military personal have arrived in Port au Prince to bring relief to these wonderful Haitian people. Canada doesen't like to abandon people in need and this is reminiscent of our history! In any time of need, our people are there! Soldiers, policemen, firemen, engineers, doctors and so on! We are not there to conquor but to help. We are there to help and once it is time to leave, if the goverment in place asks us to stay, we will stay to continue helping the people in need of that country! We help our fellow human beings! I hope that what ever can be done by yourselves, finacially or in any other way, please do so, we can all help, even by givin the Haitian people a little prayer from the heart, because somehow we can be of help to this people in need!

During two World Wars, the Korean war, the United Nations peace missions, Canadians have givin their lives and their youths because we have stood on guard for thee and we still do so today in Afghanistan and other places in the world! This is why, i am proud of my country! Canada is not perfect but we are all human beings and as long as our Canadian hearts stand on guard for thee, this will always make me proud to be a Canadian and am i proud of our past and present accomplishmets to our country and the world!

Please, help the people in need of Haiti. What ever little deed is done, their prayers will be answered!

Here a few reliable links, where donations can be made to help the people of Haiti

http://www.worldvision.ca/Pages/Home.aspx

http://www.oxfam.ca/

Thank you!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2010

2009-12-18T17:36:00.004-05:00

Greetings to all!

It has been a pleasure for me this year to bring to the world, stories of the RCAF and our veterans and of World War 2 events. Although, i have not done as much as i would have liked in 2009 on my blog, i will do my best in the year 2010 to bring you more interesting stories of our fascinating history! 2009 has been a year mixed with emotions all over the globe. Unfortunatelly, there are still wars, we would think by now that humanity would have learned that wars don't bring nothing good to mankind. The climate is of major concern as we are seeing more and more frequent freak storms and different weather patterns all over the globe. How can i not mention the H1N1 virus and the economy that seems to be under the bad spell of the H1N1 virus and cant seem to find a cure for it's well being! It's been a crazy year but things will work out just fine! As long as there is life, there is hope!

When i think of the sacrifice our veterans, past and present have givin us, we must not forget that somewhere, we also must make a sacrifice and do an effort to make this a better world! No matter, how big or small our contribution is! We can make a difference! PEACE AND HOPE, HOPE TO ALL ON EARTH!

Lets keep the faith in 2010 and lets all turn things around for the better!

My thoughts go out to eveyone in the Cyberworld that read my blog and that have sent me nice words through the year, It was really nice hearing from you and please keep those nice emails coming my way, everyone, including our veternas past and present every human being, all over the globe!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New year 2010

PEACE

Behind Enemy Lines in North Africa

2009-12-13T11:13:00.009-05:00

This is the true story of Lieutenant, Dick Jones, General list.

Webmaster comment: Although this story is not of the RCAF, i do have an interest also for the WW2 North African desert campaign.

In November 1941 I accidenttally parachuted into Tunisia on my way to Tripoli. The Vichy bagged me almost immediately and i was internet at Layhouat (Algeria). From there i escaped in 1942 and was again recaptured. This time i was charged for espionage and sentenced to twenty years hard labour. Despite the efforts of the American counsul, the authorities interned me in a civil prison.

In November, 1942 (by then the Americans had landed in North Africa, i escaped from prison during a revolt.

In quick time we managed to assmble part of our old organisation, obtain some money, a wireless and other necessary tools of our trade. My orders from Malta were to stay in Tunis and gain information.

After three months, i was ordered to cross through the lines and proceed to Algers. My compagnion on the journey was to be a French doctor who had been in Goal for Gaulisme (The Vichy didn't like the Gauliste)

We left Tunis at 11:30 a.m. on the 23rd February, 1943. Our conveyance was a Jewish supply lorry ferrying material to the front. A short distance from Djonzzar (Pont du Fahs) we hopped off the lorry and made into the woods. We changed into Arab dress.

By now it was 2:30 in the afternoon. A five hours walk took us the the front line. It was now dark. We oriented ourselves by the gun fire.

Everything was going well when we were captured by Arabs. Undoubtedly they intented to rob us. As we had several million francs in our possesion it would have not been a bad haul. Happily, i speak Arabic fluently. After a two hours delay we managed to convince them as we were just simple travellers and should be allowed to proceed on our journey. The snag was that while we were past the Arabs, we had lost our two valuable hours of darkness before the moon came up. This meant that we had to pass through German lines in moonlight.

We went on. At Shraa, a German patrol of three soldiers discovered us. We were in "No Man's Land". We tried to withdraw. They fired half a dozen shots in our direction. I asked my friend- "Coggia! Are yout hit?"

"No," he answered.

We pretended we were dead. When the Germans were about three yards from us we instinctively fired from our "Parabellums" (small Italian revolvers we had brought from Tunis). Then all hell broke loose. This small German patrol was supported by a fighting patrol of about 50 men. My compagnion was killed. The three Germans were killed. I was wounded in the leg. I was taken prisonner by the Afrika Korps.

At their headquarters, a German officer demanded my identity. "Dick Jones" He wouldn't believe it. At the time the Gestapo had a price on my head. The officer insisted that he knew Dick Jones quite well and that i was not him. Prospects did not look too bright, captured as i was in Arab dress with a wireless.

On arrival at Berlin i was handed over to the Gestapo. Then began a tour of German Gestapo prisons for the next thirteen months.

Repeatdedly the Germans promised to grant me P.O.W, recognition as a British officer. Eventually, i got fed up and started my hunger strike againts the schocking treatement i found myself put to.

September 20th, 1944 was a great day. I walked through the gates of Oflag IVC. At long last i was with civilized people Allied soldiers, airmen and sailors as a prisoner of war.

Mackenzie King's speech somewhere in Britain August, 1941

2009-12-06T22:19:00.007-05:00

This is a speech Makenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada declared somewhere in England on August,20th, 1941. This article is taken from The Telegraph, Journal of Saint John, New Brunswick dated Thursday August 21, 1941

Canada is with you The Empire "Heart and soul for winning the war" Prime Minister Makenzie King declared tonight. Asked for a statement before boarding a train for London the prime minister, who arrived here by plane from Canada today, told reporters: "Please tell Great Britain that Canada is with the Empire heart and soul for winning the war and will not spare any effort that is necessary to ensure victory."

Mr. King also thanked the British people for their hospitality to Canadian servicemen and women. "This friendship will strengthen the strong ties existing between Britain and Canada and help us, in the future to develop the cultural, material and economic exchanges necessary to the welfare of both countries" he said.

They shall not grow old - Beautiful High Flight Poem by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee

2009-08-30T08:11:00.000-04:00

PER ARDUA AD ASTRA

Oh! I have slipped the surely bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings:

Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds-and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. How'ring there

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind - swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor eagle flew,
And while with silent lifting mind i've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space
Put out my hand and touched the face of God,

Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee
Royal Canadian Air Force

This is such a beautiful poem writen by an American airman who flew for the RCAF and was killed in the Second World War. I loved it so much that i wanted to share this beautiful poem with the world!
May we never forget their courage and what all of our veterans past and present have done and are doing for us now!

Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee P/O(P) J5823 From Washington, D.C U.S.A. was killed Dec.. 11/41 age 19 #412 Falcon Squadron (Promtusad Vindictum) P/O Magee was killed when his Spitfire aircraft # AD291collided with an Oxford aircraft and crashed at Ruskington Hall, Ruskington, Lincolnshire. P/O Magee was born in Shanghai, China and was educated in Rugby, England and Avon, Connecticut, U.S.A. he is the author of the poem High Flight the original manuscript of which resides in the Unitted States in
the Library of Congress, Pilot officer Magee is buried in the Scopwick Church burial ground, Scopwick, Lincolshire, England.

Taken from the book - They shall never grow old! May we not forget them!

THANK YOU!

RAF Group Captain Douglas R.S. Bader, DSO & BAR - DFC & BAR

2009-08-11T23:59:00.000-04:00

Reproduced from THE LONDON NEWS 1942

Britains legendary "Ace of Aces" who commanded the Canadian Squadron in the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Back in December 1931 an air crash cost him both his legs. The "experts" said he could never hope to walk on artificial limbs without crutches. Six months after the accident he walked out of hospital on "tin legs" -- without sticks.

His career with the RAF was finished. Again the "experts" were wrong. They had said he would never fly again.

On the outbreak of the war he stormed the Air Mnistry until they took him back. He inspired, bold and dashing leadership of his squadron during the battle of Britain will never dim his memory.

Then came an air collision with a German fighter during a sweep over the Continent. That was October 1941.

After escaping from German prison camps three times he was sent to Coldits.

Such is his personality that it is impossible to think of him as a "cripple". He isn't. Tennis is one of the games. "stool ball" and hockey found him in the goal. As a concession he was permitted "parole walks". No matter how inclement or cold the weather he would walk up to 10 kilometers. When food got short he always smuggled in several pounds of wheat traded from the farmers in special sacks about his legs. This would be distributed among the camp.

"Wings" Bader typifies a trait common to all British - no matter the odds, they stay in there punching.

This is a beautiful article that was published in the London news in 1942. For some reason, i love couragous Men and Women like Douglas Bader and all veterans of past and present. They signify courage and i truly admire them. Douglas Bader died in 1982 but his memory lives on the hearts and minds of all those who truly understand the courage and sacrife of our veterans.

Thank you Douglas!

Vintage Wings of Canada Open House Air Show 2009

2009-06-07T09:37:00.070-04:00

Vintage Wings of Canada Air Show 2009, June 6, 2009

Greetings to all aviation lovers!

I wanted to share with you some beautiful pictures that i have taken of the Vintange wings of Canada Open House Air Show, 2009 in Gatineau, Québec. The Air Show was absolutely beautiful, well organised and very enjoyable. It was absolutely pure fun to see these all these beautiful birds fly! I wanted to thank all of the people at Vintage Wings of Canada that were so very friendly and cortious! You have a very beautiful hanger with very beautiful airplanes. It was very enjoyable to meet World War two veterans and all the friendly people that share the same passion as i do, World War 2 airplanes and the vintage ones from the golden age of aviation! I really enjoyed seeing The Curtis P40 Warhawk, the P51 Mustang and all of the beautiful World War 2 airplanes. They are all so very beautiful!

Vintage Wings of Canada celebrates Canada's aviation heritage and inspire Canadians with the most powerful stories of the heroes, aircraft and events that make up this legacy. To do this, they acquire the finest airworthy examples of important aircraft in Canadian aviation history.

I would like to share with you The Vintage Wings of Canada web site that celebrate the Centenial of Canadian aviation.

http://www.vintagewings.ca/page?s=63&lang=en-CA

Again, Thank you to all at Vintage Wings of Canada for this Wonderful experience at the Vintage Wings open house Air Show!

We will be looking foward to the next Open House on September 19, 2009

The Amazing George Beurling

2009-06-01T22:41:00.004-04:00

The Amazing George Frederick Beurling. The Falcon of Malta.

What more can be said about George Beurling that has not been said or written? He was liked, he was disliked by some of his superiors and fellow pilots. I would like to give my own opinion to all, that's if you don't mind? Not the opinion of historians and scholars but my own opinion on George "Buzz" Beurling! He was a heck of a pilot and when i come to think of it, i am so glad he was on our side! (The Allies, that is!) The aircraft he mostly flew in World War 2 was the Spitfire MK. VC. He had a grace to manoeuvre an airplane quite like no other fighter pilot but George unfortunatelly died at the young age of 27 years old. During World War 2 George was shot down four times and was injured but made it through his injuries. This is quite amazing that he lived through the four crashes! The way he handled an airplane was quite dangerous and couragous at the same time. George had a very good eyesight and his manoeuvres were quite, if not incredible and judged by many to be lunatic and crazy! I think he simply did his manoeuvres out of shear courage and many airmen were envious of his amazing stunts and couragagous manoeuvres. He did this for the war effort, so the allies could win the war. I believe he risked his life doing all those crazy stunts for our freedom! Mind you that when falling out of the sky on a roll and gaining control of your aircraft at the very last moment requires quite a bit of skill and courage but these stunts did out manoeuvre the ennemy on many occasions. His stunts and manoeuvres, he did them at his own risk because he was couragous and knew that it could make him crash and be killed! Everyone knows George Beurling was born in Verdun, Québec, Canada. Everyone knows that George Beurling did not always follow orders and was somewhat of a rebel in the Air Force. Everyone knows he would leave his squadron on combat missions to knock the heck out of the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica (Italian Air Force) with 32 kills over Malta and George came to be known as screwball Beurling for all his amazing war stunts over Malta and the Mediterranean.

