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It was Steve McQueen who helped Murray Bowen open up about his war experiences.
Bowen was a 20-year-old rear gunner and already a combat veteran when his RAF Wellington bomber took off with nearly 400 others on a bombing raid to Berlin on Nov. 7, 1941. But bad weather and bad planning turned the raid into a disaster. Nearly 40 aircraft, including Bowen’s, were lost to the storms and freezing rain.
In the panic to abandon the doomed plane, Bowen somehow got his leg trapped in the bomber’s rear gun turret. He made it out, parachuting into a farmer’s field with a bad strain and, in his own words, “in none too good a condition for escaping.”
What followed were nearly four hard years as a prisoner of war, including more than a year at the famous Stalag Luft III, site of the Great Escape,
Bowen died in his sleep in Ottawa on Feb. 23. He was 93.
“He never spoke about the war at all, but my mom said that when the movie The Great Escape came out, he decided he was going to take the family to go and see it,” said his granddaughter, Samantha Ladell, who eulogized her grandfather at his funeral. “It wasn’t until after he’d seen that that he started to speak about the war.”
Like McQueen’s “Cooler King” character in the 1963 Hollywood movie, Bowen spent time in solitary confinement. He passed the time solving math problems or playing imaginary chess games in his head, Ladell said.
Planning and construction of the three escape tunnels at Stalag Luft III — nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry — began in March 1943, but Bowen was transferred out of the camp that July, nine months before the actual escape.
“He’d talk about tunnelling and he said it was exactly like in the movie,” Ladell said. “They would dig and come out and put the dirt in their pants and walk around and let it out around the yard.”
Murray Gerald Bowen was born Sept. 21, 1921 in Toronto, the son of a tin smith and First World War veteran who later moved the family to Montreal and worked as a postman. His mother was a school teacher.
Bowen was working as a clerk when he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force on July 1, 1940. Shipped overseas, he was promoted to sergeant and posted to 99 Squadron, Royal Air Force, as an air gunner. He’d flown more than two dozen sorties before his plane was downed and he was captured.
In a submission to the War Claims Commission made in 1954, Bowen described the conditions he and the other POWs endured.
“Living conditions were very primitive with little food, inadequate clothing and bedding, cold buildings and harsh treatment from the enemy,” he wrote.
In all, Bowen was held in six different camps, and endured several brutal forced marches and train journeys in cattle cars jam-packed with prisoners.
“Very little food, exposure to the cold and dampness by being forced to sleep in the open without adequate clothing,” he wrote of one trek in the fierce winter of 1945 when tens of thousands of POWs were marched for weeks at a time, westward and away from the advancing Soviet Army. “Very little medical attention and no relief from chronic dysentery for entire time of march … forced to march with little or no rest for many kilometres a day and in bad weather without adequate footgear.”
On another march “we had our few personal belongings cut from our backs with bayonets and prodded severely to keep us going on the double.”
“They were death marches,” Ladell said. “There’s no other way to describe them.”
She remembers her grandfather talking about seeing “hundreds of dead bodies stacked on top of each other” during his time as a POW.
Bowen was finally liberated in April 1945 by an advancing British armoured unit from a camp near the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
He arrived home in Montreal by train late one night and faced an immediate choice: Go see his mother or first visit Phyllis, the sweetheart he’d left behind in Canada. Romance won. Six months later, in June 1945, he and Phyllis were married. Their union lasted 62 years and produced two daughters, Dawn and Cheryl, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Murray Gerald Bowen in his RCAF uniform.
Bowen obtained a degree in forestry (something he had begun studying as POW) and worked in New Brunswick and at the forestry station in Petawawa before moving to Ottawa in 1969 to work for the Canadian Forestry Service.
As a father, Bowen was a strict disciplinarian — “a serious and haunted man” Ladell wrote in her eulogy. But he mellowed as he aged, and she remembers her grandfather as “funny, affectionate and sensitive.” On good days, he would laugh and joke with strangers. Bad days he would dismiss by saying, “At least I’m not in Germany.”
He took up ham radio as a hobby, teaching himself Morse code and listening to broadcasts from around the world. He was a dedicated Mason and Shriner. After Phyllis became ill with rheumatoid arthritis, he spent years as her devoted caregiver until he too grew ill and began suffering from dementia.
The disease robbed him of recent memories, but gave no respite from the nightmare of his war, Ladell said.
