Forces: Land ~ Air ~ Sea ~ Home
A MILITARY TRIBUTE WEBZINE . . . AS YOU WERE . . .
www.hillmanweb.com/flash
Compiled by Bill Hillman
FLASH. . . Editor and Webmaster: Bill Hillman: hillmans@wcgwave.ca
www.hillmanweb.com/rcaf/mag
SEPTEMBER 2003
B24 Liberator Bombers #99 Squadron over Burma, 1945
The Burma Bomber’s Reunion, Niagara Falls, Ontario
Sept. 29, 2003
The following article appeared in the London Free Press
following the Burma Bombers Association’s first reunion in August 1983.
FORGOTTEN WARRIORS REMEMBER
Jock McBride of Winnipeg, a 19-year-old only son, is a forgotten man – a Canadian youth killed in an American Liberator bomber on the last days of the British campaign against the Japanese, over, and in, the faraway jungles of Burma.
But on the weekend, Jock’s death on August 7/45 wasn’t forgotten by his crew-mates who were Canadian air crew, attached to the RAF, who met at the inaugural meeting of the Burma Bomber Association in London Ontario. A group of warriors who themselves are forgotten in the history books.
“Canadians accounted for about 75 percent of the RAF aircrew in Burma”, said a former bomber pilot Harry Bray of Vancouver. And he recalled the sad death of McBride after more than 300 hours of casualty free missions – on the last day the Japanese ‘fired at us in anger’.
“You can search Burma Command records and the fact I never mentioned that Canadians played such a healthy part in the Burma Campaign”, said Bray. Of the 1300 airmen in six squadrons, close to 1000 were Canadians assigned to the RAF. There were also some Canadian ground crew.
Bray said that the three day inaugural reunion, which he said evolved because of the drive of Les Barns of London, hopefully will be an annual event drawing former Burma Bombers from across North America and Britain. “A lot of us, after the war and said we didn’t want to have anything more to do with it…. We didn’t want to join the Legion – we wanted to be through with it. But you get to an age that all of a sudden mates start dropping off and you miss them, so you feel a need to get together.”
It was difficult to pin Bray and other crewmembers – Lloyd Fife of Ottawa; Earl McMillan of Winnipeg; Len McDonald of Kamloops – down to an interview because they kept wanting to include numerous other members of other crews attending the reunion. But when they did settle into talk about their part in the Second World War, they concentrated on that last day of hostilities when McBride as killed and how they weren’t sure they themselves would make it.
“Jock was killed over a place called Benkulen, Sumatra. We were after a Jap airstrip. They had some twin engine bombers - they thought they could mount a bombing raid on the Cocos Islands.” Bray said. The airstrip was 500 kilometres away from the Burma Bomber home base on the Cocos Islands. “We went in low level which we shouldn’t have. We had one of these new wonders from England, A Group Captain who thought he was still doing low level raids over the Netherlands. He put us in at 50 feet instead of up where we should have been – high level bombing.”
The lumbering Liberator was so slow we couldn’t locate the Japanese airstrip in the dense jungle, so Bray had to noisily criss-cross the area until it was found. “They heard us and had everything oiled up! They could have hit us with a sling-shot … all of a sudden they started putting fighters out. Being at tree to level we got heavily hammered. That was when Jock bought it.” Said Gunner Fife, “He never knew what hit him. I was at the nose gun in front of him … I had to crawl across the Navigator’s table to get to the nose gun … when we got hit I could hear Harry talking to the rest of the crew, I heard Harry say, ‘I guess Fife is gone too!”
----The Japanese fighter caught the Liberator from the rear and underneath. Harry was sprayed in the back with Liberator armour plate splinters and the entire instrument panel was destroyed by machine-gun fire – that was when they feared that they would not make it back across the Pacific to the Cocos Islands. Peter Hunting received the DFC for bringing the crew back to base. “When you are 900 miles from base, your Navigator dead, and your instruments shot away, you tend to worry,” said Fife. “Peter navigated us back home and Harry flew us … I’d say we were more than tense – we were scared!”
L Squadron Base – Cocos Is. in Indian Ocean
But hit the needle in the haystack they did even though one of the four engines caught fire – but luckily righted itself – and there was a fire stirring in the wireless room. But Hunting finally picked up a radio beam from Cocos base and that saved their skin.
The crew were never fired upon again, but they ran a number of missions dropping medical supplies and food to Allied Prisoners of War trapped in Japanese camps in Sumatra, Java, and North Singapore.
Those present lamented the absence of their Flight Engineer Alex McDougall who was killed last year (1980) in a tractor accident at Port Dalhousie, but his widow. Joyce, was invited and did attend.
The forgotten Burma Bombers don’t forget a detail of their unheralded part in the war and they don’t forget their own – dead or alive.
Letter (in part) from member Tom Cousins (wag) Kamloops, B.C.
Dear John,
Thank you for the Short Bursts. I never get tired of reading about days gone by. These stories about Bella Bella are excusable when you think about that station and its isolation.
My log book reminds me that I flew into Bella Bella the morning of 3/5/42 in Shark 520 with Pilot F/L Morris. We had picked up Shark #520 at the Repair Depot, Jerico Beach after it had been repaired. This was shortly after the wings had folded back on a Shark at (#6 BR Sqdrn.) Alliford Bay killing three.