Earned World War 2 awards to George Beurling, The distinguished service order, The Distinguished flying cross, The Distinguished flying medal and bar. Quite an accomplishment for a World War 2 Canadian RCAF pilot!

George was given an honorable discharge from the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1944.

Many in the RCAF and RAF did not like George Beurling because he did not always follow the orders of his officers. I agree that we must, in life follow the orders of our superiors. This goes for the average Joe like myself. But after all the amazing feats and courage he achieved over Malta in 1942, i still believe George Beurling is a true Canadian war hero. George Beurling is buried in Haifa, Israel because he wanted to fly for the Israeli Air Force after World War 2 but he never made it alive to Israel. When i think that no one claimed his body at the time of his death kind of makes me sad! His body was not claimed for three months after the time of his death in Italy in 1948 when his Norseman aircraft crashed on take off killing himself and WW2 United States RAF volunteer veteran Leonard Cohen. George Beurling was buried in Italy until 1950 and then his remains were transfered to Israel in 1950.

George wanted to fly for the Israeli Air Force because when i think of it, he couldn't live without the rush of combat. I have heard that there is some kind of adrenaline rush that goes through your body while you are in combat that is so hard to replace once the battle is over and can become addictive? This is probably what happened to George Beurling, he wanted to fly for Israel to protect the Israeli territory and to get that rush of adrenaline he would not get in civilian life? This is my assumption? I have heard that no one claimed his body when he died in May, 1948, not his family? Although, i am very sceptic about this information that no one in his family claimed his body when he died? Not the Canadian Gouverment either? How can this be when you are a National war hero here in Canada? George flew for the RCAF and RAF. If i were living in 1948 and would have known that George Beurling were dead, i would have been the first Canadian to want to have this war hero buried in our Canadian soil. What ever the case may be, this is only known to history?

I am very happy to let you know there is the George Beurling Academy in Verdun, Québec and the Beurling park and also Beurling boulevard, in Verdun, Québec . I don't know if there is any other monument or street named after him in Verdun? What ever the case maybe, i live in the Montréal area and will some time this summer get pictures and information from Verdun, Québec to post on my blog. Pictures of where George lived, his neighbouhood, his city and the park named after him. Please stay tuned because, hopefully i will have some interresting pictures and stories to share about our great Canadian War hero, George ''Buzz'' Beurling sometime this summer.

Click on the link below to see the George Beurling avenue and parc in Verdun, Québec on Google earth.

http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ei=cyUjSvzvFdqJtgfsiKD9DQ&resnum=0&q=beurling%20boulevard%2C%20verdun&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl

If there are any pictures or stories or opinions you would like to share about this amazing World War 2 Canadian war hero, please let me know and i will gladly post it on my blog!

Thank you George for your courage and efforts you have given us! Rest in Peace George.

More tributes to RCAF and RAF pilots will be done in the future. Stay posted for more great historical stories of our heroes to follow!

In Their Memory-RCAF Supermarine Stranraer #935

2009-05-09T23:59:00.000-04:00

In Their Memory - RCAF Supermarine Stranraer #935

Greetings to all

As you might know, this is an opened WW2 RCAF, RAF blog. This means that anyone wanting to post a story of a loved one or of someone missing in action during the Second World War is more than welcomed to let me know and i will gladly post it on my blog.

Here is the story of a Supermarine Stranraer that crashed in British Columbia 1943 and we are looking for anyone who can help us find relatives or acquaitances of the airmen that crashed on RCAF Supermarine Stranraer serial number 935 on Febuary 14, 1943.

Please do not hesitate to write if you have any informations what so ever on this historical event!
Thank you very much,

Lucky Luke

Told by Shirley Gilmour Santini. My father, Joseph Orr Gilmour was born in Glasgow, Scotland on Oct 6, 1904. He emigrated to Toronto Canada with his parents when he was in his twenties. I believe he was a metal worker by trade and employed by a bus company as a mechanic. When Canada became involved in the second World War in 1939, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force on Oct 17, 1939 in Vancouver, BC. He married my mother Mary Veronica Mulvihill in 1931, in Vancouver and my sister Patricia was born in Sept 1932, I, Shirley Gilmour Santini arrived in August of 1936.

When my Dad was stationed with the RCAF in Trenton, Ontario in 1939, we travelled by train to join him and live in that area, until 1941 when he was once again Stationed at Jericho Beach, Vancouver, BC. in/on or about 1943? From there his next and final station was Alliford Bay, BC. on the Queen Charlotte Islands. He was attached to #6 Bomber Reconnaissance Squadron flying "coastal watch" missions.

**Only recently we discovered the following info. Mother passed away in 1991 and was not in possession of any of Dads military records***"On February 14, 1943 the RCAF Canadian Vickers Stranraer serial number 935 crashed in Skidgate Channel between Maude and Leading Islands at position 53.12N and 132.92W.

""The crew had been on a training flight when they attempted a landing. Due to gusty conditions, the Stranraer bounced a number of times with each bounce getting more severe. The aircraft nosed under and the 4 depth charges on board exploded, killing all 5 crew members and one RCAF passenger, (total 6 men).

In the winter months the waters in that area can be extremely choppy with huge swells and the conditions are often worsened by dense fog. It has been difficult to obtain information regarding the "flying accident" and the records I requested and received had been on microfishe and had not copied well, making it very difficult to read. Many of the pages had many details blacked out line by line.

In the past 5 years I have met with and become a member of AWON - American War Orphans Network and have heard their stories of their loved ones lost in WW II. Through these wonderful people, most of whom are WWII kids, many have found the gravesites of their parent and visited National Cemetaries in many countries. I am not aware of any Canadian counterpart to AWON but the assistance offered to the American members is so helpful. Many of them never knew their fathers. I am fortunate in being able to remember my father, as he was 39 at the time of his death. My sister was 10 years old and I was 6. My memories of him are very vivid--always in uniform and so often we were saying good bye, when he was leaving again. In those days we made many trips to the train stations as all of my Uncles were in the service and being sent overseas.

On February 14, 1943 the Crew Members who gave the Ultimate Sacrafice along with my father were:

Pilot J13672 Pilot Officer Donald Stuart MacLennan of Montreal, QuebecSecond Pilot J13697

Pilot Officer Lorne Gregory Thompson from Chance Harbour, St. John County, New Brunswick

Wireless Air Gunner (W A G) J13153 Pilot Officer Frederick William McConkey from Calgary, Alberta

Airframe Mechanic - R50522 Sergeant Joseph Orr Gilmour from Vancouver, British Columbia (MY FATHER).Aero Engine Mechanic - R94622

Corporal John Paul Sperling from Chamberlain Saskatchewan.

Passenger was C3378 Flight Lieutenant Charles William Thomas Field (RCAF Accounting Officer). He was originally from Chicago, Illinois. USA.

I am looking for any type of information anyone has, reference this accident, or can help me get in touch with any of the families of these men.

Looking for anyone who knew of my father during that time?

The bodies of these men were never recovered to our knowledge due to the "conditions" in that area. The Official paper work read "killed" as a result of a "flying accident--body not recovered presumed dead". This info was given to my mother in a letter dated May 21, 1943 from the Wing Commander H.J. Winny Dads, first station I believe was Trenton Ontario 10-21-1939 until 1940.

We lived at 65 Queen Street, Trenton Ont.Rank of CPL was made on 12-12-1941 RCAF Station, Vancouver BC Jericho Beach -

VancouverRank of SGT. was made on 4-4-1942.

Assigned to Alliford Bay Station on 10-21-1942. Squadron 6

Thank you so much.

Looking for information RCAF Manning depot Lachine, Québec, Canada

2009-05-05T23:54:00.016-04:00

Greetings to all!

I am looking for information about the Royal Canadian Air Force Manning depot in Lachine, Québec, Canada.

Would anyone have any information on the RCAF manning depot in Lachine? This depot was used as a training station for WW2 RCAF, RAF, RAAF aviators in Lachine, Québec, Canada. The base was in service for training wireless air gunners, (WAG'S) radio operators and navigators from 1942 to 1959. It would be very interresting, if you could possibly share any stories that you might have, pictures or any other experiences what so ever from that era about the manning depot in Lachine! I do wish to keep the history of the RCAF manning depot alive and you folks could possibly help me! There is nothing left of the base today, but maybe, with your help i can keep history alive for future generations to come through your pictures, relics and stories!

You can email me at: oxygen2060@yahaoo.ca with any information what so ever that you might have, it would be greatly appreciated.

The depot was unfortunatelly demolished in the 1960's and early 1970's. Lachine is my hometown where i grew up. I still can remember some of the hangers from the depot as a young boy. Many of the men that were trained at the manning depot have died in Europe in the Second World war or are still missing in action to this day and this is the least i can do for their memory! Many people in Lachine, the Province of Québec and Canada don't even know there was an RCAF base in Lachine, training aviators to fight for our freedom in these perilous times of fear for our freedom during the Second World War!

If you can possibly help me on this matter i would be very greatful!

Thank you very much for your help!

Lucky Luke

Sea Rescue FL/Lt. Cenek Chalupka-RAF

2009-05-04T23:57:00.001-04:00

This is the true story of a Czechoslovakian officer in the Royal Air Force in 1941.

Four hurricanes flying low on the water, skimmed over the English Channel bound for Belgium. It was somewhere near twelve, midday, on the 29th August, 1941, a lovely war day with a soft haze cutting down on our visibility. We carried assorted armament between us. Two of the "Kites" with 12 machine guns each, one with four cannons and one, myself with two 150lbs bombs.

We crossed the coast with no opposition from hostile flak and wheeling left soon picked up a canal which we were to follow inland for some twenty miles before reaching our target, a concentration of German flak ships in some small harbour.

The unexpected always occurs, however! Some miles before reaching our objective we came over a single flak ship in the canal. Immediately the C.O's voice came over the radio: "Attack...Attack...Go..!

Down we went one after another, myself with the eggs last. I pressed the button and down went a bomb scoring a hit on the flak ship. Contrary to expectations however the bomb burst immediately instead of the usual seven second delay before detonation which enables the aircraft to reach a safe distance before the explosion. My aircraft rocked violently in the explosion and i caught the sound of the false note of the engine. I reported this to the C.O. and duly received instructions to join the formation and continue to the target.

Soon the harbour and six falk ships appeared and in we went once again to the attack. After a fast and furious engagement we pulled away and headed for the coast. Things were going from bad to worst, howeveer, with my engine and with my speed down to 140 m.p.h. It was decidedly unpleasant when a heavy barrage opened up at us as we crossed the coast. The old "Hurribus" staggered on until some thirty miles from the English coast the inevitable happened. Smoke and fire began to come uf from the cockpit floor.

I did not waste much time in pulling onto my back and dropping out of the aircraft. My parachute had hardly opened when i hit the water. Down and down i went swallowing most of the English channel before reaching the surface again. My C.O. was circling overhead and sending back my position by wireless as i got into the collasible dinghy. A little later two spitfires were overhead patrolling. Two and a half hour later, by means of a smoke flame dropped by the Spitfires, i was picked up by an R.A.F. sea rescue boat and taken to Ramsgate in nice time to a celebration party that night.

