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Flight Sergeant Stanley Spallin never lived to see his only child.
The 20-year-old pilot from Edmonton, Alta., was in one of two fighter planes scrambled late on the morning of Nov. 5, 1942 to intercept enemy aircraft reported over the south coast of England.
Nazi-occupied France was only 34 kilometres away across the Strait of Dover and German planes often raided Allied coastal installations.
At the controls of a Hawker Typhoon, Spallin, a member of Royal Air Force 609 Squadron, flew alongside his section leader, Flight Officer J.C. Wells, north along the coast to Deal. Unable to find the enemy, the two planes were ordered south to Dungeness, which took them over the cliffs of Dover.
The clouds hung low in the sky that day, about 100 feet above the famed white cliffs. Further out to sea, it was raining.
Wells would later report he could see Spallin behind him as he flew out to sea to avoid the barrage balloons that protected Dover Harbour. Defensive measures, the balloons were designed to maim enemy aircraft with the heavy cables that hung beneath them.
Wells subsequently lost sight of Spallin. Only when he landed was he told that his wingmate had flown into the barrage balloons and crashed into Dover Harbour.
“It was not apparent that balloons were flying as they were in cloud,” Wells would later report in a written account of the accident.
Spallin’s plane was never salvaged and his body never recovered.
His story, until Friday, was remembered by a precious few.
But on Remembrance Day, Spallin’s name was issued by a computer algorithm that generates one name every hour for a Twitter account, We Are The Dead, established by the Citizen as an online memorial.
One name is published on the website at 11 minutes past each hour from the list of 119,531 uniformed Canadians who have lost their lives in wartime.
Spallin’s name appeared at 11:11 a.m. on Remembrance Day — a random event that brought his story to Canadians 76 years after his death. A one-day reporting effort, conducted with the help of Citizen readers, revealed that Spallin died in service to his country — just as his own life was about to change in dramatic fashion.
The official report on the plane crash from Spallin’s war service file.
Spallin never had the chance to meet the daughter, Yvonne, who would be born two months after his fatal crash.
Yvonne Holden, 73, now lives in Mount Lehman, just outside Abbotsford, B.C. She was contacted by the Citizen as she prepared to leave her house Friday to lay a wreath for her father at the Mount Lehman cenotaph.
“He was very fun-loving. He played the piano by ear,” she said of her father. “He was the life and soul of a party, from what I understand.”
Spallin met Yvonne’s mother, Irene Carpenter, while stationed at an airbase near her home in Cambridge. Holden’s mother told her she met Spallin at the Dorothy Ballroom on Cambridge’s Hobson Street.
“All the men used to come into Cambridge for fun and games,” Holden said. “There were a lot of fighter stations scattered around East Anglia. Cambridge and Norwich was where they would go for fun if they couldn’t go to London.”
Spallin and Carpenter were a couple for about a year, but did not get married even after she became pregnant in 1942. That fact would complicate Yvonne Holden’s life.
“I think there are a whole lot of people my age in the same position,” Holden said. “It’s something that’s never, ever talked about — is how the illegitimate children of servicemen overseas were treated in the ’50s.”
Holden endured mistreatment even after her mother married her stepfather and she took his last name. “They were small towns. Everybody knew that my mother wasn’t married and had a child, that she had never been married and had a child.”
Her mother left her nothing of Spallin’s except the portrait taken of him before he was sent overseas. Holden moved from England to British Columbia with her husband, John, in 1972, and much of what she has learned about her father came from his Canadian family, whom she contacted by writing to every Spallin in Alberta about 10 years ago.
Among other things, she learned that Spallin’s mother Cecilia had died four years before Holden sent her letters: She had been living in Chilliwack, half an hour’s drive up the Fraser Valley.
“Aunt Cecilia had gotten a letter from Yvonne’s mother and they didn’t know whether to believe her. They were, I guess, suspicious of her motives,” said Debby Was, a Spallin cousin who lives in Edmonton. They never met.
“It was really sad, because that would have been her only grandchild,” Was said.
She and other Spallin cousins had a picnic with Holden in Edmonton after she wrote to them.
Related
“Then we met her and it was so wonderful,” Was said. “As soon as we saw her, we knew she was a Spallin.”
Stanley Spallin was the third son born to an engineer, Joseph Mark Spallin, who’d been born in Minnesota, and Canadian Cecilia Lambert Spallin. The family sprawled. One of his great-uncles, also named Joseph — Stanley was nicknamed Joe himself — had a farm near Masham.
The couple married in 1915 but separated one year after Stanley was born. She raised her two surviving children as a single mother since Stanley’s father did not stay in contact with the family.
Stanley grew up in Chauvin, a small town east of Edmonton, and as a boy, he kept a collection of model airplanes. He played rugby, hockey and baseball.
In 1937, he moved to Edmonton to attend Westmount High School, where he was elected assistant editor of the school yearbook. He loved photography, and he worked part-time as a Safeway grocery store clerk.
