A lot of stories get told at the monthly meetings of the Vancouver Island Aircrew Association and, as some wag will always point out, some of the stories are even true.
But there’s no need to embellish the stories, especially the ones told by former pilots, navigators, gunners and bomb-aimers who served during the Second World War.
A decade ago, about 80 per cent of the membership Vancouver Island branch of the association consisted of Second World War veterans. Time has taken its toll, and Tom Burdge, a member of the executive, says about a third of the current membership served in the Second World War.
At the association’s monthly lunch meeting in CFB Esquimalt’s Nixon Building, it’s fairly obvious who the Second World War airmen are. They are in their late 80s to mid-90s, and they don’t move as fast or hear as well as they used to. But there’s nothing creaky about the lively sense of humour and camaraderie that infuses the meeting.
Eavesdropping on conversations is worthwhile — these are people who lived history, although they don’t always see it that way.
Fred Sproule, 95, said his part in the war was a small one. He first joined the army, but wanting to fly, managed to earn his wings and get transferred to the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was assigned to the Royal Air Force’s 42 squadron in Burma.
He was leading a squadron of Hurricane fighter-bombers against Japanese positions near Mandalay in March 1945, when the squadron encountered anti-aircraft fire. Sproule dove his plane toward the AA emplacement. His plane was hit and he was wounded.
“When I was hit, I turned the squadron over to another flight commander and went back,” he said. “I didn’t know how badly the aircraft was affected.”
He was travelling through the Suez Canal on his way back to England when the end of the war in Europe was announced.
“It was just a little war for me, but it was big enough,” he said.
Sproule was 27 when he was wounded, an old man by air-crew standards. Many pilots hadn’t been shaving for long when they earned their wings. Burdge was 20 when he started flying Mosquito fighter-bombers.
Atholl Sutherland Brown was barely 20 when he flew a Beaufighter, a long-range heavy fighter, from England to India. He served for two years with the RAF’s 177 Squadron in Burma. He has written extensively about the war, including Silently into the Midst of Things, a history of 177 Squadron’s experiences in Burma, which describes the dangerous, low-level flying used in attacking Japanese installations.
“Our squadron had 40 per cent casualties,” he wrote. “So if you did a tour of duty there, which was 50 trips, your chances of being killed or shot down were four out of 10.”
He knew personally the toll of war — his older brother, Ian, an RCAF pilot, was killed in action in 1941.
Gord Lough was 19 when he got his wings and began flying heavy bombers, even though he wanted to fly something faster.
“Everyone wanted to be a fighter pilot,” he said. He got his wish during the Cold War era when he flew F-86s and CF100s for the RCAF.
George Hickson had flying aspirations when he joined the RAF in 1943 at the age of 18, but his pilot training kept getting interrupted by other assignments, including guarding Italian and German prisoners captured in the North Africa campaign.
“I was a cadet pilot with a Sten gun,” he said.
They were just kids, those airmen. Many had close calls, some were shot down and captured. All saw friends leave for combat and not return.
Michael O’Hagan helped collect stories from fellow members and published Aircrew Memories in 1999. Other members of the group have had their stories included in such collections, and many of them have written their own accounts.
We could never have too many such stories. The airmen were part of a generation that helped change the world for the better, not only during the war, but after as well as leaders in industry, business, science and government. Old age may have caught up to them, but not irrelevance.