"Cheko" (A regular Czechoslovakian Airforce officer) joined the Polish Air Force after Munich, after the French and then the to RAF after France. In each case, he rose from the ranks to commissioned rank. He was decorated by most governments for his war efforts.

The true story of a WW2 RCAF hero Mr. Kenneth Landers

2009-03-28T00:10:00.001-04:00

Mr. Landers is a very nice man that i happen to know and admire. Although, i do not see and speak to him often enough due to the distance that seperates us, i still admire him for his courage that he has demonstrated during the Second World War and i would like to share the story of his imprisonment during the war, the year was 1945. Mr. Landers was a Flight Lieutenant and navigator with the Snowy Owl Squadron #420 from 1942 to 1945.

On the evening of January 5, 1945, Halifax bombers of the RCAF were dispatched from Yorkshire, England to Hanover, Germany, laden with 4000 lbs of incendiaries which were to be dropped on the target between 19:30 and 19:40 hours.

Flying officer Ken Landers was a navigator on one of the bombers. At 19:37 hours, while on the bombing run, his aircraft was attacked by a Junkers 88 night Fighter and struck three times. On the third attack, both port engines became inflamed causing the pilot to order the crew to "abandon aircraft". We bailed out, landing a few minutes later in the city of Hanover as the civilians were coming out of their bomb shelters. I was immediately attacked by the throng, suffering several blows and having my dog tags, watch etc, stolen. In the mindst of the beating, a Gestapo officer appeared and took me away. He was joined by three Home Guardsmen and they proceeded to take me to a jail in the town of Wanstorff, a suburd of Hanover. I learned later that four of my crew were listed as missing in action, they were never found and two others were captures.

While proceeding to the jail that night, the Lancaster bombers attacked Hanover at 21:30 hours, bombing the fires from their ealier raids with blockbuster bombs. The Gestapo agent and guards became very excited and beat me unmercifully with their weapons during the latter raid, which could be seen and heard befind us.

I was jailed that evening and the next morning, along with eight other allied airmen we began a two day forced march at times and sometimes in railcars to Frankfurt at the "DU LAG LUFT" Air interrogation centre. During this time, we were shackled and monitered by Home Guards. As we went through cities, we were stoned and verbally abused by German civilians and certainly were fearful of our lives.

On arriving at the interrogation Centre, i was put in solitary confinement for eight nights and seven days. On the eight day, i was ushered into a major's office and a two hour question period began, i was in real rough shape - i had hardly eaten for ten days and my face and head were bloodied from my beating. Amazingly, the major knew the names of my crew, my RCAF Station, where i lived in Canada, the name of my fiance and that of my two brothers who were in the Air Force, among other data. I had not givin any information to the Germans other than my name, rank and serial number and i was dumb-founded at the interrogator's knowledge!

When i would not answer any of his questions concerning muilitary matters, he informed me that since i had no I.D. he would have to inform his superiors that i was a spy and therefore could expect to receive a spy's sentance - -death at sunrise.

The next morning, i along with some 40 other Air Crew prisoners, many American, were lined up. We all expected to be shot! However, we were marched across the city to a prisoner of war reception area, run by the International Red Cross. What a relief to have a shower and food!!!

After four days there, some 100 of us spent five days-marching, in box cars, etc.. Travelling some 300 miles to Stalag Luft One in Barth, Pomerania, where i was imprisoned until liberated by the Russian army on May 3rd, 1945. I was finally able to enjoy my freedom and i was able to return to England on May 13, 1945....

This is the TRUE STORY OF A TRUE HERO. Thank you Mr. Landers for what you have done for our FREEDOM. Men and Women like yourself will never be forgotten for generations to come! Thank you Mr. Landers and God bless yourself and your loving family!

Newspaper articles from 1941-The Telegraph journal

2008-12-28T10:46:00.013-05:00

Newspaper articles from 1941-The Telegraph journal

Greetings to all!

After a very tumultious year 2008, we are nearing it's end! Today is December 28, 2008. I am very saddened to hear that more Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan have lost their lives! We will remember you all! As for the economy things are not very good! But this was to happen, there is so much greed on wall street and in the business world that i am not surprised!! Greed rules, unfortunatelly!

Man will never learn of his past mistakes! Such a shame!

I have found some interesting articles that i came across on an old newspaper of mine that i wanted to share with you! These articles are from The Telegraph journal and is from Saint John's, New Brunswick and is dated Wednesday September 10, 1941

Germany Warns all ships in war zones subject to atttack. (Please note that America lost Merchantships to the Kriegsmarine and was not yet at war with Germany until December 7, 1941 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.)

(Berlin, Sept 9 A.P) The Germans warned again tonight that all ships in the Axis-declared war zones are subject to attack "regarless of nationality" and indicated that either an Italian or German plane sank the American freighter Steel Seafarer in the Red Sea Friday night.

A spokeman said, however, that "it is beyond discussion that there should be any general order to attack American ships."

Since the Red Sea has long been considered a war zone by the Axis, he said, no one should be surprised that the steel Seafarer was sunk there. He pointed out that the 5,819 ton vessel was lost while en route to Suez, pressuably with lend-lease supplies for the British forces.

Emphasising the activity of Axis bombers in the Red Sea area the high command claimed today the sinking of a 7,000 ton tanker and the damaging of five other large merchantmen in a sunday night raid on shipping over Suez Gulf and Roadstead.
_____________________

Here is another article from The Telegraph Journal and his dated September 6, 1941.

German Planes raid Scotland. Article by Drew Middleton. (Associated Press)

(London. Sept 5)Several German planes attacking eastern Scotland today inflicted a small number of casualities and some damage, and one of the bombers crashed, killing it's crew of four, the Air Ministry annouced tonight. A report from one village said a Nazi bomber machine-gunned the streets where children were plawing but that none was injured. In the only British offensive action the ministry said two German tankers were attacked off the continental coast last night. Clouds of smoke were seen to rise from one of the ships. A factory at La Pallice, France was also bombed.

I hope you enjoy reading these events that happened so long ago! I want to share them with you because this is an interresting part of history that must never be forgotten. Thank you for reading my blog!

In memory of our lost soldiers of today!

2008-12-05T19:18:00.006-05:00

In memory of our lost soldiers of today!

Greetings to all!

I was reading the news today and i came across the sad news that Canada has again lost three brave soldiers to the Talibans.

The soldiers are from left to right on the picture, corporal Mark Robert McLaren, Officer Robert John Wilson and soldier Demetrios Diplaros.

The soldiers were patrolling the district of Arghandab in Afghanistan when there armored vehicule drove over a mine. The three soldiers were based in Petawawa, Ontario.

It is very sad news everytime a Canadian soldier or a soldier of the coalition dies or is injured in the course of action.

I would like to say thank you and God bless you soldiers and the members of your family!

THANK YOU

PLEASE HELP SAVE WW2 447 WING'S 'H' HUT IN MOUNT HOPE,ONTARIO

2008-11-11T23:59:00.001-05:00

GREETINGS TO ALL...

I HAVE COME ACROSS AN ARTICLE FROM THE CANADIAN NEWSPAPER GLOBE AND MAIL THAT MADE ME REACT IN URGENCY! DUE TO THE LACK OF FUNDS RCAF WING HUT 447 WILL HAVE TO CLOSE DOWN IN EARLY TO MID 2009. I CAN NOT BELIEVE THIS! BEING A WW2 RCAF HISTORIAN, IT IS WITH URGENCY THAT I ASK ANYONE WHO READS THIS ARTICLE TO CONTACT THEIR MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT IN OTTAWA TO KEEP THE 447 WINGS HUT OPENED WITH FUNDS NEEDED TO KEEP IT GOING IN OPERATIONS. I CAN NOT BELIEVE THAT OUR CANADIAN GOVERMENT WILL NOT KEEP THIS HISTORICAL TREASURE OPENED FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS. THERE ARE SO MANY SOUVENIRS ON THIS FORMER RCAF BASE THAT WE MUST ACT WITH URGENCY. THIS HUT IS A PART OF OUR COUNTRY AND IT SHOULD STAY FOR MANY GENERATIONS TO COME!

I WANT TO THANK EVERYONE FROM MOHAWK COLLEGE FOR THEIR HELP!

PLEASE HELP ME DO SOMETHING FOR OUR VETERANS IN THIS EMERGENCY. LIKE SOMEONE SAID, HISTORY IS BEING SWEPT UNDER THE CARPET ” IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HONOUR OUR VETERANS, YOU DON'T BRING THEM OUT REMEMBRANCE DAY, THEN JAM BACK INTO THE CLOSET. YOU KEEP THEIR HISTORY ALIVE. HERE IT IS, RIGHT IN THIS BUILDING.”

PLEASE WRITE TO YOUR MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT AND IF I CAN BE OF ANY ASSISTANCE PLEASE EMAIL ME AT

oxygen2060@yahoo.ca

LINK TO YOUR MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT IN OTTAWA:

http://webinfo.parl.gc.ca/MembersOfParliament/MainMPsCompleteList.aspx?TimePeriod=Current&Language=E

PLEASE LET'S ALL DO SOMETHING TO SAVE 447 WING H HUT.

Here is the link to The Globe and Mail article

Operating on a wing and a prayer

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081107.whut08/BNStory/Front/

THANK YOU AND DON'T FORGET THIS BUILDING IS PART OF OUR CANADIAN HERITAGE!

IF I CAN BE OF ANY ASSSITANCE, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!

ACT NOW!

THANK YOU!

A simple Thank you from the heart for Remembrance day

2008-11-09T13:04:00.013-05:00

A simple Thank you from the heart for remembrance day.

Were can i start, what can i say that has not been said to our veterans. How we love dearly, how we care and that i must say Thank you. You have givin us hope to look for tomorrow. All the tears that are shed for a loved one who has givin it all for our freedom! What can i say, there are no words to say but Thank you. It is not enough, i feel, when one dies of old age, my heart has sorrow that i know a part of our history is slipping away. I will not hear again of your brave courage you have givin to me and to all of us! How we care for thee, to the Canadian veterans of all wars and of our allied friends!

We must say Thank you, that you are not forgotten, and when your trumpets of eternity will call you home because of a long life that you have kept inside of sorrow and grief and nightmares of loosing friends that were like your brothers on the battlefields of the world, we must say thank you.

God Bless you all for what you have done to thee, giving us our freedom for a beautiful and bright tomorrow!

The RAF bomber pilot who single-handedly recovered the body of the co-pilot and comrade he lost on Berlin raid 60 years ago

2008-11-05T22:18:00.004-05:00

The RAF bomber pilot who single-handedly recovered the body of the co-pilot and comrade he lost on Berlin raid 60 years ago

Hero: Former Pilot Officer Reg Wilson who found the body of a former comrade killed when their plane was shot down 60 years ago
Crammed together in their unwieldy aircraft and utterly dependent on one another, the bomber crews of the Second World War forged friendships that often only death could break.
Which is why Pilot Officer Reg Wilson never forgot the night more than 60 years ago when he lost two friends in the night skies over Germany.
As he entered his old age - the memories of his youth perhaps more powerful than ever - Mr Wilson began a quest to find their remains.
Yesterday he told how at last he had succeeded in finding one of those friends, flight engineer Sergeant John Bremner, and finally laying him to rest.
Sergeant Bremner will be buried with full honours at the Heerstrasse War Cemetery in Berlin next Thursday.
'It's only right that John is honoured,' said Mr Wilson, of Chigwell, Essex.
'Thousands of good men, like John, lost their lives. It must not be forgotten. It will be an emotional, but happy, day.'
Sergeant Bremner died aged 21 on the night of January 20, 1944, when 800 aircraft raided the German capital.
Among the 27 aircraft lost was Halifax LW337 from 102 Squadron based at RAF Pocklington near York.
The aircraft - nicknamed Old Flo by her eight-man crew - was heading for home when she was hit by anti-aircraft fire.

