I was going to write a blog about my recent experience playing Call of Duty and make fun of the game a little but at the last minute I realized how remarkably inappropriate that would be in the eve of Remembrance Day. Saved by the bell on that one.
So anyway, now I’m going to write something about Remembrance Day. That’s a hard thing to do, because everyone writes stuff about Remembrance Day. Facebook is jam packed with maudlin stuff about it; every event, every workplace will observe a moment of silence at 11 AM (note: it’s not supposed to be at 11:11. It’s the eleventh day of the eleventh month at 11, but not the 11th minute. Pass it on) and almost everything that could be said about sacrifice and never forgetting and such has been said, often in words far better than mine. As to the general sentiment of Remembrance Day I’m not sure that I can really add anything intelligent right now, so instead I’m going to just give you a little history lesson, and tell you about my grandfathers, who are two of the people you should be remembering tomorrow.
My maternal grandfather joined the RCAF in 1943 and he was commissioned as an officer. They put him in Bomber Command, and trained him as a pilot and bomb aimer. In 1943 he was shipped off to Europe two weeks after his wedding – I want you to think about that for a moment – and assigned to 427 Squadron, a bomber squadron in Leeming, England. He trained for the rest of 1943 and in the beginning of 1944 they started flying combat missions over occupied Europe.
My Grandpa is on the top left.
Being a bomber crewman was arguably the most dangerous job in the Allied armed services; 44% of all Bomber Command crewmen died during the war, and a substantial percentage of the remainder were wounded or captured. That is a worse casualty rate than the Soviet infantry would have experienced. Only 27% of men in bomber crews managed to get through their tour without being killed, hurt, or imprisoned. And if you didn’t die this week, it was near certain a friend would. It was a pretty horrible job. My grandfather (Flight Officer Charles Laing) was one of the lucky ones. His entire crew somehow survived 35 combat missions and not one of them was scratched, an amazing accomplishment. Flying a Halifax B.III, they bombed German cities, bombed Normandy defenses before D-day, bombed factories and mined harbours. They were shot at by flak and chased by fighters, and once shot down a fighter (a rare accomplishment for a bomber) but they always made it back. (Anyone who used a plane after his crew did had different luck, though, and always seemed to be lost, so much so that they were nicknamed “The Jinx Crew.”) When my grandfather died in 2005, he was the first man in the crew to pass away.
Of course to me, my grandfather was the kindly, bald old man who lived right down the street and loved computers and gadgets and would tell me stories about the war that from my perspective might as well have happened in the Middle Ages. He had some interesting adventures after the war, perhaps notably that he was stationed in Germany itself with NATO, where he and my grandmother and my mother made friends among those who had been our enemies. But by the time I “met” him he lived in the house he would never leave, and was a very quiet and reserved man. He wasn’t really much into the Legion and whatnot; despite being a legitimate war hero he didn’t put on the semi-uniform the veterans wear and go marching and stuff. Part of that was just that he was shy and reserved, but part of it was that I just don’t think he wanted to think about war much. And who can blame him?
My paternal grandfather, of whom I sadly have no picture, has a story even more remarkable. He was a pilot in the RCAF as well, and spent much of the war as a trainer, teaching flight to other students. He wanted to go overseas and do his part,though, and so managed to get transferred to RAF 3 Squadron late in 1944, flying the Tempest, a huge, fast fighter that kind of looked like a Spitfire on steroids.
At that point in the war the Germans didn’t have a lot of air force left so he rarely got to see an enemy plane. What they spent their time doing was shooting down V-1 buzz bombs. No, really; the Tempest was fast enough that if it started above the V-1 and dove at it, it could briefly match its speed. Shooting at a flying bomb has its dangers so they tried to get next to them and tip then over with the wings of their aircraft – I swear I’m not making this up, they really did that – and spin them into the Channel. I believe my grandfather got one.
He was also assigned to ground attack missions and this was his downfall, so to speak. In February in 1945 he was attacking a train in the Netherlands when an antiaircraft battery shot his plane up, killing the engine. Too low to bail out, he crash landed the plane into a field and ran away. He was taken in by the Dutch resistance and befriended by a man named Paul, who I had the occasion to meet many decades later. For a few months he fought with the Resistance (the Allies knew he was there; like many pilots on the lam he even had an identification number for escaped pilots) running errands and raids, eating grass and sawdust because the Dutch had nothing to eat, it had all been stolen by the Nazis. Eventually their luck ran out, or so you’d think. On a trip to a safe house the Waffen SS showed up. My grandfather (Pilot Officer Richard W. Jones) held them off to give Paul time to escape, and Paul’s escape was such a narrow one that there were bullet holes in his overcoat. Then my grandfather surrendered.
The Germans informed my grandfather that, regrettably, as he was an Allied pilot trying to pass himself off as a civilian, he’d have to be hanged. Fortunately, Paul escaped towards Allied lines – this was very close to war’s end – and informed the advancing formation, which I believe was the British 49th “Polar Bears” mechanized infantry serving within the 1st Canadian Army, of the situation. They sent an officer in under flag of truce to suggest to he Germans that they give the pilot back or else maybe there’d be no surrendering when it came time to capture the town. So the Germans let him go, hours before he was to be executed, and he went home to his wife and baby son, my Dad.
I didn’t know my paternal grandfather nearly as well, because he lived far away, but he liked me and indulged my interest in his war stories, and that was enough for me. He died quite a long time ago, in 1983, I believe.
So those are the real stories of two real veterans, and if they sound rather amazing, well, they ARE amazing. My maternal grandfather survived an arm of the service more suicidal than playing Russian Roulette with two bullets, and my paternal grandfather’s story would make a pretty good movie. Men did this stuff, by the millions. They weren’t superheroes; they were ordinary people who had no choice but to take the most awful risks.
My grandfathers are both dead now, and we’re running out of World War II veterans. Many express sadness at that, but it’s a good thing we’re not making veterans as fast as we used to. (Now we have a lot of Afghanistan veterans, but obviously not nearly the same number.) The World Wars caused destruction and horror and misery on a scale beyond the scope of imagination. So please remember what my grandfathers did for us, but work towards creating a world where nobody ever has to do it again.
