My grandfathers were war heroes.
My paternal grandfather was a pilot trainer in Canada during the war. He bugged and bugged the RCAF to get overseas and into combat, and in early 1944 they finally let him. He was assigned to a Tempest squadron in Britain, I don’t recall which one.
The Tempest was the ultimate evolution of the prop fighter plane, a huge, fast, powerful fighter that could blow anything out of the sky or off the ground. He loved it. First he was assigned to shoot down V-1 buzz bombs. The buzz bombs were too fast to catch in normal level flight, so they’d patrol over the Channel looking for them. When the buzz bombs came along they’d time a swooping dive towards them so that the speed of the dive pulled them alongside for a moment; then they’d try to knock them down with their wings, which might sound risky but it was a heck of a lot safer than firing cannons at a gigantic bomb. He knocked a few down that way.
As the Allied armies began to sweep over western Europe, his squadron began attacking targets on the ground. He would shoot at trains a lot, using rockets and cannons to knock them off the tracks. He only once ever saw a German fighter plane - the Luftwaffe was more or less annihilated outside of Germany by that time.
One day, while attacking a train, his Tempest had its underbelly shot out by an AA gun. Too low to bail out, he was forced to crash land his plane in a field. Surviving, he jumped out and ran from pursuing German troops. He hid in a forest and later happened across some Dutch people who brought him to a Resistance house. There he met Paul Van Der Aarde, a young man in the Dutch resistance, who took him in.
For some months he served with the Resistance, running sabotage missions, finding other pilots, ambushing Germans, cutting supply lines, fighting almost nonstop. There was little food, so they ate grass and roots and whatever else could be found. He lost weight at a chronic pace. Not once did he suggest leaving them, though. He figured the Allies would be there soon enough.
One day he and Paul were at a house picking up some supplies when a platoon of German troops moved in on them, alerted to their presence. My grandfather held them off with a submachine gun, yelling at Paul to get out and run away. Paul stepped out of the house, empied his entire magazine, killing two Germans, and ran like hell. The German bullets came so close that his coat, which billowed out as he ran, had bullet holes in it. My grandfather surrendered after Paul was gone.
Being an Allied pilot without a uniform, he was a spy, and so was to be executed. Paul, however, had not given up on him, and the Allied army was drawing near. He snuck out of town and fled to the Allied lines; the Americans were advancing in force, and he told them an Allied pilot was to be shot in the morning. The next morning the Americans were on the doorstep of town and sent in an officer under flag of truce who politely informed the German commander that no German in the town would live to see the end of the war if the pilot was not released. My grandfather was released moments from the scheduled execution.
My grandfather, who weighed 180 going into the war, weighed 110 at that point. None of his uniforms fit and he was relieved from active duty because he was so weak.
He never spoke to Paul again; life was like that, you know. They made great friends, brothers in arms, and then you returned to a regular life and… it just happened. My grandfather served with distinction in the air force for many years afterwards, flying Sabre fighters, eventually graduating to Argus submarine killers. He died in 1982. A few years after that Paul came to Canada looking for him, and it was too late. But what do you know… Paul’s granddaughter and my cousin fell in love.
Isn’t that something?
My OTHER grandfather, my mother’s father, was a poor kid from Hamilton. His family was a mess. He went to stay with relatives in Detroit when he was a kid and can still tell you stories about the old Tigers. He watched Goose Goslin win the World Series for the Tigers in 1935. Once, Hank Greenberg threatened to beat the shit out of him for touching his car. Grandpa is very proud of having been threatened by a Hall of Famer.
When war broke out he joined the RCAF, too. He was assigned to heavy bombers; 427 Squadron. At first they were outfitted with Wellington heavy bombers, which were obsolete pretty much from the time they rolled off the assembly line. They had a habit of leaking fuel and exploding. Many of my grandfather’s friends simply vanished on training missions, probably blown to smithereens.
The squadron switched to Halifax bombers in 1943 and began really heavy operations. My grandfather was the copilot, which meant he was also the bombardier. Curiously, their first pilot kept asking him to fly the plane while he “checked on a few things.” As it turned out the “Few things” were bottles of gin. They got a new pilot.
They did everything. They bombed German targets, they bombed railways, they laid mines at sea. My grandfather flew an amazing 35 missions; 17 of them were in daylight. Several were over Germany, including a number of firebombing raids. Once they bombed Hamburg and my grandfather said that at 20,000 feet, where it was normally -20 degrees, he was so hot from the flames of the burning city that he was sweating and took off his jacket.
On one mission they were to drop mines off Kiel. Six bombers flew in unopposed and dropped their mines, but my grandfather’s plane couldn’t drop them; something was wrong with the bomb release in the bomb bay. Flying in circles, frustrated, they told the flight leader to head back and they’d be along once they could get the mines to drop. (They couldn’t land with bombs aboard then.) They had to pry the release open with wrenches to drop the mines, but after 20 minutes managed to get them out and fly back.
The other planes had been ambushed by a flight of German fighters and had all been destroyed. The busted bomb release saved their lives.
The worst ones were his friends who died but the planes came back. Many of his friends were blown to giblets inside their planes. Cannon shells blew off arms, legs, heads. Men were splattered all over the insides of turrets. Kids barely out of their teens had to be removed from their planes with buckets and sponges. The casualty rate in Allied bomber squadrons was appalling; in the RCAF, one in three men in bomber crews in 1943-1944 died or went missing. Still they soldiered on; there was no other way to fight Hitler until the invasion, and the Germans were being worn down even worse. What could they do? My grandfather, a quiet, gentle man who had never even gotten into a fight as a kid and who liked to spend time alone reading and with his family, just kept going on.
He was the only guy in the crew to shoot down a German fighter. While under fighter attack over Germany a Bf-109 was flying underneath their bomber, lining up a bomber in front of them. His .303 couldn’t pivot down that far so he called to the pilot to nose the bomber down so he could shoot at it. He put a burst into the German’s cockpit. The plane was so close he could see the German’s blood on the glass after he shot him. The plane corkscrewed to the ground. My grandfather’s words were heavy when he told me that story, and even as a kid I could tell he always wished he’s hit the engine or something so the German could have bailed out.
His crew was one of the first original 427 crews to survive 35 missions, the tour of duty length. Amidst the blood and horror and almost constant casualties, not one member of his crew was ever scratched. They were called the Jinx Crew because anyone who flew a plane they’d used would promptly be shot down, but they were bulletproof.
For years afterwards, he would wake up screaming.
They had good times though. MGM, the move studio, adopted the squadron and Lana Turner visited them at their base in Leeming. They adopted a lion cub that was supposed to belong to Churchill himself (427’s coat of arms has a lion on it.)
When I joined the Army in 1989, my boot camp was on the Mattawa Plains at CFB Petawawa, north of Ottawa. The first morning we went running for PT up the road, and there was a helicopter squadron not 1500 yards from our camp. It was 427 Squadron. The very same.
After the war he left the air force and then rejoined. In the 1950s he was assigned to, of all places, Germany. They chose to live in town among the Germans, and learned to speak the language. He used to joke that he must have been fighting robots during the war because he never could find a German who would admit to having fought on the Western front. Yet not once did he ever near an iota of ill will towards them.
“They’re just like us,” he’d tell me, “kind, generous people. They made a mistake. What’s past is past.”
I am not sure I would be so forgiving.
Later he joined the Ministry of Transportation and audited trucking companies. Now he’s retired and loves computers, DVD players, and gadgetry of all kinds.
So that is what my grandfathers did. My grandmothers are a whole 'nother message. 