Long search: Pilot Officer Wilson and Sergeant John Bremner

Woodland hunt: Reg with wife Barbara in the woods in Koepenick, Germany, where the plane was discovered 60 years after it went down
Another survivor from Old Flo, rear-gunner Sergeant John Bushell, 84, said: 'It burst into flames from wing tip to wing tip.
'I was thrown out after hitting my head on a gun. I came to in free-fall and managed to pull the chute.'
Both he and pilot Mr Wilson, along with bomber aimer Flying Officer Laurie Underwood, now 86, and pilot Flying Officer George Griffiths survived and became prisoners of war.

A Halifax bomber like the one shot down as it approached Berlin 60 years ago
The bodies of second pilot Sergeant Kenneth Stanbridge and wireless operator Pilot Officer Eric Church were buried after the war.
But Sergeant Bremner and gunner Warrant Officer Charles Dupueis were never found.
Mr Wilson, 85, a former management consultant, began his search for answers in 2005 when he travelled to Berlin with his daughter, Janet Hughes, 46, who speaks fluent German.
They met local historians and witnesses and the next year, he returned and found the wreckage with the help of a team of volunteers using metal detectors.

War heroes: George 'Gag' Griffiths and Sergeant Kenneth Stanbridge

Reg shows off some of the debris from the crashed Halifax bomber
Final confirmation that the remains belonged to Sergeant Bremner, of Elswich, Northumberland, arrived after a DNA sample was taken from his sister Marjorie, 89, who will also attend his burial.
Mr Underwood, of Wetherby, West Yorkshire, is too ill to go and Mr Griffiths died in 1998.
A Royal British Legion spokesman said Mr Wilson's quest 'spoke of the searing and life-long impact of service in the armed services. People don't put away their war memories easily.'

Survivors: Sergeant John Bushell and Flying Officer Laurie Underwood
Some 55,500 young men of Bomber Command died during the war.
Last night Mr Bushell, of Oakley, Bedfordshire, added: 'My abiding memory of John is singing our hearts out together at a piano bar in York. He was a war hero who gave his life for his country.'

Former RAF Rear Gunner John Bushell holding his Prisoner Of War ID Card which he took from the prison office when he was freed

I remember Sam Estwick

2008-09-21T21:34:00.009-04:00

During the First World War, patriotic black Canadians lined up to join the armed forces but weren’t allowed to enlist. In 1916, the Second Construction Battalion out of Pictou, Nova Scotia was formed, the first black battalion in Canadian history. They were responsible for crucial work building bridges, digging trenches and clearing roads. In the Second World War, black Canadians tried to enlist again. This time, men like Sam Estwick were allowed to join.Served: As a Leading Aircraftman in the Second World WarSam Estwick immigrated to Canada from Barbados at the age of four and his family settled in Glace Bay, N.S. When war broke out, Mr. Estwick heard the Air Force was looking for fighter pilots. But when he showed up in Halifax to enlist, the officers at the recruiting office wouldn’t take him. “What do you mean? There’s a war,” Mr. Estwick said. “We can’t trust a black pilot,” they told him.Top-secret radar work: Rejected by the Halifax recruiting station, Mr. Estwick went home and wrote a letter to his MP who brought the issue up in Parliament. Still, nothing changed. But his high-school diploma and strong academic record showed he was just what the Air Force was looking for in its top-secret radar program.

Thousands of radar technicians were trained and sent around the world to serve on aircraft, ships and air strips. Mr. Estwick was the top of his class in radar school at Clinton, Ont. He was sent overseas in December 1942.Why he joined: Mr. Estwick will never forget what his church minister said to him when he won a school award the age of 14. “He said to me, ‘That goes to prove that a young lad of your colour can be as good as any other colour.’” Mr. Estwick also remembers meeting members of the Second Construction Battalion from the First World War.

“My family was from Barbados so we had a very strong allegiance to the British,” Mr. Estwick said. “Everyone would say how handsome they all looked in uniform.”The longest layover of his life: After advanced training in England, Mr. Estwick was assigned to duty in India by ship, with a 10-day layover in Durban, South Africa. Despite the red maple leaf sewn onto his uniform, Mr. Estwick was continuously denied entry into the local restaurants. One night when he and a group of his radar buddies went into a bar, a beefy bartender ordered Mr. Estwick out. Mr. Estwick was only 5-foot-7 but he had a reputation as a feisty boxer with an attitude. He was ready to fight the bartender when a British commando stepped in. “He said: ‘Hold on, Canada. He’s too big. That guy’s more my size. Let me do it.’” Mr. Estwick recalled. “And he took the guy down.”

Service to honour WWII RAF airmen

2008-09-21T07:33:00.001-04:00

RAF pilots who defeated the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain are being remembered at a thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey.
Veterans and their families are attending, along with the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall and Defence Secretary Des Browne.
The service marks the 68th anniversary of the battle that cost 544 airmen.
It was these crewmen Winston Churchill referred to in his phrase "never was so much owed by so many to so few".
Fly-past
The service is also being attended by Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy.
After the ceremony, the Prince of Wales, who is patron of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association, and the Duchess were due to meet former aircrew members.
Four Tornado F3s were also taking part in a fly-past over Westminster Abbey.
The defeat of Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe by the RAF's Hurricane and Spitfire pilots came at a cost of more than 1,000 fighter planes.

Veteran reunited with lost medals

2008-09-20T22:37:00.002-04:00

Veteran reunited with lost medals

Mr Brown lost his medals as he boarded a boat using his walking frame
A 93-year-old veteran of the Dunkirk evacuation has been reunited with war medals after they were recovered by scuba divers from the River Thames.
Charles Brown lost two rows of medals last Sunday as he boarded a boat during the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships cruise from Kingston to Weybridge.
Mr Brown said he was "emotional" about the medals which included an OBE, a Dunkirk and Normandy campaign medal.
Divers from Teddington Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) found them.
Scuba divers began their fingertip search near Kingston Bridge at about 1100 BST on Saturday.

Last week attempts to recover the medals with magnets proved unsuccessful.
Mr Brown lost the medals from the breast pocket of his jacket as he used his walking frame to board a boat near Kingston Bridge.
On hearing about the recovery Mr Brown, who is originally from Southwark in south London, came to the riverside from his care home in Woking, Surrey.
He said: "I do get a bit emotional because these medals meant so much to me. I wasn't a celebrity, a pop singer or a cricketer, these medals were what I was proud of.
"I'm not going to be celebrating with cream cakes or anything like that, just having the medals back is enough for me."
Poor visibility
Malcolm Miatt, operations manager at Teddington RNLI, said: "It was a fingertip search on a grid pattern. I wasn't sure that we'd find the medals because they have been down there all week."
RNLI's helmsman and experienced scuba diver Jean-Pierre Trenque, who led the dive, said: "It was quite dark but surprisingly we had probably half a metre visibility in there.
"I literally just went in the water, straight down the wall, we had good datum where the medals had been dropped and I didn't think they would have drifted too much."
Mr Brown, who joined the army as a volunteer in 1939, was a tank transporter and fought a rear guard defence at Dunkirk.
He was one of the last off the beach during the evacuation.

Guy Gibson and the Dambusters remembered 65 years on

2008-05-16T23:59:00.000-04:00

May 16th, 2008 a service and fly-past has been held to mark the 65th anniversary of the World War II Dambusters mission.
A Lancaster bomber flew three times over Derwent Reservoir in Derbyshire, which was used by the original pilots to train ahead of their famous raid.
In 1943, the RAF's 617 Squadron set out to destroy three dams in Germany's Ruhr valley. They managed to breach two, giving a boost to Britain's war effort.
The service remembered the eight aircraft and 53 crew who were lost.
A Spitfire, a Hurricane, two Tornadoes and a Dakota transport plane joined the fly-past.
Most of them travelled from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire to take part.
Low-level mission
Sqn Ldr Les Munro, the last surviving pilot from the mission which was codenamed Operation Chastise, was a guest of honour.
The New Zealander said: "I feel a certain amount of pride that I've outlasted the other pilots.
"I'm not sure whether that says anything about the way I've lived and that sort of thing, but I think that I've always had a bit of satisfaction in that I've outlasted many of the others."
Also present was Michael Gibson whose uncle, Wing Cdr Guy Gibson, led the Dambusters.

WWII Dambusters raid revisited
During the service, 88-year-old Richard Todd, who played Mr Gibson in the 1954 film The Dambusters, laid poppies on the water of the reservoir.
The Lancaster is the last left flying in the UK, and there are only two still airworthy in the world.
It flew 100ft above the water, which compares to the 60ft of the Dambusters on their practice runs.
On 16 May 1943, 19 aircraft set out to destroy the Mohne, Eder and Sorpe dams in Germany's industrial heartland.
They used specially-designed drum-shaped bouncing bombs which skimmed across the water, rolled down the dam wall and exploded at depth.
Only 11 of the aircraft returned from the perilous low-level mission in which they flew at just 150ft all the way from England before descending for the bombing run to defeat the German radar.
It resulted in the largest awarding of medals at any one time during the war.
The bouncing bombs were the brainchild of legendary aviation engineer Sir Barnes Wallis, who was knighted in 1971.

An RCAF tribute to Victor Phillip Walsh

2008-05-11T22:30:00.007-04:00

I wish to dedicate this tribute to Mr. Victor Walsh who is originally from Montreal, Canada. Mr Walsh joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941. Victor wanted to join the RCAF like so many young airmen, to help protect his country in times of danger and trouble, not only for Canada but for all of the free world. I would have loved to meet Victor but i never have but i have been very fortunate to meet his son Richard, through the wonders of the Internet, actually through EBay and then Richard told me of his father Victor. I was so happy and proud to meet the son of an RCAF airman that i offered Richard to do a post of his father and of his WW2 exploits. I am very fortunate to do a post of a WW2 veteran who has contributed to give us so much of our freedom that many people now seem to take so much for granted! Even now, 63 years after the end of the Second World war, i simply cannot forget any of the sacrifices our veterans have done for us and this includes the sacrifices of Victor.

Victor joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in Montreal to be an Air gunner on a Canadian or British bomber of the Commonwealth forces during the Second World War but his ambitions didn't stop him there! Having a High school diploma, Victor figured that he actually could be and wanted to be an RCAF pilot. Although a tall man, Victor was able to somehow fit in the small cramped space of an air gunner to protect his bomber but this just wasn't enough for Victor. He wanted more action and more responsibilities so he became a pilot for the RCAF after many months of learning, training and flying. From my personnel accounts as a WW2 historian, i do not recall hearing of many air gunners becoming pilots during the Second World War, so this was indeed quite an exploit being an air gunner and then becoming a pilot. Victor graduated from the RCAF gunnery and training school in 1943 and in 1944 was transferred to England. Victor, during the war after hard work and devotion became a warrant officer and has met the Queen mother at a reception at the Leinster Court Hotel in London on Febuary 10, 1942 with other Canadian airmen. Victor served in Italy and all across Europe during the Second World War as a gunner and then as an RCAF pilot. Victor, i wanted to say thank you for all of your courage and bravery and for all that you have done not only for me but for Canada all of the free world in which we live in today! I am so happy to be free, thanks to you and all of our veterans!

Thank you Victor and also thank you to Richard for helping me meet your father Victor, another Royal Canadian Air Force WW2 hero!