His principal, J.G. Niddrie, wrote him a letter of recommendation in June 1940. “It is with pleasure I recommend Stanley Spallin to you as a young man of exceptionally pleasing personality and promise,” Niddrie wrote. “His deportment in and out of school is all that could be desired.”
Spallin used the letter when he went to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force on July 11, 1940 — two weeks before his 18th birthday. He volunteered his services as a pilot.
He was about five feet 10 inches tall and 142 pounds. He had brown eyes, and light brown hair and liked to smoke three or four cigarettes a day.
Flt.-Sgt. Stanley Spallin, as seen in an RAF propaganda film.
He was accepted into the RCAF and entered pilot training in early 1941, finishing 13th out of 62 pilots in his class. His commanding officer described him as alert, determined and confident: “He appears to have plenty of dash… Regardless of youth, he appears to be leader material.”
He trained in Dauphin, Regina and North Battleford before departing Halifax for England in September 1941. He was sent to an operational training unit at RAF Sutton Bridge, and was eventually assigned to 609 Squadron, an RAF fighter squadron that had played a significant role in the Battle of Britain. It had lost many men, though, and took in reinforcements from many countries.
Professor Desmond Morton, the renowned war historian at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, said Spallin’s Hawker Typhoon was an advanced plane for its day. “It could carry a variety of weapons, including rockets. It had very strong wings and a powertrain that really worked,” Morton said.
If a Canadian pilot was assigned to fly one, he said, it was a sign that he was considered good at his job.
After Spallin’s fatal accident, his girlfriend Irene Carpenter wrote to RCAF officials, trying to get confirmation of his death.
Spallin’s mother also wrote to the central depository at RAF Slough, trying to find her son’s movie camera, which had not been returned with his other effects. Spallin would receive $354.37 as a “war service gratuity” for her son’s 689 days in the RCAF, but she really wanted the five or six reels of film that were with the camera.
“These films would be very precious to me,” she said, “knowing the fun my son used to have taking pictures. I know most of these would be taken to please me, so if it is at all possible, would you let me know you have them in your care?”
There’s no indication that the film was ever found.
dreevely@postmedia.com
http://www.twitter.com/davidreevely
aduffy@postmedia.com
http://www.twitter.com/citizenduffy
With files from Citizen staff and online volunteers who helped “crowdsource” the research for this story.
Newspaper clipping photo of Flt.-Sgt. Stanley Herbert Spallin.
查看原文...
The 20-year-old pilot from Edmonton, Alta., was in one of two fighter planes scrambled late on the morning of Nov. 5, 1942 to intercept enemy aircraft reported over the south coast of England.
Nazi-occupied France was only 34 kilometres away across the Strait of Dover and German planes often raided Allied coastal installations.
At the controls of a Hawker Typhoon, Spallin, a member of Royal Air Force 609 Squadron, flew alongside his section leader, Flight Officer J.C. Wells, north along the coast to Deal. Unable to find the enemy, the two planes were ordered south to Dungeness, which took them over the cliffs of Dover.
The clouds hung low in the sky that day, about 100 feet above the famed white cliffs. Further out to sea, it was raining.
Wells would later report he could see Spallin behind him as he flew out to sea to avoid the barrage balloons that protected Dover Harbour. Defensive measures, the balloons were designed to maim enemy aircraft with the heavy cables that hung beneath them.
Wells subsequently lost sight of Spallin. Only when he landed was he told that his wingmate had flown into the barrage balloons and crashed into Dover Harbour.
“It was not apparent that balloons were flying as they were in cloud,” Wells would later report in a written account of the accident.
Spallin’s plane was never salvaged and his body never recovered.
His story, until Friday, was remembered by a precious few.
But on Remembrance Day, Spallin’s name was issued by a computer algorithm that generates one name every hour for a Twitter account, We Are The Dead, established by the Citizen as an online memorial.
One name is published on the website at 11 minutes past each hour from the list of 119,531 uniformed Canadians who have lost their lives in wartime.
Spallin’s name appeared at 11:11 a.m. on Remembrance Day — a random event that brought his story to Canadians 76 years after his death. A one-day reporting effort, conducted with the help of Citizen readers, revealed that Spallin died in service to his country — just as his own life was about to change in dramatic fashion.
The official report on the plane crash from Spallin’s war service file.
Spallin never had the chance to meet the daughter, Yvonne, who would be born two months after his fatal crash.
Yvonne Holden, 73, now lives in Mount Lehman, just outside Abbotsford, B.C. She was contacted by the Citizen as she prepared to leave her house Friday to lay a wreath for her father at the Mount Lehman cenotaph.
“He was very fun-loving. He played the piano by ear,” she said of her father. “He was the life and soul of a party, from what I understand.”
Spallin met Yvonne’s mother, Irene Carpenter, while stationed at an airbase near her home in Cambridge. Holden’s mother told her she met Spallin at the Dorothy Ballroom on Cambridge’s Hobson Street.
