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In a corner of the house where I grew up, a framed black and white photograph sat on an austere living room bookcase.
The serious young man in the Second World War uniform was displayed off to one side, behind a large chair and easy to miss. He wasn’t mentioned often, perhaps in keeping with the fact that my father’s years in India and what was then Burma with the RCAF weren’t talked about either.
But at least we heard a few details about my father’s wartime years. He would mention snippets of the sights and sounds of 1940s India, especially. I know he liked India.
The portrait in the corner was of Uncle George, my mother’s brother who didn’t come back. I knew little about him until a few years ago when my mother sold her house and my wife became the keeper of George’s letters home — letters whose existence was a surprise to me.
For the first time since 1942, George had a new audience.
War stories are, of course, always told by those who come home alive. There are stories of how the enemy almost got them but how they nursed their aircraft to safety or crawled through the mud and made it home — wounded perhaps, but always alive.
Scientists have named this “survivor bias,” meaning that we pay more attention to people and things that succeed, or make it through a selection process, than to those who don’t — more attention for an NHL star than to all the players who never make it beyond the minors.
So we honour those who died, but the bigger impression is often made by those who came home.
These surviving story-tellers are the ones who live to produce postwar children, and their kids remember — at least sometimes — their stories of adventure. Crucially, the survivors always tell their stories in the context of those who saw the end of war, who know How It All Turned Out.
My Uncle George did not see the end. He died in a training accident in 1942 when the aircraft on which he was the “observer” went into a spin over the Irish Sea.
Today he tells his story anyway.
Related
_____
George King didn’t make it home, but his letters offer insight into the day-to-day struggles of a young man trying to make it through extraordinary times.
George King was born in 1916 in Wingham, which is also the hometown of writer Alice Munro. It’s a typical town in southwestern Ontario farm country: Houses of pale yellow brick and not quite 3,000 people. I have seen some of the 10-inch airplanes he carved from odd pieces of wood when he was young; he took the trouble to paint them and to carve and mount propellers.
He didn’t go to university, although his two older sisters did. And when war broke out, he joined the Canadian Army, expecting to serve in the artillery — until he got a chance to join the RCAF.
All this I knew from my mother, his sister. Then I saw the letters.
After transferring to the RCAF in Toronto, he enjoys the camaraderie and good food. Some of his group of 1,000 men are skilled musicians and put on shows. He envies the experienced Norwegian pilots training over Toronto Harbour, and gleefully escapes detection when he accidentally uses a shower with a disconnected drain. “The result was a shower bath for some of the chaps in bunks on the floor beneath,” he writes home. “Luckily I got out in time before they discovered what the trouble was.”
His math, he acknowledges, needs some work. Observers were the navigators and in 1941 they had to work out their position with pen and paper from maps, watches, the sun and the stars. Poor math was a problem that dogged George through his training in Cape Breton, the Eastern Townships and New Brunswick.
George was among the thousands of air crew members trained in Canada through the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. The 131,000 men and women were scattered across Central and Eastern Canada during the course of the war, quartered wherever there was space, including the Automotive Building at the Canadian National Exhibition (George’s first stop), and plenty of YMCAs.
He was 24 years old, and the spring of 1941 was a bad time for the Allies: Rommel was attacking Tobruk; the U-boats were sinking huge numbers of ships; Germany invaded and captured Crete; the United States was not yet in the war.
Over the next six months George stands on guard duty in the snow, does classroom work, worries about his family store’s overdrawn bank account, and asks his relatives for one pair of mitts for Christmas of 1941 — “the kind you can slip your fingers out of, through that opening in the palm. That’s all. Any suggestions from your end of the line?”
That winter they send him to England in a transport so packed that men’s hammocks hang above the mess tables.
He ends up in Silloth, in England’s northwest, a town on the Irish Sea. George is attached to the Royal Air Force and they train him as an observer in Hudsons — light bombers with two engines and a crew of four, often used for coastal patrols.
The trainees of Silloth have one fatal training accident after another. Aircraft fly into hillsides in cloud or at night; they crash on landing; and one pilot takes off with a bolt still holding an aileron in place, fatally locking the controls. There’s one midair collision.
Training airmen was dangerous everywhere; while 131,000 graduated in Canada, 856 others died in crashes trying to learn their jobs.