PER ARDUA AD ASTRA

A tribute to my friend Mr. Ted Turner

2008-04-01T21:27:00.028-04:00

I would like to dedicate this tribute to my very good friend Mr. Ted Turner. Ted is someone who is always fascinating to talk to and always has a good story to tell and i would like to share to the world his story of bravery and courage. Like so many young men of his age in the early 1940's war was ravaging Europe and Ted wanted to do his contribution for our freedom so he signed up with the Army Reserves from age 15 to 17.5 when he was accepted by the Air Force but not paid by them until enlistment at age 18. He was in the Manitoba Mounted Rifles during that time and is very proud of that because it counts towards his military career. Ted is from Morden, Manitoba and he received part of his basic air crew training with the RCAF in Lachine, Quebec which happens to be my home town where I grew up and I remember very well the hangars where the base was situated on Provost street in Lachine. It was quite a fascinating time for the City of Lachine because so many young men from all over Canada went there to receive their basic training and Lachine was a reception and selection depot for the RCAF. Today only memories are unfortunately left of the airbase there in Lachine. Many men that trained in Lachine never came back home and are now buried in cemeteries all over Europe or are missing in action. Such brave men!

After Ted's basic training in Lachine he moved on to Quebec City and then to Mont Joli where he trained and graduated as an Air gunner on a Fairey Battle single-engine aircraft. In late 1943 Ted was transferred from Halifax, Canada to England for more air gunnery training. Such extensive training was necessary before combat! Then afterwards when training was completed Ted was chosen as a members of the crew on Handley Page Halifax bomber. The pilot who chose Ted as one of the member of his crew was Flying Officer Lloyd W. Patten of the RCAF also from Manitoba. Ted was posted to a conversion unit to train on the Halifax bomber and did operations (ops) in England on a Wellington bomber before being posted on a Halifax bomber doing his 35 missions of the war. The Halifax bomber consisted of seven crew members and Ted was the rear gunner.

Ted was very lucky along with his crew to have done 35 missions over Europe without being shot down over enemy territory! Ted and his crew did their last flight to try out a new belly gun on a Halifax, which was over enemy territory, so he could have been shot down and killed or captured, at that time. Ted remembers on one of his missions, one night flying over a burning airport in Germany and having to confront a Luftwaffe Messerschmidt ME 109 that came out of nowhere behind a cloud and noticing the ME-109 at the very last second. This was quite an hair raising experience indeed when you don't see the enemy coming for you until the last second! All and all Ted and his crew were very lucky because in those days the odds were that only 1 in 5 allied bombers would survive their first five bombing missions at the most. When you were able to survive 35 missions or more you were considered a very lucky crew. Ted was commissioned as a Pilot Officer from Flight Sergeant after the end of his 35 mission tour and and only found out about it after he had returned to Canada, after spending two months in a hospital in Engand and in Winnipeg due to sickness. He was carried off the hospital ship back in Canada and taken straight to hospital. Ted had been hoping that he (and also the mid-upper gunner Adam Kell, who was also from the Interlake District of Manitoba and has also volunteered with him) to go to Japan but Ted spent January and February of 1945 in hospital in Winnipeg. When he was discharged from hospital, he was also discharged from the Air Force for medical reasons. The war in Europe ended in May and the war with Japan ended in August of 1945, so he was never sent to fight the Japanese. After the war another amazing career was about to begin for Ted. Ted learned how to fly and became a bush pilot in Northern Manitoba and Northern Ontario from 1950 to 1966 and then moved to BC and became a coastal pilot until his retirement in 1982. Ted flew over 30,000 hours in his flying career as a bush and coastal pilot. Such a beautiful way to earn a living indeed! Quite an accomplishment for anyone who loves to fly!

Ted, i wanted to say Thank you for all you have done for myself and the rest of Canada and the free world and we will always remember you and all of our veterans past and present for what you have done for our freedom!

Thank you Ted and God bless all of our veterans!

The RCAF consolidated PBY Catalina

2008-03-02T08:35:00.033-05:00

The WW2 RCAF consolidated PBY Catalina was a wonderful airplane that saved many downed airmen during the Second world war. From the Atlantic to the Pacific and the South Atlantic the PBY Catalina proved to be a formidable foe for German Uboats and a welcomed sight for the ditched Canadian and other airmen of the Allied Air Forces. The Catalina came into service in 1936 and flew with many air forces of the world until the late 1970's. 4000 Catalina's were build between the mid 1930's until the end of the Second World war in 1945. The Catalina proved to be a very versatile and enjoyable airplane to fly for the Allied Airmen being able to land on a runway or on water. Hundreds of sailors and airmen were rescued in harms way thanks to the Catalina. Sadly, there aren't too many of them left in flyable condition. Some say about 30 Catalina's are still in flyable condition to this day? This goes to show that anything historical should be preserved at all cost or restored to their original historical condition because once they are gone they can never come back to their original condition. The Americans used their Catalina's for search and rescue off the coast of the US and to attack Japanese convoys in the Pacific and the British and Canadians used them in the Atlantic for search and rescue and to attack German Uboats. The Australians and New Zealanders also used the PBY Catalina in the Pacific for strafing the Japanese and also for search and rescue.

In Canada the PBY was build by the Vickers Company in Cartierville which still exist today and the company is now named Canadair. The maker of the world famous Challenger and global jets and also the yellow Canadair water bombers that have some design familiarities with the PBY. The PBY's were also manufactured by the Boeing Aircraft Company and have two Pratt and Whitney engines that consist of radial piston engines. Weight: Empty 20,910 lbs., Max Takeoff 35,420 lbs.Wing Span: 104ft. Length: 63ft. 10.5in. Height: 20ft. 2in. Performance: Maximum Speed: 179 mph Long-Range Cruising Speed: 117 mph Ceiling: 14,700 ft. Range: 2,545 miles Armament: Five 7.62-mm (0.3-inch) machine guns Up to 4,000 pounds of bombs or depth charges. There were many variations of the PBY throughout the war until the end of it's production in 1945. I will be making more tributes in time to come to some of our great Canadian and Allied airplanes and fliers of WW2. To be followed.

We were very fortunate to have a wonderful aircraft such as the consolidated PBY Catalina and great pilots and air crews that contributed to save the lives of the people in need and helped the Allies win the war over the oceans of the world.

Spitfire heroine's joy over medal

2008-02-24T20:23:00.003-05:00

A woman pilot who was among those who flew replacement fighters to RAF bases during World War II has spoken of her joy at the recognition for her work.
Margaret Frost, 87, is one of 15 women and 100 men who are to have a special merit award for serving in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA).
The parson's daughter from Bwlchllan, near Lampeter, west Wales, flew Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mustangs.
She said: "We just went wherever we were needed to go."
The ATA played a pivotal role in ensuring the RAF received the planes it desperately needed as fighter pilots fought dog fights with the Luftwaffe.
Made up of old WWI pilots, injured airmen and women who had private flying experience, it ferried new and repaired fighters, bombers and other aircraft from factories to frontline bases.

I think that we were extremely lucky when I look back to be able to fly those planes when we all so wanted to do that
Margaret Frost
Ms Frost won her wings in 1938, after just 15 hours in the air, only five of them solo.
She was rejected by the ATA when she volunteered after war broke out because she was just under the 5ft 4in (1.62m) height requirement and was considered too inexperienced.
But the need for pilots was so great three years later that, aged 22, she was accepted, only to face objections from her father.
She said: "Villagers where we lived heard about it [and] phoned my father to congratulate him and I overheard him say I would not be allowed to do it.
"Soon after he got a second call and he then said he wasn't sure whether I should do it.
"By the third call he was saying he was delighted and so I suppose he was swayed by public opinion."

Her father was swayed by 'public opinion' to let her join the ATA
She was posted to "number 15 ferrypool" based at Hamble, near Southampton, and flew spitfires, hurricanes, mustangs and barracudas all over the UK.
She said: "We were not allowed to fly above 2,000ft (600m) and there was no radio contact so it could be quite lonely.
"And, of course you didn't meet many people during the war because you were busy doing it all.
"But I think that we were extremely lucky when I look back to be able to fly those planes when we all so wanted to do that."
When the war was all over people just went their own way and didn't want any recognition - that was just the way it was
Margaret Frost
She added: "It is marvellous to get the recognition but I also feel very embarrassed about it all really because there are so few of us left.
"I should think that the original girls who started it all would be turning in their graves now at all the fuss.
"When the war was all over people just went their own way and didn't want any recognition. That was just the way it was.
"Nobody wanted any fuss they just did what was needed doing at the time and after the war got back on with their lives."

The battle for Malta.

2008-01-20T18:02:00.000-05:00

In 1940 everything seemed quite bleak for the free world! Western Europe had capitulated to Nazi Germany and England was struggling for survival. One very small island in the Mediterranean sea is of vital importance not only for the Allies but also to the Axis forces and this small island is called Malta. This little island is only 142 square miles in the Mediterranean sea but of so much importance to the supply lines of both forces. Possession of this little piece of land is vital for control of supply lines. Cross the Mediterranean by sea or air in any direction and you will pass close to island of Malta. Control of Malta is Vital for the supply lines of North Africa for the Afrika Korps and vital for the British troops there to wreck havoc on the German army in North Africa. Malta has been of strategic importance for hundreds of years. On June 10Th, 1940 Mussolini decides to bomb Malta with his Regia Aeronotica (Italian Air Force). Imagine, the Royal Air Force only had three flyable Gladiator 6C to ward off incoming Italian bombers and fighters. The British were defending the island of Malta with three World War 1 fighter airplanes against more modern Italian fighters and bombers. Thankfully before the end of June four Hurricane fighters landed on the island to refuel on their way to North Africa and were pressed into defending Malta instead of heading back to North Africa. Finally the island had four modern fighters for its defense. The Royal Air Force was able to control the air over Malta because of the inexperience of the Italian Air Force but their luck quickly changed when the Luftwaffe came into battle for the Italian reinforcement in January of 1941. The Luftwaffe were based in Sicily only seventy-five miles away from Malta. Now the Italians had reinforcements from Germany and the RAF were in big trouble. Fortunately in April of 1941 more newer versions of the Hurricanes arrived that were a closed match to the BF-109's. In 1941 the role of the RAF was mostly on the offensive. Save the island lads! Don't forget, the nearest British bases were at least 1,000 miles away from the island of Malta from Gibraltar in the ouest and Alexandria in Egypt on the eastern flank.

In June of 1941, RAF fighters and fleet air arms from aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean were able to attack the Afrika Korps in North Africa and the shipping of troops and merchandise in the Mediterranean in which Erwin Rommel was in desperate need. Mind you these attacks came to great loss for the British forces that lost so many men and aircraft in the deserts of North Africa. Many of there flyer's graves are scattered throughout North Africa. (RIP.) From April to November of 1941 the RAF and the British Fleet air arms were able to sink 170,000 tons of enemy shipping. In December of 1941 Malta was under constant bombing from the Luftwaffe to the despair of the British! The British forces were beginning to wonder when this hell will end because of the constant fighting in the air and on the island. Now, two islands are at stake, Great Britain and Malta!!!! At one time in February of 1942 the Luftwaffe had over two thousands sorties to the despair of the British. The Germans wanted nothing less than air supremacy over Malta. The RAF was indeed outclassed and outnumbered by the Luftwaffe. In February of 1942 Air Vice Marshal Lloyd reported to his Commander in chief that it was becoming impossible to do any sorties for his fighters. His airfields were under constant attacks. What the RAF badly needed were reinforcements from Hawker Hurricanes to Spitfires to save the island. Finally in February of 1942 fifteen Spitfires arrived on the island from Gibraltar. Don't forget the island was resupplied by convoys each month from England and the RAF had to protect them on their way to Malta but in February of 1942 the RAF were so badly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe that no convoy reached the island to feed the population and the British forces. Now the RAF was in shortage of fuel, ammunition and so on. The RAF's desperately needed fuel was floating in the Mediterranean sea sunk by a Uboat or a Luftwaffe bomber.