“He’d say, ‘I can’t remember what I did yesterday, but I remember Germany. Why can’t I forget that?”
bcrawford@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
Bowen was a 20-year-old rear gunner and already a combat veteran when his RAF Wellington bomber took off with nearly 400 others on a bombing raid to Berlin on Nov. 7, 1941. But bad weather and bad planning turned the raid into a disaster. Nearly 40 aircraft, including Bowen’s, were lost to the storms and freezing rain.
In the panic to abandon the doomed plane, Bowen somehow got his leg trapped in the bomber’s rear gun turret. He made it out, parachuting into a farmer’s field with a bad strain and, in his own words, “in none too good a condition for escaping.”
What followed were nearly four hard years as a prisoner of war, including more than a year at the famous Stalag Luft III, site of the Great Escape,
Bowen died in his sleep in Ottawa on Feb. 23. He was 93.
“He never spoke about the war at all, but my mom said that when the movie The Great Escape came out, he decided he was going to take the family to go and see it,” said his granddaughter, Samantha Ladell, who eulogized her grandfather at his funeral. “It wasn’t until after he’d seen that that he started to speak about the war.”
Like McQueen’s “Cooler King” character in the 1963 Hollywood movie, Bowen spent time in solitary confinement. He passed the time solving math problems or playing imaginary chess games in his head, Ladell said.
Planning and construction of the three escape tunnels at Stalag Luft III — nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry — began in March 1943, but Bowen was transferred out of the camp that July, nine months before the actual escape.
“He’d talk about tunnelling and he said it was exactly like in the movie,” Ladell said. “They would dig and come out and put the dirt in their pants and walk around and let it out around the yard.”
• • •
Murray Gerald Bowen was born Sept. 21, 1921 in Toronto, the son of a tin smith and First World War veteran who later moved the family to Montreal and worked as a postman. His mother was a school teacher.
Bowen was working as a clerk when he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force on July 1, 1940. Shipped overseas, he was promoted to sergeant and posted to 99 Squadron, Royal Air Force, as an air gunner. He’d flown more than two dozen sorties before his plane was downed and he was captured.
In a submission to the War Claims Commission made in 1954, Bowen described the conditions he and the other POWs endured.
“Living conditions were very primitive with little food, inadequate clothing and bedding, cold buildings and harsh treatment from the enemy,” he wrote.
In all, Bowen was held in six different camps, and endured several brutal forced marches and train journeys in cattle cars jam-packed with prisoners.
“Very little food, exposure to the cold and dampness by being forced to sleep in the open without adequate clothing,” he wrote of one trek in the fierce winter of 1945 when tens of thousands of POWs were marched for weeks at a time, westward and away from the advancing Soviet Army. “Very little medical attention and no relief from chronic dysentery for entire time of march … forced to march with little or no rest for many kilometres a day and in bad weather without adequate footgear.”
On another march “we had our few personal belongings cut from our backs with bayonets and prodded severely to keep us going on the double.”
“They were death marches,” Ladell said. “There’s no other way to describe them.”
She remembers her grandfather talking about seeing “hundreds of dead bodies stacked on top of each other” during his time as a POW.
Bowen was finally liberated in April 1945 by an advancing British armoured unit from a camp near the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
He arrived home in Montreal by train late one night and faced an immediate choice: Go see his mother or first visit Phyllis, the sweetheart he’d left behind in Canada. Romance won. Six months later, in June 1945, he and Phyllis were married. Their union lasted 62 years and produced two daughters, Dawn and Cheryl, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Murray Gerald Bowen in his RCAF uniform.
Bowen obtained a degree in forestry (something he had begun studying as POW) and worked in New Brunswick and at the forestry station in Petawawa before moving to Ottawa in 1969 to work for the Canadian Forestry Service.
As a father, Bowen was a strict disciplinarian — “a serious and haunted man” Ladell wrote in her eulogy. But he mellowed as he aged, and she remembers her grandfather as “funny, affectionate and sensitive.” On good days, he would laugh and joke with strangers. Bad days he would dismiss by saying, “At least I’m not in Germany.”
He took up ham radio as a hobby, teaching himself Morse code and listening to broadcasts from around the world. He was a dedicated Mason and Shriner. After Phyllis became ill with rheumatoid arthritis, he spent years as her devoted caregiver until he too grew ill and began suffering from dementia.
The disease robbed him of recent memories, but gave no respite from the nightmare of his war, Ladell said.
“He’d say, ‘I can’t remember what I did yesterday, but I remember Germany. Why can’t I forget that?”
bcrawford@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