George is first billeted in a private home. He writes of sleeping on a straw mattresses in an attic so cold he sleeps in his winter flying gear. The worst, he says, is an elderly woman boarding downstairs because her home had been bombed.
“Just like an old vulture,” George grumbles in a February letter to his sister, Kate: “She couldn’t get it off her chest fast enough how happy she was that her nephew was in the army. ‘You don’t last very long in the air force.'”
Food is scarce when he moves into the barracks. He doesn’t like England but concludes, “We’re here because we’re here.”
It says a lot about George, and perhaps the time and the people, that he can be so exasperated with the military, especially with training but never second-guesses his decision to join up. There’s never a suggestion that is the wrong choice. In his mind, it isn’t a choice at all.
March 8, 1942:
“I dined on potatoes and gravy, bread and jam. That’s the regular evening meal. You eat quantities of the stuff but are never satisfied,” he writes to Kate.
His detail in describing a young airman’s life is striking: He tells about holes in socks, about wearing a respirator on exercises, about looking for a Protestant church in rural Quebec, about bunks and cold showers and lost luggage on a train trip to Glasgow.
More alarming is his continuing struggle with navigation. Less than three months before he is to enter regular operations, he’s a poor navigator — but the boy who carved airplanes still wants to be in the sky.
“I’m not enthralled with flying. Every trip sees me dashing around the aircraft in a continual dither. I can do more fool things than one would think possible. There is though a certain attraction for which I can’t account. It will be a relief when it’s over though.”
If his letters are accurate, he is a pretty hopeless navigator. His math had once been sound but by his mid-20s he’s forgotten much of it, and he repeats this theme again and again. But it doesn’t hold him back; the RAF needs men, and they are all pushed through the system.
March 18, 1942:
“I sure messed up my studies (classroom navigation work) this past week,” he writes. “The knack of putting down on paper what I know seems to have left me. However there is no danger of being washed out now…
“Love, George.
“PS: I do love Peanut Butter or a package of CHEESE.”
The family writes faithfully, but packages — for instance, a pair of binoculars — sometimes go missing suspiciously. You can tell he misses his hometown and has miserable moments that must be hard for the family to read about.
But what about the larger war? Reading George’s letters, it’s easy to be caught up in the day-to-day life of a 25-year-old airman: the cold, the worrying about exams, the boredom tinged with stress and the expectation of being transferred, within weeks, to an operational squadron.
News was piecemeal, but these men did try to put together a picture — and tried to imagine their place within it for the coming years. There was little sense of certainty or direction. They knew the Americans were a huge new force on their side but had no idea how long the war would last or where they would be told to fight.
Looking back today we have to luxury of knowing when the D-Day invasion took place and when the war finally ended, which allows us to fit each event into a context. These men had no such perspective.
Letters from George King home to his family in Ontario.
“Eastern news isn’t too good,” George reports in the spring of 1942, despite some U.S. success in the Pacific that he doesn’t identify. “The rest of the boys want to head that way if possible. Hope you don’t presume I’m there already. When I wrote before it looked very much that way.”
And the theme of difficulties with flying continues, though he likes his three Australian crewmates and respects the 22-year-old pilot’s skill.
“Flying here packs a lot of thrills and chills in it even though it is training. You don’t require any aerobatics at the end of a trip. Tuesday we got messed up in a (censored). One trip like that will last me a lifetime. Coastal command (looking for German ships) is no cinch. … The European coast is decidedly unhealthy when it comes to reconnaissance.
“I’ll drop Wes (his sister’s brother-in-law) a line one of these days. He’s in bomber command, is he not? Looks as if I’m in for coastal work. Perhaps one of these days I’ll be taking a crack at the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (German battleships). Last week’s Channel battle was rather a mess on our part.”
May 5, 1942:
“Wonder where I’ll be when you receive this. Perhaps on leave or perhaps getting ready for one of my ops trips. Boy oh boy, this training throws the odd scare into you. Saturday gave us a bad one. Came in to land when the hydraulic system proceeded to act up. We touched down a bit too fast and then ballooned up and down a couple of times while our airspeed dropped to about sixty mph. These kites stall at sixty-five. Bob certainly did a real job to control her.