Finally on April 20, 1942 47 Spitfires were able to take off from the USS Wasp to Malta as greatly needed reinforcements. Unfortunately, the German army radars in Sicily had detected the 47 spitfires in the air on their way to Malta and were destroyed on the runways or in the air by the Luftwaffe. This is very bad news for the RAF high command. Two weeks later 60 Spitfires were dispatched again from the USS Wasp and the HMS Eagle to the island flying low over the water and having all hands waiting on the ground in Malta for the spitfires when they arrived they had them refuelled and armed and ready to meet the oncoming Luftwaffe immediately. They had learned from their previous experiences two weeks earlier that speed is of the essence for survival. The Spitfires were quickly back in the air ready for battle. Day and night the battle raged on day after day, night after night until the winter of the 1942 the siege was lifted. At last with a stroke of good fortune the battle of Malta was coming to an end! The British and allied airmen and soldiers, sailors were totally exhausted! The battle lasted over two years and after 14,500 tons of bombs fell on the island. Over 1,500 civilians had been killed or injured and 23,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged. Thank God the island did not fall to the hands of the Axis forces otherwise the re-supply of North Africa would have been possible for the Army of General Erwin Rommel and General Montgomery and his desert rats might have lost the war against the Afrika Korps in North Africa. This would have permitted General Rommel to walk right through to South Africa and Gibraltar and drive back to Europe from the southern Mediterranean. Quite a frightening scene to know that General Rommel could have controlled the African continent. British and Canadians fought for the battle of Malta and so many gave their lives! George Beurling is one of the Canadian aces and heroes who fought to save Malta.

***WE MUST ALWAYS REMEMBER THE SACRIFICE OF OUR ALLIED AIRMEN, SOLDIERS AND SAILORS WHO HAVE FOUGHT SO HARD FOR THE FREEDOM OF MALTA AND FOR TWO LONG YEARS HAVE HELPED TO DEFEAT THE AFRIKA KORPS AND THE LUFTWAFFE FOR THE BATTLE OF MALTA. THANK YOU TO OUR VETERANS!***

World War 2 in 1940

2007-11-13T19:39:00.000-05:00

The invasion of Norway was the first offensive on the western front by the Wehrmacht in 1940 and thus began the invasion of Norway. Norway had a strategic importance not only for Germany but also for the allies because of it's natural resources to help their both the allies and German war industries. On April 9 Germany invaded Denmark and landed in Norway which took the allies totally by surprise. In 1940 French and British troops try desperately to resist the German invasion of the above without any luck and thousands of French and British troops were made prisoners of war. May 10Th, 1940 Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister of Great Britain. On that very same day the German army invades Belgium and the Netherlands and also starts the invasion of France. France had quite a defense system to protect its borders called the Maginot line consisting of fighting bunkers to prevent an invasion to the East and northern flank of France. On May 14 The Netherlands capitulates to Germany. France had a very courageous army but in no way could they resist the powerful German invasion from the land and air.

Now that all the European countries are falling one after the other what happens to the French and British army you ask? Retreat men.....run for your lives, the Wehrmacht is coming. The allied armies are retreating north towards the English channel in Northern France, they have no choice, it's a do or die situation and Winston Churchill knows this. So begins the biggest amphibious evacuation of all times. Small boats, big boats, military boats, private boats, civilian boats that want to go towards France in the English channel leaving the English harbours to help rescue the Allies who are running for their lives towards northern France. The Allies are exhausted after months of fighting in Europe. Help us God Europe is falling to Hitler and his army. Thus begins the greatest evacuation plan of history with hundreds of boats leaving England through the English channel towards France. The British navy had to turn away people with sail boats of all things, sail boats were slow and vulnarable, this goes to show how much the British are proud and are always willing to lend a hand in what ever way they can! Once upon the French coast of Dunkirk the boats were being bombed by the Luftwaffe and soldiers were being evacuated from the advancing German army but by the time this was all over and the boats had returned to England and thousands of French and British soldiers were evacuated from France at least 300,000 were made prisoners by the German army in France. The German army entered Paris on June 14Th, 1940. On June 25Th Marechal Petain will ask Hitler an armistice and become a traitor to many French for he will be a direct collaborator to Hitler and a puppet of the German army doing anything Hitler would ask of him. On June 30Th,1940 the German army invaded the iles of Jersey and Guernsey. France capitulated and thus in a few months shall start the battle of Britain. My we ain't seen nothing yet! The world is in a state of shock! England is getting ready for the battle of Britain and the war in 1940 expands to the middle east. It seems as though Hitler's army will conquer the world! That's indeed quite a scary scenario! I really must think that the folks in those days though that really dark clouds were hanging over their heads in the sky!

A week of remembrance

2007-11-05T19:52:00.000-05:00

A week of remembrance

How can we forget the sacrifice! How can we forget the valor! You have fought, you have died, if you have not died you were wounded like no one could understand. Your wound is deep in your soul! Why did you do it! You did it for me, you did it for my family, you did it for us all! The ultimate sacrifice. How can we forget only to be selfish if we forget.

Lest we forget!

I want to lift my heart to the stars were our veterans shine, they shine like the sun, they shine like the brightest star. You will always shine in our hearts. You gave us the ultimate sacrifice. How can we forget. I will wear my puppy today! I will proudly lay my puppy on my jacket and i will say thank you to all of you! Thank you for the ultimate sacrifice. Would i do it, would i go a thousand miles from home to leave my loved ones like you have? I would be scared, i would be terrified but you have done it! You were and are still brave and courageous!

I want to say thank you to all our veterans who have fought in all previous wars and to all of our blue helmets who help bring peace to the world. To our past and present Airmen, Soldiers and Sailors i want to say thank you for bringing us freedom of religion and speech and a free democracy. Thank you to all are soldiers serving in Afghanistan, you are valiant!

It was indeed and still is a sacrifice well deserved for us all and to the free world!

THEY SHALL GROW NOT OLD AS WE THAT ARE LEFT TO GROW OLD. AGE SHALL NOT WEARY THEM NOR THE YEARS CONDEMN. AT THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN AND IN THE MORNING, WE WILL REMEMBER THEM.

Thank you!

A letter home

2007-08-31T20:26:00.000-04:00

Often soldiers, pilots and navy personnel would write home after excruciating missions to their loved ones to tell them that all was well after a battle. Here is an example of a letter being written home by a Canadian RCAF pilot to his parents.

Dear mon and dad!

I just wanted to take this moment to say hello and to say that i am doing fine. I have received your letter dated April 16Th. Don't worry for me i am doing well. I went out on a bombing run last night! Made it back OK. The flak was so hard i could almost walk on it! I am a little tired but feeling well! I am sad to say that i have lost two of my good friends last night. Johnson and Perry. Their Mosquito was hit by flak and broken in two. Didn't see no parachutes. They wont be writing home no more. I can say that i am so happy to be writing to you now dear mom and dad. I am cold and tired but it don't matter. I am alive and well. Say hello to all and i just cant wait to see you folks! Thank God i am here to see another day! I love the sunrise before my eyes!

With love your son Frank!

Very ofter letters were short and simple, servicemen couldn't write much because of the military censorship. Back in World War 2 letters would take a few days to get home to reassure their loved ones that all was OK! Just knowing that your son or daughter was doing well gave reassuring news to the families and friends that their loved ones overseas would live to see another day! Gee whiz i cant wait for this war to be over mom!

BROTHERS IN ARMS-THIS IS AN OPEN WORLD WAR TWO BLOG! PLEASE READ BELOW!

2007-07-22T22:02:00.000-04:00

This is an open Blog to anyone who wants to share their WW2 stories!

I want to share your World War 2 stories to the world!

I have so much respect for our veterans that i have decided to share your stories. Yes, you the blog reader. If you are a World War 2 veteran or know of anyone who is a World War two veteran please let me know and i will post your blog for free! If you are a Canadian, British or American veteran or anyone who has participated in any other Country that was part of the Allied Forces in World War 2 or know of someone who participated in any World War 2 battle or activity please let me know! I will gladly post your request upon revision if i feel you have well documented the information you have sent to me and if you sent me at least two photographs of the veteran in question to be posted on my blog!

I want to be an open blog and when ever i can i will gladly post a story of yourself the veteran or of the person you know! I will continue of course to post my World War 2 blogs but from time to time i will gladly post your blogs also.

Please feel free to write at oxygen2060@yahoo.ca and i will gladly get in touch with you at the earliest convenience. Please make sure to leave me your name and email address!

Any postings that will be done on my blog will be sent to you before publishing for your final approval!

Thank you very much!

Cousin 1924

A tribute to my father Vincent Desjardins and all our veterans

2007-07-20T17:26:00.000-04:00

A tribute to my father Vincent Desjardins and all our veterans

I always considered my father to be a great man. He always wanted the best for his family. He worked hard and was very honest with everyone. As a young boy during the depression of the 1930's life was hard. My grandparents never had much food and work was scarce. Although my grandfather was able to make ends meet life was tough. I remember my grandfather as the mirror of my father looking just like my dad. Same height, same stature and the same attitude towards life. My grandmother was a brave woman because in the Quebec of the 1930's life was tough and very often you had to raise 10 sometimes to 20 and more. The parents of the 1930's and 1940's were brave and i admire them for what they did. Raise children with morals and values. I truly love having learned so much from my parents. My mom was such a wonderful woman. So patient and gentle and full of wisdom and faith. I am truly blessed to have great parents.

As a young boy my father told me of his was wartime stories in World War 2. My father tried to enlist in 1939 at sixteen but was turned down by the Canadian Army for his young age. Then enlisted at 17 in Quebec City at the Citadele and joined the army with the Royal 22nd regiment. I am very proud of the Royal 22nd Regiment the Vandoos who are serving now in Afghanistan. Like the rest of the Canadian Army, they are to be admired and respected.

My father wanted to join the Canadian army not to go to war and fight people. My father wanted to join the army to help my grandparents earn a living. Like i said times were tough and at Christmas when the Christmas gifts that Santa would bring to the children back in those days would be an orange or maybe an apple and not much more than a fruit. That's how things were back in the depression era. This is why my father joined the army. To help his parent's make ends meet and feed the family because there weren't too many jobs around back in those days. During the 1940's people had a great interest and pride in their patriotism's. So my father joined the army and had his training done in Borden, Ontario, Canada and afterward's was transferred to England on a troop carrier a civilian ship (The Queen Mary, converted into a troop carrier for the war effort) in 1942. My father was trained as a soldier but also as a mechanic and ambulance driver. My father wanted to have more than just one trade. He wanted to be a soldier but also a mechanic and help his fellow soldiers as an ambulance driver. More training followed in England but my dad was getting anxious to see action like thousands of other Canadians waiting in England to see action. The year 1942 came and went and so did 1943. My dad was getting trucks and jeeps readied for the war effort that would be needed to be sent to France eventually but when D day finally came along my father was still stationed in England fixing trucks and seeing his friends go on to the shores of France after June 6Th, 1944. I remember my dad telling me that he was getting quite impatient because he wanted to see action to help free the world of Fascism's and tyranny.

One day an officer came up to my father and to my father's surprise the officer told my dad that he was transferred from the Royal 22nd regiment to The Calgary Higlanders. My father was surprised because he taught that he would fight with the Royal 22nd regiment but was transferred with the Calgary Highlanders. Well my dad did not mind, he was after all with Canadians but the only thing is that he was with English speaking Canadians. You see my father is French Canadian and joined with a French Canadian Regiment and to his surprise was being transferred with guys from western Canada. My dad being from Quebec did not speak much English back in his young days. (This was only normal being from Quebec). He became fluently bilingual afterwards. My dad was in for a surprise because when he arrived with the Calgary Highlanders he felt he was treated like a king! Imagine, the only French Canadian soldier in his platoon with English speaking soldiers. My dad loved it! To his friends in his platoon he was called Frenchie. Then one day in September of 1944 army headquarters told my father and his friends, boys this is it. You are going in to France as reinforcements. My father arrived in France on September 29th,1944 and fought in Northern Europe until September 27, 1945. Also my father was part of the Royal Highland Regiment from September 21, 1945 to September 27, 1945 thus only for one week.

