It’s almost May 5, and almost time to resurrect Coldfire’s magnificent thread. I’d like to do the honours this year. I know it’s two days early, but I will be travelling this week and won’t have a chance to write this later, and this year is particularly important to me.
Last week my other grandfather - not the one on Page 2 or 3 of this thread, but my maternal grandfather - died after a battle with cancer. He was 85 years old. We buried him Monday, and I gave the eulogy. (this post isn’t the eulogy I gave.) That the sixtieth anniversary of the war was almost upon us was not lost upon me.
My Grandpa had a horrible childhood. His parents married too young and divorced, a rarity for Catholics back then, and he was shuffled from house to house, relative to relative. He lived in maybe five entirely difference provinces or states before he turned 18. He was apprenticed to a tool and die maker but after a year or so of war decided he’d rather fight Germans, and so he went off and joined the RCAF.
He was trained as a pilot, commissioned as an officer. Shortly afterwards he met a young lady who would become his wife, my grandmother, and they married in August 1943. Four weeks after they married, he was sent to Europe to fight, not to return for 18 months.
He was assigned to 427 Squadron, the Lions, a squadron of Halifax heavy bombers based out of Leeming (by the time he arrived, anyway; previously they’d flown Wellingtons) as a bombardier (which in a Halifax also meant you were the co pilot.) The squadron was one of the most travelled and successful in Bomber Command, flying innumerable sorties. They were presented with a lion cub by Churchill himself, and given a bronze lion statue by MGM.
Here is his crew; my Grandpa is back row, on the very left.
http://www.rcaf.com/6group/427crewpics/pages/427SQDNcrew44.htm
My Grandpa’s crew spent some time training, itself a dangerous profession. On one occasion they went out on a navigation exercise and somehow lost their way and ended up in Ireland. Fortunately the Irish decided not to intern them.
His crew ended up flying 36 combat missions throughout Europe. They bombed German cities, rail yards, and laid mines in the North Sea and in front of German ports. They were shot, flakked, and once collided with a German fighter; they lost parts of their tail, wings, engines shot out, the fuselaged holed. And yet not one of the seven men inthe crew was ever so much as nicked by a peice of flak, not one bruise, not one scratch. Since one in three Canadian airmen in Bomber Command were killed, wounded or captured, that is something of a miracle.
Grandpa told me that there were a few missions, dropping incendiaries, when the heat from the fires would be such that he would be sweating buckets in his flight jacket. Once a friend’s plane returned seemingly intact, but he saw that a cannon shell had penetrated the rear turret and blown his friend up, and he had to be washed from the turret with a hose and buckets. Once a German fighter was right under their nose, and he shot a long burst into the cockpit, and he could see the inside of the cockpit exploding in blood and metal, and the plane spiralled to the earth.
On another occasion their bomb bay refused to release the mines inside it. You couldn’t land with bombs in the bay, so they circled while Grandpa and the flight engineer crawled into the open bay and released the mines with hammers and wrenches. It took twenty or thirty hair-raising minutes. Upon returning they found that the rest of the squadron, which had gone home without them, had been set upon by German fighters and suffered heavy losses.
In a morbid twist, any crew that used a plane after they’d been done with it was lost - they soon became known as the “Jinx Crew.” In an equally bizarre twist, he was at 85 years old the first of the entire crew to die. What’re the odds of seven men living to be that old?
After the war Grandpa served the air force for 23 years in a variety of mechanical jobs. It only took three or four years for the really bad nightmares and shakes to go away. He retired from that and worked for the province, and retired from that, and spent 22 years of retirement puttering around his hobbies - computers, radios, and things of that nature. The computer I am typing this on was built by his hand. He raised a daughter, who he loved more than anything in the world, and helped to raise his two grandchildren.
There was nothing superhuman or amazing about my grandfather. He was a quiet, dignified, working class man. He was very, very smart, but shy, and really only opened up with us - my Grandma, my parents, me and my sister, and eventually my wife, who he treated as a granddaughter. He never really got much into the whole Legion thing - he was a member, but not enthusiastically, and never did Remembrance Day stuff. He mostly liked to be at home with his family and his gadgets, and to fall asleep in front of his one of his many TVs.
He was, in short, an ordinary guy. A very good man, a man who loved his family,but an ordinary guy all the same.
But… he was an ordinary guy who, just because it had to be done, left his wife and his country behind to go to the other side of the world and fight what were, literally, the forces of evil. An ordinary guy who got into a “plane” that, to me, looks like the crate you might ship a real plane in, that rattled and lumbered across a sky of unending terror and danger in the face of a determined foe. Thirty six times. How could he do that? I guess it’s possible because millions did. But he did it, and we cannot eb grateful enough.
And then he went back to Canada, and led his quiet life, and died. There was no tragedy in this; what else could you ask of a life? He outlived most men, had a loving family, raised himself up from absolutely nothing, with no education and no support, to make his own money and live a comfortable lifestyle and want for nothing. He saw Europe (not just from when he was dropping bombs on it - they lived in Germany, of all places, on assignment with NATO, and there made fast friends among those who had once been their enemies) and all of Canada and the USA. He died surrounded by his family, and sick as he was it was time. An ordinary but happy life. But make no mistake about it; for that service long ago, he was a hero.
How many others are there? Even as we lose them, quite a few are still around, old men now, shuffling about the twilight of their ordinary lives, some parts good and bad, you see them all over. And like my Grandpa long ago they demonstrated a bravery and endured suffering and horrors I couldn’t even begin to imagine, not to cleanse their ethnics rivals or to grab loot or for conquest of one sort or another, but as players in the greatest crusade ever fought to free other human beings. The magnitude of what these ordinary men did cannot possibly be overstated, and my Grandpa was one of them.
At this point, I have to stop typing, because I can barely see the screen.
Yes, bicycles indeed.