“It’s funny how things affect you. All I remember is the expression on the faces of some chaps on the ground as we roared over them. We careened over a hangar by inches (just like the movies) and then the motors took hold and away we went. Did I ever work to operate the hand hydraulic pump. We felt a bit weak afterwards. Once in a lifetime is plenty for that. I’ll just keep hoping I’m lucky enough to get through.”
George was at heart a fun-loving kid. He writes home about going to dances, about meeting Scottish girls (the base was near the border; he says that he and all the Canadian boys were more welcome in Scotland than in England); he takes a smiling photo of himself in front of a sign prohibiting photos. He’s grateful when the family sends him a book.
And he flies to Ireland, by accident. I’ll let him take over at the point where the weather is bad, they decide to climb above the low cloud and his watch — vital for navigation — stops.
“My calculations indicated one position but on peering down through a break in the clouds Bob (the pilot) and I thought we were someplace else. My calculations for once were approximately correct. However as the fates would have it I passed them up for intuition. Finally we located a drome (airfield). Couldn’t locate it on a map but we knew it was British (i.e. Northern Ireland) and we finally decided to come down. Quite a surprise to end up in the land of the shamrock.”
The radio was wonky and hours later their RAF base in England wrote them off as missing, presumed dead. George got home to find his friends ready to divide up his belongings. “They certainly are optimists,” he writes.
That was May 21. Three days later they fly toward Ireland again. This time they really don’t come back.
In Canada, his two older sisters and mother hoped at least his body would be found. Kate offered to pay the Red Cross to organize a search, but he remained missing. There’s a stone with his name in the Wingham cemetery beside his parents and two sisters.
Millions of words have been written in analyses of Canada’s wars. Certainly it’s easy to spout broad-brush theories about the rise and fall of powers, or the dogma that we all became Canadians at Vimy Ridge.
However I don’t see any of this in George’s letters and I wonder whether it’s a modern indulgence to look back in comfort. George and his friends were busy with the balky hydraulics and difficult navigation that made up ordinary reality.
His letters are an insight not into the dramatic turning points of the war, but into day-by-day training and the lives of those who made such events possible.
I wonder whether he would have anything in common with today’s armchair tacticians. I suspect he wouldn’t, but I am sure he would still want to fly.
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
The serious young man in the Second World War uniform was displayed off to one side, behind a large chair and easy to miss. He wasn’t mentioned often, perhaps in keeping with the fact that my father’s years in India and what was then Burma with the RCAF weren’t talked about either.
But at least we heard a few details about my father’s wartime years. He would mention snippets of the sights and sounds of 1940s India, especially. I know he liked India.
The portrait in the corner was of Uncle George, my mother’s brother who didn’t come back. I knew little about him until a few years ago when my mother sold her house and my wife became the keeper of George’s letters home — letters whose existence was a surprise to me.
For the first time since 1942, George had a new audience.
War stories are, of course, always told by those who come home alive. There are stories of how the enemy almost got them but how they nursed their aircraft to safety or crawled through the mud and made it home — wounded perhaps, but always alive.
Scientists have named this “survivor bias,” meaning that we pay more attention to people and things that succeed, or make it through a selection process, than to those who don’t — more attention for an NHL star than to all the players who never make it beyond the minors.
So we honour those who died, but the bigger impression is often made by those who came home.
These surviving story-tellers are the ones who live to produce postwar children, and their kids remember — at least sometimes — their stories of adventure. Crucially, the survivors always tell their stories in the context of those who saw the end of war, who know How It All Turned Out.
My Uncle George did not see the end. He died in a training accident in 1942 when the aircraft on which he was the “observer” went into a spin over the Irish Sea.
Today he tells his story anyway.
Related
_____
George King didn’t make it home, but his letters offer insight into the day-to-day struggles of a young man trying to make it through extraordinary times.
George King was born in 1916 in Wingham, which is also the hometown of writer Alice Munro. It’s a typical town in southwestern Ontario farm country: Houses of pale yellow brick and not quite 3,000 people. I have seen some of the 10-inch airplanes he carved from odd pieces of wood when he was young; he took the trouble to paint them and to carve and mount propellers.
He didn’t go to university, although his two older sisters did. And when war broke out, he joined the Canadian Army, expecting to serve in the artillery — until he got a chance to join the RCAF.
All this I knew from my mother, his sister. Then I saw the letters.