I do remember my father telling me stories that are not funny and sad. These are the casualties of war! I am glad he told me these stories because he had to get it out of his chest! I sometimes wonder if it was myself living these episodes of history how i would have felt. I probably would have been insane after the war. You have to be strong to endure the burden of war! My father fought in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.

If you like i can recall a story my father had told me before he died of cancer on May 5, 1990. My father had a military funeral from members of the Canadian Armed forces and the Royal Canadian Legion and i was overwhelmed with the feeling of appreciation for my father but i found out later why all the recognition. This is something he had never told me when he was living!

One day in early 1945 in Holland the Canadian Army were given the order to secure a small island in Holland in the middle of the night so the American Army can pass on the river banks with their Sherman tanks without being shot at by the German Army artillery. Canadian army heaquarters asked the Calgary Highlanders if they could find one hundred volunteers for a special mission. My father was one of them who volunteered. In the middle of the night the one hundred Canadian soldiers in their rubber dinghy's slipped silently on the cold river to the island to secure the shores of the island so the American Sherman tank could travel without being bombed on the other side of the river but somehow the German army were waiting for the Canadians. Someone had betrayed the Canadians and the German army were waiting for them in the middle of the night. It was a real massacre as soon as the Canadians got on the Island the German army started shooting at the Canadians. All hell broke loose. The Calgary Highlanders jumped back in the dinghy's only to be pursued by the German army. On the other side of the river banks the Canadians were running for their lives when my father was escaping with Colonel Campbell from New Brunswick. All of a sudden Colonel Campbell was hit in the leg by a bullet. He told my father, Vince i give you the order to leave me here right now at once! They will make me a Prisoner of war! I give you the order to go now! My father refused the order and instead stayed with Colonel Campbell who was injured in the bushes until the early morning hours and both were able to make it back to the Canadian lines and this made my father a hero for saving Colonel Campbell's life amongst the Calgary Highlanders and the Black Watch Regiment. My father risked being a prisoner of war or even being killed to save Colonel Campbell's life.

My father told me of very interesting stories of his days in the war and i must say that all soldiers must be remembered. Soldiers, Airmen and sailors always stand on guard for our freedom and protection and we must always remember what they have done for us and are doing now to better secure our future.

My father Vincent Desjardins died from cancer in 1990 and i must say he was a brave man who went to war to protect our freedom and democracy and we must be thankful for the millions of Canadians through history who have fought and are still fighting and have given their lives and their freedom and who are far away from their families and loved ones! Canadians are buried on all continents and in so many countries where their was tyranny and oppression. What great courage they have and have given us! Indeed they have given us our freedom! My father came back from Europe in 1946 and married my mother in 1947 and lived their lives to have three wonderful children and succeeded in raising and giving us a terrific family life.

INDEED THEY HAVE GIVEN US THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE. THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR VETERANS. WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER YOU WHERE EVER YOU ARE! ANYONE WHO HAS FOUGHT FOR CANADA IN WORLD WARS AND WITH THE UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING FORCE AND NOW THE WAR ON TERRORISM IN AFGHANISTAN FOR FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY IS A TRUE HERO.

MAY GOD BLESS YOU ALL! THANK YOU!

RCAF combat missions over occupied France in 1941

2007-07-14T20:28:00.000-04:00

The Battle for Europe must never be forgotten. If ever we forget history it will repeat itself sooner or later in time. The Battle for Europe consisted of Hitler and the Wehrmacht wanting to invade Europe which they did and conquered a great part of it. Thus began the Battle for Europe. Poland first fell to Germany on September 1st 1939 and then France in 1940, Belgium, Holland, the Balkans and North Africa and Greece. The fighting was continued to the doorsteps of Moscow, Russia. Such a costly war in lives and resources. Hitler was gaining ground at a worrisome paste. What can be done to prevent further incursions from the Wehrmacht on European soils. Defend the Island of Britain and the free world with blood, sweat and tears. In 1940 Hitler gave the order to invade England and the name of the operation was called Sea Lion. As you have seen in my previous post, due to the tenacity of the The British, the Canadians and the Allied Airmen, Soldiers and sailors England was saved from the invasion. Now we must fight on the Shores of continental Europe and North Africa to help defeat the enemy. The RCAF has contributed greatly to the cause of freedom in Europe. In 1941 the RCAF was stationed in England to destroy any Uboats in the English channel and in the Atlantic and to cause havoc on German held territories on the European continent.

Brave Canadian and allied airmen took off from air fields in England to Attack installations in occupied territory in France and to destroy German vehicle convoys and communications but this was done at a great cost. For example, if you were flying in a Wellington Bomber or Spitfire fighter and were shot down over France there were only two options. Either you were killed by the impact of a movable machine gun mounted on the rear of Wehrmacht convoy trucks or Flak (A ground to Air Cannon aimed at aircraft's to destroy and bring you down) or you had to bail out over enemy territory which was not very encouraging for any airmen. If you were to survive the impact of the explosion on your aircraft chances were you would be wounded and you had to bail out with your parachute sometimes at night and in sometimes rather rough weather.

Bailing out in cloud cover was actually good because the enemy would have more problems spotting you as your parachute brought you down softly to the ground. Think of it this way my friend. Pretend that you are the airman that was brought down and it is you is is trying to escape the German army! Who ever is reading this article, you are in the airman's place and these are your first thoughts as you land on the ground OK, here we go! Now, i have made it thank God in am alive on French ground and as i look up to the sky Lord and Behold i see my bomber going down in flames with 4 parachutes and a sudden rush of sadness takes over the me (That's you living this, picture yourself as the airman boots on the ground in enemy territory don't forget) because you knows two of your friends inside the bomber did not have time to bail out. There should be six parachutes bailing out but there are only four to be seen. Why them and not me. We are seven on this mission! What do i hear now? My God i can hear German Shepard's barking in the distance. The airman would feel more anxiety as ever before because he knows the German army are on his tail.

(Note that the German army used German Shepard's to track airmen that were shot down because the German Shepard has a very good flair for smell and search.) I must run, i must hide, they are after me, mom please hear me, dear God don't let the German soldiers capture me otherwise what will i become. They might shoot me on the spot! Such a terrifying thought for an 18 or 19 year old kid from Toronto, Saskatoon or Quebec City, Halifax. The Airmen in the RCAF and RAF had very good training in circumstances like these. They were trained to keep their calm and remember what they were thought. First, get rid of your parachute, hide it so the German Army don't find it and then run but run silently in the forest, in the fields but do run silently and calmly and try to meet up with the members of your crew. Young man, you were sent on a mission, to destroy enemy installations and convoys but now your faith will be slim if the enemy captures you. Can i see the North star?(Aircrews were trained that if ever they were shot down over enemy territory to follow the north star because neutral territory was usually in the north? This was always depending on were the airman was shot down obviously!) It is one thirty in the morning, April 19,1941 on a clear night, it is rather cool tonight and damp. I must find my crewmen and friends. What will be of their faith in enemy territory? I saw them bailing out to the north of me. My God i still hear those German Shepard's and they seem to be getting closer, why is that. If i run i will give my position away. After all i am behind enemy lines. Then all of a sudden i hear engines, i know i recognise these airplane engines i hear above. Wellington Bombers, my God i am saved. They are flying above me at only a few hundreed feet above my head. I am here guys. Look down, just below... Well, they never saw me! They call this the rush of battle and it is also called battle Anxiety. Man, i am scared. I will follow the North Star and i will be rescued. As i am walking slowly in the forest and i feel tired and i am so hungry. I have been awake now for at least 17 hours. We took off from Skipton on Swale, England to bomb a bridge near Bordeaux France but now i am not sure exactly of where i am in France? I think i am in the region of Langon? I am cold, lost and tired. I want to sleep. I look at my watch and it is now three thirty in the morning. I sit down to catch up with my exhaustion and first thing i know i have fallen asleep on the ground only to be awaken a few minutes later by a German soldier with his K98 Mauser rifle pointing directly in my face. This is it, the war is over for me! I will only give my rank and serial number. Flight Lieutenant, Royal Canadian Air Force, serial number 4394217. Four weeks later i am sent by train to Stalag luft 3 in Sagan Eastern Germany. What as become of my colleagues i do not know! I hope they made it well? This is what happened to Canadian and allied airmen in World War 2 when they were shot down over enemy territory very often unless they had the help from the French underground.

The story is not over because you the airmen must try to escape. Your goal is not to finish the war wasting away in a prison camp. No, i shall try to escape and continue the fight for our freedom, the freedom of the free world. I will use what ever means i can to escape. Please follow my weblog because i will tell you of the true story of airmen, soldiers and sailors who tried to escape in 1943 from one of the most secure prisoner of war camps in German and based on a true story called the GREAT ESCAPE! Stay tuned!

Through Adversity to the stars

2007-06-22T21:48:00.000-04:00

Through Adversity to the stars

May we bow our heads and be thankful for our veterans. They have fought with dignity. Let them grow in Peace up to the clouds and above the stars so we may never forget in Flanders fields they will remain our heroes and saviors of our freedom and rights. They have made us free. Now it is up to us to discover the path we walk on. May it be the right path for their sacrifice will have not been in vain! May God bless them. Air Force - Army - Navy of Canada and the free world! We will never forget you because you have touched the face of God and made us Free. So young to die. You have indeed given us the ultimate sacrifice. To all our past and present day heroes of Afghanistan and of our blue helmets. Thank you!

The Battle of the Atlantic 1940

2007-05-30T20:50:00.000-04:00

By the year 1940 Germany was already causing quite a bit of havoc in the Atlantic ocean sinking any merchant ship that would be sailing towards England. Europe being under the control of the Nazis on the Western front and Russia struggling on the Eastern front it seemed as though Germany was about to have total dominance over Europe. Every ship that was sunk by the Kriegsmarine was calculated by tons. Thousands of Allied merchant ships and hundreds of battleships and destroyers of the Allied navy were sunk in the Atlantic ocean between 1940 and 1944 when Germany had control of the North and south Atlantic ocean and the Atlantic floor (with their formidable Uboats). These were terrible times to be a sailor. You would never know if you would make the journey across the Atlantic. Otto Kretschmer (U505) would surely be the most successful Uboat commandant having sunk during the battle of the Atlantic at least 266,000 tons. This would be about 40 to 45 ships sunk! Most of the battles of the year 1940 were fought in the North Atlantic. Italy entered the war in June of 1940 and was part of the European Axis being Allies with Germany so began the battle for the Mediterranean sea. The problem for England was immense! We need to be re-supplied and re-arm and be feed our friends and allies but our ships are being sunk in the Atlantic. Canada was re-supplying England and 1941 saw the United States entering the war because of the attack on Pearl Harbour. The United States were helping their Ally England in early 1941. The United States would lend Destroyers and cruisers on the basis of the Lend-lease act of 1941 and England was being supplied military ships which included destroyers and battle cruisers. England would lend-lease bases to the Americans in the Isles of the Bahamas and Jamaica. Basically England was broke because of the damage being done to their country so it lend basis to the United States during the war for any military assistance it can get! The battle was far from over and seemed as though everything was lost! Like the Battle of Britain in the air it seemed as though England would not be able to win the Battle on the sea. If the Isle of Britain is lost, we loose our diving board to Europe. Remember if we loose England how can we fight the Battle in France and else were in Europe.