“All the men used to come into Cambridge for fun and games,” Holden said. “There were a lot of fighter stations scattered around East Anglia. Cambridge and Norwich was where they would go for fun if they couldn’t go to London.”
Spallin and Carpenter were a couple for about a year, but did not get married even after she became pregnant in 1942. That fact would complicate Yvonne Holden’s life.
“I think there are a whole lot of people my age in the same position,” Holden said. “It’s something that’s never, ever talked about — is how the illegitimate children of servicemen overseas were treated in the ’50s.”
Holden endured mistreatment even after her mother married her stepfather and she took his last name. “They were small towns. Everybody knew that my mother wasn’t married and had a child, that she had never been married and had a child.”
Her mother left her nothing of Spallin’s except the portrait taken of him before he was sent overseas. Holden moved from England to British Columbia with her husband, John, in 1972, and much of what she has learned about her father came from his Canadian family, whom she contacted by writing to every Spallin in Alberta about 10 years ago.
Among other things, she learned that Spallin’s mother Cecilia had died four years before Holden sent her letters: She had been living in Chilliwack, half an hour’s drive up the Fraser Valley.
“Aunt Cecilia had gotten a letter from Yvonne’s mother and they didn’t know whether to believe her. They were, I guess, suspicious of her motives,” said Debby Was, a Spallin cousin who lives in Edmonton. They never met.
“It was really sad, because that would have been her only grandchild,” Was said.
She and other Spallin cousins had a picnic with Holden in Edmonton after she wrote to them.
Related
- Help us research a biography of Flt.-Sgt. Stanley Herbert Spallin
- The Citizen needs your help for our annual act of remembrance project: @WeAreTheDead
“Then we met her and it was so wonderful,” Was said. “As soon as we saw her, we knew she was a Spallin.”
Stanley Spallin was the third son born to an engineer, Joseph Mark Spallin, who’d been born in Minnesota, and Canadian Cecilia Lambert Spallin. The family sprawled. One of his great-uncles, also named Joseph — Stanley was nicknamed Joe himself — had a farm near Masham.
The couple married in 1915 but separated one year after Stanley was born. She raised her two surviving children as a single mother since Stanley’s father did not stay in contact with the family.
Stanley grew up in Chauvin, a small town east of Edmonton, and as a boy, he kept a collection of model airplanes. He played rugby, hockey and baseball.
In 1937, he moved to Edmonton to attend Westmount High School, where he was elected assistant editor of the school yearbook. He loved photography, and he worked part-time as a Safeway grocery store clerk.
His principal, J.G. Niddrie, wrote him a letter of recommendation in June 1940. “It is with pleasure I recommend Stanley Spallin to you as a young man of exceptionally pleasing personality and promise,” Niddrie wrote. “His deportment in and out of school is all that could be desired.”
Spallin used the letter when he went to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force on July 11, 1940 — two weeks before his 18th birthday. He volunteered his services as a pilot.
He was about five feet 10 inches tall and 142 pounds. He had brown eyes, and light brown hair and liked to smoke three or four cigarettes a day.
Flt.-Sgt. Stanley Spallin, as seen in an RAF propaganda film.
He was accepted into the RCAF and entered pilot training in early 1941, finishing 13th out of 62 pilots in his class. His commanding officer described him as alert, determined and confident: “He appears to have plenty of dash… Regardless of youth, he appears to be leader material.”
He trained in Dauphin, Regina and North Battleford before departing Halifax for England in September 1941. He was sent to an operational training unit at RAF Sutton Bridge, and was eventually assigned to 609 Squadron, an RAF fighter squadron that had played a significant role in the Battle of Britain. It had lost many men, though, and took in reinforcements from many countries.
Professor Desmond Morton, the renowned war historian at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, said Spallin’s Hawker Typhoon was an advanced plane for its day. “It could carry a variety of weapons, including rockets. It had very strong wings and a powertrain that really worked,” Morton said.
If a Canadian pilot was assigned to fly one, he said, it was a sign that he was considered good at his job.
After Spallin’s fatal accident, his girlfriend Irene Carpenter wrote to RCAF officials, trying to get confirmation of his death.
Spallin’s mother also wrote to the central depository at RAF Slough, trying to find her son’s movie camera, which had not been returned with his other effects. Spallin would receive $354.37 as a “war service gratuity” for her son’s 689 days in the RCAF, but she really wanted the five or six reels of film that were with the camera.
“These films would be very precious to me,” she said, “knowing the fun my son used to have taking pictures. I know most of these would be taken to please me, so if it is at all possible, would you let me know you have them in your care?”
There’s no indication that the film was ever found.
dreevely@postmedia.com
http://www.twitter.com/davidreevely
aduffy@postmedia.com
http://www.twitter.com/citizenduffy
With files from Citizen staff and online volunteers who helped “crowdsource” the research for this story.
Newspaper clipping photo of Flt.-Sgt. Stanley Herbert Spallin.
查看原文...