After transferring to the RCAF in Toronto, he enjoys the camaraderie and good food. Some of his group of 1,000 men are skilled musicians and put on shows. He envies the experienced Norwegian pilots training over Toronto Harbour, and gleefully escapes detection when he accidentally uses a shower with a disconnected drain. “The result was a shower bath for some of the chaps in bunks on the floor beneath,” he writes home. “Luckily I got out in time before they discovered what the trouble was.”
His math, he acknowledges, needs some work. Observers were the navigators and in 1941 they had to work out their position with pen and paper from maps, watches, the sun and the stars. Poor math was a problem that dogged George through his training in Cape Breton, the Eastern Townships and New Brunswick.
George was among the thousands of air crew members trained in Canada through the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. The 131,000 men and women were scattered across Central and Eastern Canada during the course of the war, quartered wherever there was space, including the Automotive Building at the Canadian National Exhibition (George’s first stop), and plenty of YMCAs.
He was 24 years old, and the spring of 1941 was a bad time for the Allies: Rommel was attacking Tobruk; the U-boats were sinking huge numbers of ships; Germany invaded and captured Crete; the United States was not yet in the war.
Over the next six months George stands on guard duty in the snow, does classroom work, worries about his family store’s overdrawn bank account, and asks his relatives for one pair of mitts for Christmas of 1941 — “the kind you can slip your fingers out of, through that opening in the palm. That’s all. Any suggestions from your end of the line?”
That winter they send him to England in a transport so packed that men’s hammocks hang above the mess tables.
He ends up in Silloth, in England’s northwest, a town on the Irish Sea. George is attached to the Royal Air Force and they train him as an observer in Hudsons — light bombers with two engines and a crew of four, often used for coastal patrols.
The trainees of Silloth have one fatal training accident after another. Aircraft fly into hillsides in cloud or at night; they crash on landing; and one pilot takes off with a bolt still holding an aileron in place, fatally locking the controls. There’s one midair collision.
Training airmen was dangerous everywhere; while 131,000 graduated in Canada, 856 others died in crashes trying to learn their jobs.
George is first billeted in a private home. He writes of sleeping on a straw mattresses in an attic so cold he sleeps in his winter flying gear. The worst, he says, is an elderly woman boarding downstairs because her home had been bombed.
“Just like an old vulture,” George grumbles in a February letter to his sister, Kate: “She couldn’t get it off her chest fast enough how happy she was that her nephew was in the army. ‘You don’t last very long in the air force.'”
Food is scarce when he moves into the barracks. He doesn’t like England but concludes, “We’re here because we’re here.”
It says a lot about George, and perhaps the time and the people, that he can be so exasperated with the military, especially with training but never second-guesses his decision to join up. There’s never a suggestion that is the wrong choice. In his mind, it isn’t a choice at all.
March 8, 1942:
“I dined on potatoes and gravy, bread and jam. That’s the regular evening meal. You eat quantities of the stuff but are never satisfied,” he writes to Kate.
His detail in describing a young airman’s life is striking: He tells about holes in socks, about wearing a respirator on exercises, about looking for a Protestant church in rural Quebec, about bunks and cold showers and lost luggage on a train trip to Glasgow.
More alarming is his continuing struggle with navigation. Less than three months before he is to enter regular operations, he’s a poor navigator — but the boy who carved airplanes still wants to be in the sky.
“I’m not enthralled with flying. Every trip sees me dashing around the aircraft in a continual dither. I can do more fool things than one would think possible. There is though a certain attraction for which I can’t account. It will be a relief when it’s over though.”
If his letters are accurate, he is a pretty hopeless navigator. His math had once been sound but by his mid-20s he’s forgotten much of it, and he repeats this theme again and again. But it doesn’t hold him back; the RAF needs men, and they are all pushed through the system.
March 18, 1942:
“I sure messed up my studies (classroom navigation work) this past week,” he writes. “The knack of putting down on paper what I know seems to have left me. However there is no danger of being washed out now…
“Love, George.
“PS: I do love Peanut Butter or a package of CHEESE.”
The family writes faithfully, but packages — for instance, a pair of binoculars — sometimes go missing suspiciously. You can tell he misses his hometown and has miserable moments that must be hard for the family to read about.