The Kriegsmarine had a system of navigating underwater called a Wolfpack which was absolutely terrifying for Allied sailors. A wolfpack consisted of a group of Uboats. There was the leader and the group of Uboats who would follow from behind as a second row behind the leader you would have two Uboats and then the third row three Uboats side by side and so on! If one Uboat missed a ship with a torpedo the other one behind would most likely hit the target sinking the Allied ship in the cold Atlantic waters. Wolfpacks were usually done when more than one merchant ship would be sailing towards England. The war is not lost because the RCAF and the RAF are patrolling the North Atlantic sinking Uboats when they can, they were called the Coastal Command. The coastal command aircraft were based in Newfoundland and Nova's Scotia and in England and Scotland. Slowly but surely we are helping to turn the tide of war in 1940-1941. With the courage of the Coastal Command flying above the ocean for hours and enduring the elements they were able to help our sailors stay afloat and reach England but the course of the war was far from over in the Atlantic. When seeing the Allied Bombers in mid Atlantic and the Allied fighters when nearing the English coast flying above the sailors merchant ships made them feel very well secure and was indeed a very welcomed site knowing that their friends were there indeed to serve and to protect them on their perilous mission to help save England!

Why i love The Hawker Hurricane

2007-05-27T19:39:00.001-04:00

Why i love The Hawker Hurricane

My love for this beautiful airplane started a long time ago! This is truly a beautiful airplane with a Rolls-Royce Merlin-powered engine armed with canons and rockets. This aircraft was a valuable aircraft in Europe, Africa and the far East. The Hawker Hurricanes were manufactured in both Great Britain and Canada in World War 2. Bagotville, Quebec was an Operational training unit during World War 2 for pilots of the Commonwealth Air Forces. I am proud to mention Bagotville because Bagotville is a city in the Province of Quebec in which i live in. This air base greeted many fliers from all over the Commonwealth. A truly remarkable aircraft the Hawker Hurricane was a great and valuable fighter to pilots of the Commonwealth during the Battle of Britain. Historically historians can say that the the Hawker Hurricane was a formidable aircraft against the Luftwaffe in August of 1939 and contributed to the victory of the Battle of Britain. This was only the first step, we saved England but now we must save Europe and the free world. I should also mention that the Luftwaffe having the Messerschmidt BF-109 fighter, the Stuka diver bomber and an amazing fleet of bombers that were also another formidable plan of attack but due to the determination of the Commonwealth pilots who were simply outnumbered by the Luftwaffe they were able to defeat the Luftwaffe in a stroke of luck and determination. I would highly recommended that you see the movie The Battle of Britain which it is a very accurate detail of how the war was fought and won but could also have been very easily lost and this would have changed the course of history. Many young people today do not realise this due to there lack of historical knowledge and then how close we came to loosing the Island of Britain and then the course of the war would have been totally different. With the constant bombardment of the Luftwaffe upon London and different British cities and military installations, the British with their stiff upper lips were able to hold a strong morale and push the enemy across the English channel back to France. Again luck was achieved on a wing and a prayer! This was only October 1940 and the war was far from over but the British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, The Poles and the South Africans were able to say what a good show they did. Indeed you did do a very good show lads! Thank you from ourselves and our future generations because thanks to you we are living our freedom!

WW2 hero pilot statue unveiled

2007-05-19T23:05:00.000-04:00

I wanted to share this great article with the world today! A nice article about a New Zelander who in 1941 gave the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom. I think this is a very nice way to show him my respect by posting this article on my blog. Another true World War 2 hero. The statue of Carlisle Everiss who was a pilot officer 41318 with the Royal New Zealand Air Force was unveiled today in the village of Cowie, Scotland on May 20, 2007. Thank you Carlisle.

WWII hero pilot statue unveiled

The memorial was erected after locals raised £12,000.A statue honouring a heroic World War II pilot who was killed in action has been unveiled in the Stirlingshire village where he died.
New Zealander Carlisle Everiss lost control of his Spitfire over Cowie in 1941 but managed to steer it towards a local wood before crashing.
The 26-year-old was pulled from the wreckage by three local residents but died after being given the last rites.
Residents in Cowie have raised £12,000 to erect a bronze bust of the pilot.
Local councillor Gerard O'Brien said: "What is being done in Cowie will echo for generations to come.
"This pilot gave his life for the village. If it were not for him, the village would have been destroyed and a lot of people would have died.
"Once in a generation a guy like this comes along. We should not forget what he did and the statue is a way of saying thank you."

Carlisle Everiss died when his Spitfire crashed near Cowie
Cllr O'Brien said he hoped the pilot would also be awarded the New Zealand award for gallantry.
Mr Everiss, who was one of a number of foreign pilots stationed at Grangemouth during the war, died after his plane crashed into railway sidings at the Cowie Colliery on 2 October 1941.
He was buried at Grandsable Cemetery near Polmont.
A plaque was put up in memory of the hero in the 1970s after local resident John Craig went to New Zealand to trace Mr Everiss' family.
A war memorial and miners' memorial were established in the village recently and prompted local businesses, the community council and local residents to raise money for a memorial to Mr Everiss.

A little about myself and why i love history!

2007-05-18T21:37:00.000-04:00

Why do i love history?

Why do i love the past, i kind of wonder. Ever since i was a little boy i always wondered about the past. Not that i don't like the present, sure i do! I love my life, i love everything around me. How was it back then though? Have you ever wondered what life was in the 1930's, 40's, 50's 60's. I do remember the 1960's as a little boy. Probably things weren't that much different than they are today. A father had to work hard for his living and the well being of his family. The mother would be home taking care of her children and loving them. I still believe though that things were quite different than they are today! Although there were no computers and cell phones and all that modern technology people were i think generally still quite happy. Imagine myself now being in my late 40's and writing about the past. The past is like a different world now i guess to me and probably to you also? I am indeed nostalgic about the past. Canada went to war in 1914 fighting in World war 1 as it raged on in Europe and World War 2 in 1939 against Nazisms and the thread of Japanese attacks on our homeland. What did we fight for? We fought for our freedom of speech, rights to vote and have the best of lives all together in this great country of ours and the free world.

I find what we lack the most in the years we are living in now are family values. Good quality life as a family unit. Where have they gone? Why have they gone? I like to think of myself as a man trying his best for his family, his community, his country and God. But what about the family life i see around us. Were has the family life gone. Why do we need to rush so much after time and money! Is time lacking in your life? If it is slow down and take a look around you! Life is short. Say i love you to that special person. To your parents, your spouse, your family and your friends even your pets. To life itself!

What about spiritually? Were has it gone? It is down the drain??? It is so sad to see the state of the planet. There is indeed a global warming changing the world right now, we can tell just by the weather extremes we are living across the globe. There is also a global change. The change is out of the family, the change is out of spirituality and out of respect and values. This is my opinion and this is why i love the past. I miss the values! I really do! If we are to fight as our fathers and grandfathers did, we should fight for our rights of freedom and also for our rights of values and spirituality which is so important to us! If we have the rights for our freedom but no values in our lives and in our families and communities and in our individual spirituality i think that somewhere along in our lives we are missing the most important point of what our veterans fought for and what they fought and died for in the past conflicts were the Values for the future and this is what we lack the most of today unfortunately!

Training on a Harvard if you want to become a pilot

2007-05-16T19:32:00.000-04:00

RCAF Flag of ww2

PLEASE CLICK ON ANY OF THE VIDEO CLIPS ABOVE TO SEE THE TRAINING OF THE NEW PILOTS AND THEIR AIRPLANES.

Before going off to war in Europe in 1939 or Asia in 1941 you needed to know how to fly an airplane if you wanted to become a pilot. This naturally was only normal for any 18 or 19 year old kid who wanted to join the RCAF. Flying an airplane for any aviation enthusiast is the greatest thrill ever. From the roar of the engine and the smell of engine fuel it is very exiting indeed. Because of the great Harvard trainer thousands of young men became pilots of bombers and fighters. Men from all over the British Commonwealth came to Canada to train under the British Commonwealth Training plan. Pilots from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, England came to Canada to train as pilots. Also came to Canada air crews such as Navigators, Radio operators, Engineers and gunners. American citizens also joined the RCAF before 1941 to fight against the Axis and were know as the Eagle Squadron and when the USA entered the War in 1941 these airmen were transferred to the United States Army Air Corps. You want to fly young man, learn to fly on the Harvard. Please see on my blog the trailer of this great training documentary of Harvard's and their students from the World War two movie starring James Cagney in Captain of the clouds. See training aircraft's such as the De Havilland Moth and the Hawker Hurricane and the Boulton Paul defiant. There are in all four videos of the training and of the airplanes. All you have to do is click on either one of them to view it. Between 1939 and 1945 over 50,000 allied airmen died for our freedom. See what kind of training these men went through. You indeed had to be very courageous and very strong to live through these tough times. You lived your life on a wing and a prayer. There were no room for mistakes. Watch your take offs, your turns your altimeter and your speed son then you will become a good pilot!

Beginnings of the Royal Canadian Air Force

2007-05-16T12:18:00.000-04:00

The Royal Canadian Air Force was founded in 1924. The life of the RCAF is short and brief but was quite an accomplishment. In 1924 the RCAF is created and disbanded in 1968 to become the Canadian Armed Forces. The Air Force, Navy and Army are all combined as one unit. I am very proud of our armed forces and what they have accomplished as Peacekeepers and of what they are doing today in Afghanistan and around the world to promote world peace and stability! The RCAF as a unit was only 44 years old! Quite young indeed!

England being drawn into conflict with Nazi Germany Canada and other Countries of the British Commonwealth had no choice but to help another country that is under the British Crown. Canada declares war to Germany on September 3rd, 1939. With mostly planes left over from the late 1920's and 1930's Canada was very modest in it's air capabilities and had to reorganize to be able to combat the Axis in Europe. Canada being what it is organised itself quickly and was able to produce airplanes on a large scale that would have not been seen thus far in it's industrial era becoming the Fourth largest air force of the Allied Air Power.

Due to the great depression of the 1930's many people were simply out of work with no food to feed their families and many men had simply no place to go. How terrible when you are proud and young and would like to have a job to earn an honest living. I remember very well my mother telling me as a young girl in the 1930's living on a farm in St Jean Port Joli, Quebec many men would be riding on trains and even on their roof tops looking for food and work. These men would come from Montreal, Quebec City even from Ontario looking for a better life but there was not much to go on! Times were tough! In Germany Adolf Hitler was creating a War machine against the free world that their domination would fix the problems that had encounter in the 1920's and 1930's and that was a lack of work and prosperity. Hitler was a very dangerous man with many dangerous followers. Basically the world was in economical depression and so was the United States of America. This until Pearl Harbour dragged the USA into the second world war against Japan and Germany.

My tribute to the Royal Canadian Air Force 1939-1945

2007-05-15T22:26:00.000-04:00

Per Ardua Ad Astra (Through adversity to the stars)

I would like to dedicate this blog to all our World War 1 and World war 2 veterans and also of Korea who have served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. (Please note that i have the uppermost respect for today's flyers of the Canadian Armed forces but this blog is being done on historical World War 2 basis!)

This is my way of showing them all the respect i have for our World War 2 flyboy's to them and for what they have done for our freedom.

LEST WE FORGET

(Please note that i also admire and respect our soldiers and sailors) I have always had a soft spot on my heart for the RCAF and the reason being for this is that i always loved aviation. There is nothing more beautiful than watching an airplane flying above in the sky! Our World War 2 airmen had the right stuff and still do! Through time i will list the achievements and sacrefice that our pilot's and air crew's have done on such famous airplanes as the Spitfire, Hawker Hurricanes the Wellington bomber and the Halifax of the RCAF.

Please return to my Blog shortly because i shall continue our travel through time and show our airmen all the respect they deserve. Please stay tuned for more! Thank you.