He told me to put on my chest pack and we circled above English Bay, up, up, up. He then descended nose down and said, “if these wings are going to fold, they are going to do that today. Fortunately the tests were completed OK and the next morning we left for Bella Bella the next morning at 9:15. I remember going up to the Sgt.’s mess, having lunch and visiting with you. At 13:50 we left Bella Bella for home (7BR Squadron) Prince Rupert. ……..
Blackburn Shark 518 at Alliford Bay, 1940
[In the above letter Tom refers to the Shark 517 that had the wings fold back during a dive. Chris Weicht in his book Jerico Beach and the West Coast Flying Boat Stations gives a WAG’s eye witness report of this crash.]
The Shark was designed with dive-bombing capabilities, therefore this practice was a standard part of operational training. A 6 BR Sqdrn. WAG flew as crew in #517 while different Pilots practiced dive-bombing a small island, and he recorded the events that took the lives of his fellow airmen.
“Each Pilot had his own characteristics. F/L Ready had the gentlest dive and F/O Halpenny, a former bush pilot, the roughest. In one of F/O Halpenny’s dives he threw the plane into a 45 degree dive nearly throwing me out. I had to jam my feet into storage holes and grab the sides of the plane. As the dive settled down I relaxed and was nearly thrown out a second time as Halpenny threw the plane into a vertical dive so as not to overshoot the target. Then the pull out began. I was sitting on a little seat and was pressed down so hard it felt as though my stomach was flowing out onto my lap. Little did I know how close to death I was until the next day.
The next day I was putting on my parachute harness to go up with F/O Halpenny again. As I was getting ready my Signals Officer tapped me on the shoulder and said he was going up instead, and Richardson was going along for the ride. I took off my harness and went about my business.
Suddenly someone yelled out and I looked towards the bay. There was a great flame where the plane plunged in and I saw part of the plane still in the air. It looked like an aileron rolling and spiralling down.”
As Shark 517 had started to pull out of a full power vertical dive, the horrified observers saw the upper wing twist and break up, and the aircraft crash into the sea. The three Sqdrn members on board were the first airmen to lose their lives in a crash of an RCAF Shark.
Sharks #519 and #521 were immediately flown to No. 3 Repair Depot Vancouver where an inspection of the upper wing revealed rib buckling and main spar movement. The remainder of Alliford Bay’s Sharks were ferried to Vancouver for modification, leaving #6 BR Squadron with one aircraft on strength – a single Norseman Utility aircraft.
The decision to attach two-foot strengthening sections to the upper wing spars at the points where the interplane struts were joined to them, was time consuming. The wing had to be stripped, which meant a great deal of stitching, doping, and fabric work. Despite #3 RD personnel working three shifts and unusual amount of overtime, it was months before all Sharks were completed. The strengthened sections prevented any recurrence of the upper wing weakness, but never again were RCAF Sharks used as dive-bombers.
Tommy Taylor; Pat Miller (deceased); Tommy Cousins;
John Moyles.
Winnipeg Reunion 1992 Shark men
All!
|
Readers who want to read more about this event might be interested in perusing MY RECOLLECTION OF THE CRASH OF SHARK 517 by W. T. Graham 
My next door neighbour, Bill Graham, and I created this Web page for our site awhile back. |
Charley Yule
Taken from the NEWS section of the Legion Magazine, November/December, 2001. #10 B&G at Mount Pleasant, PEI is where I took my Gunnery Training.
Although hard to imagine today amid the pastoral settings of this rural farming community around Summerside, PEI, Prince County was a main strategic zone for the Atlantic region during the war years, supporting four air installations of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
One of these was #10 Bombing & Gunnery School at Mount Pleasant which, at the peak of it's wartime service, boasted paved runways; barracks that in 1944 housed about 1800 personnel; a firing range; a bus service; and a newspaper.
The other installations were at the now-closed Canadian Forces Base in Summerside, the emergency landing strip at Wellington and the radar base at Tignish.
All are gone now, and mostly forgotten. The former CFB Summerside has been closed and turned over to private industry. Nothing remains at Mount Pleasant, not even the huge concrete abutments filled with tons of sands required to absorb spent rounds that had been used on the firing range. A small abandoned hangar is the only building on the site, used in the past by a local flying club.
Personal memories of the Mount Pleasant airbase were not enough for some RCAF vets. Something needed to be done to honour and remember the 98 young airmen who died while stationed on PEI during the war, including the 22 who died while stationed at Mount Pleasant. Most of these deaths were the result of aircraft crashes, and a few were caused by ground accidents.
With the support of the City of Summerside, the RCAF Association, The Legion Branches in Summerside and Ellerslie, the PEI Government and the Canada Millennium Partnership Program, a monument was erected in Summerside's Memorial Square alongside the cenotaph.
The east side of the monument bears the names of the 44 who died while stationed Charlottetown. A picture of an Anson aircraft tops the list. On the west side, center, are the 22 who died while at Mount Pleasant, with a picture of a Bolingbroke on the top face. To the left are the 15 who died while at one of the units in Summerside, and a picture of a Harvard aircraft at the top, while the right side bears 17 names of those killed while serving in another Summerside units. There is a picture of an Anson on the top face.