But what about the larger war? Reading George’s letters, it’s easy to be caught up in the day-to-day life of a 25-year-old airman: the cold, the worrying about exams, the boredom tinged with stress and the expectation of being transferred, within weeks, to an operational squadron.
News was piecemeal, but these men did try to put together a picture — and tried to imagine their place within it for the coming years. There was little sense of certainty or direction. They knew the Americans were a huge new force on their side but had no idea how long the war would last or where they would be told to fight.
Looking back today we have to luxury of knowing when the D-Day invasion took place and when the war finally ended, which allows us to fit each event into a context. These men had no such perspective.
Letters from George King home to his family in Ontario.
“Eastern news isn’t too good,” George reports in the spring of 1942, despite some U.S. success in the Pacific that he doesn’t identify. “The rest of the boys want to head that way if possible. Hope you don’t presume I’m there already. When I wrote before it looked very much that way.”
And the theme of difficulties with flying continues, though he likes his three Australian crewmates and respects the 22-year-old pilot’s skill.
“Flying here packs a lot of thrills and chills in it even though it is training. You don’t require any aerobatics at the end of a trip. Tuesday we got messed up in a (censored). One trip like that will last me a lifetime. Coastal command (looking for German ships) is no cinch. … The European coast is decidedly unhealthy when it comes to reconnaissance.
“I’ll drop Wes (his sister’s brother-in-law) a line one of these days. He’s in bomber command, is he not? Looks as if I’m in for coastal work. Perhaps one of these days I’ll be taking a crack at the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (German battleships). Last week’s Channel battle was rather a mess on our part.”
May 5, 1942:
“Wonder where I’ll be when you receive this. Perhaps on leave or perhaps getting ready for one of my ops trips. Boy oh boy, this training throws the odd scare into you. Saturday gave us a bad one. Came in to land when the hydraulic system proceeded to act up. We touched down a bit too fast and then ballooned up and down a couple of times while our airspeed dropped to about sixty mph. These kites stall at sixty-five. Bob certainly did a real job to control her.
“It’s funny how things affect you. All I remember is the expression on the faces of some chaps on the ground as we roared over them. We careened over a hangar by inches (just like the movies) and then the motors took hold and away we went. Did I ever work to operate the hand hydraulic pump. We felt a bit weak afterwards. Once in a lifetime is plenty for that. I’ll just keep hoping I’m lucky enough to get through.”
George was at heart a fun-loving kid. He writes home about going to dances, about meeting Scottish girls (the base was near the border; he says that he and all the Canadian boys were more welcome in Scotland than in England); he takes a smiling photo of himself in front of a sign prohibiting photos. He’s grateful when the family sends him a book.
And he flies to Ireland, by accident. I’ll let him take over at the point where the weather is bad, they decide to climb above the low cloud and his watch — vital for navigation — stops.
“My calculations indicated one position but on peering down through a break in the clouds Bob (the pilot) and I thought we were someplace else. My calculations for once were approximately correct. However as the fates would have it I passed them up for intuition. Finally we located a drome (airfield). Couldn’t locate it on a map but we knew it was British (i.e. Northern Ireland) and we finally decided to come down. Quite a surprise to end up in the land of the shamrock.”
The radio was wonky and hours later their RAF base in England wrote them off as missing, presumed dead. George got home to find his friends ready to divide up his belongings. “They certainly are optimists,” he writes.
That was May 21. Three days later they fly toward Ireland again. This time they really don’t come back.
In Canada, his two older sisters and mother hoped at least his body would be found. Kate offered to pay the Red Cross to organize a search, but he remained missing. There’s a stone with his name in the Wingham cemetery beside his parents and two sisters.
Millions of words have been written in analyses of Canada’s wars. Certainly it’s easy to spout broad-brush theories about the rise and fall of powers, or the dogma that we all became Canadians at Vimy Ridge.
However I don’t see any of this in George’s letters and I wonder whether it’s a modern indulgence to look back in comfort. George and his friends were busy with the balky hydraulics and difficult navigation that made up ordinary reality.
His letters are an insight not into the dramatic turning points of the war, but into day-by-day training and the lives of those who made such events possible.
I wonder whether he would have anything in common with today’s armchair tacticians. I suspect he wouldn’t, but I am sure he would still want to fly.
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
