North Vancouver
Dane parked his car in front of the house that he had called home for all of his formative years and climbed out into the dusk with a bag of takeout Chinese food and a six-pack of Tsingtao beer. The house was out of whack with the others in the neighborhood. At one time, in the early twentieth century, it could be seen down on Marine Drive, the main drag of the North Shore waterfront. But with the rampant commercialization of that strip in the post-war years, Dane’s grandfather had decided to move up—literally. He’d cut the house off just below the subfloor and had it trucked up the hill on a flatbed to this spot. The other homes on the street had been built in the 1950s, so this throwback to Victoria’s reign stood out.
The house was steep-roofed from side to side, with dormer peaks at the front. The house was white, the roof two-tone gray, and all the trim and the window shutters forest green. The corners of the yard out front were planted with towering firs and various deciduous trees. The only blemish was the “For Sale” sign.
A half century in one family.
Three generations.
So much happiness and sorrow within these walls.
Dane wondered who would buy it, this old house.
And what their future would hold.
The first thing Dane did upon entering the house was to check on Puss. During the long months of his granddad’s cancer slide, a stray cat had taken to entering if a door was left open, almost as if it knew that the old man was in need of its comfort. He was, so Dane had cut a porthole into the backdoor to enable Puss to come and go at will.
“Hello, Puss,” Dane said, on seeing the tabby in the kitchen now. “Let me know when it’s time, and we’ll put the siren on and rush to the vet’s.”
Puss was pregnant.
That was all he needed.
Dane fed Puss for six kittens or so, then popped the cap off a cold beer and sat down for his takeout feast of Szechuan prawns, with pickles and sweet ginger, and chicken chow mein.
Finished, he cracked the fortune cookie.
“Don’t ask, don’t say. Everything lies in silence.”
* * *
Tonight, Dane was determined to press on with cleaning out Papa’s house to prepare it for sale. Papa, as in the pa of his pa, the father of his father. But in his heart, he knew that he would accomplish nothing more than digging back into his granddad’s war record.
Like so many of his generation, Papa had rarely talked about what he’d done in the war. Hidden away with his grandfather’s Pilot’s Flying Log Book, Dane had found some photos and a square box. Two of the photos now had his attention. One was a black-and-white headshot of a pilot in his early twenties. The pilot wore his peaked cap at a jaunty angle, one side lower to his eyebrow than the other. In the center sat an RCAF officer’s badge: the British crown over a pair of bird wings. His uniform was immaculate, and he had a pencil-thin, flyboy mustache like Clark Gable’s.
The patriot with the easy smile who’d come home from war.
The other headshot was much starker. It was a candid shot of a pilot just back from an overnight bombing run, still buckled into the cockpit seat of a Halifax heavy bomber. Gloved and fleeced in a thick bomber jacket against the high-altitude cold, he was turned toward the camera as if spooked by its intrusion into his private hell. His head was encased in a skin-tight leather helmet; on either side, leather earmuffs clamped headphones to his skull. Dangling an obscene corrugated hose as long as an elephant’s trunk, the oxygen mask on his lower face dug into the flesh of his cheeks. All you could see of the man within was the intensity in his eyes, and those eyes spoke loudly of what he had just been through.
Dane was eyeball to eyeball with a warrior of the night.
* * *
Over sixty years ago, President Roosevelt called Canada “the aerodrome of democracy.” Far from the battlefields of Europe, this country proved ideal for training wartime aircrews. In all, 131,553 airmen were prepared for combat in Canada. One of those who signed up at the height of the Battle of Britain was Keith Winter, Dane’s granddad. From day one of training—January 4, 1941—he was required to keep a pilot’s flying log. The log would list every aircraft he took up and every bombing run he made.
This was Keith Winter’s book.
The log was bound in black leather with gold type engraved on the cover.
Taped inside the cover were snapshots of two bombing crews, each photo taken in front of the open bomb doors of a Halifax. One crew was bundled up for winter skies over Europe. The other was stripped down to khaki shirts and shorts for the scorching desert sands of North Africa.
Dane settled back with another beer and read through Keith’s war against the Swastika.
After he’d completed three and a half months’ training in both the Tiger Moth and the Anson—155 hours and 40 minutes in the air—the RCAF had shipped him overseas to Kinloss, Scotland. There, attached to the RAF, Keith was strapped into the Whitley and taught how to fly a heavy bomber. At that point, the monotonous blue ink in the log was joined by red to denote night flights.
September 1941 saw Keith posted to #10 Squadron at Leeming, Yorkshire.
By October, he was outward bound.
“Ops. to Wilhelmshaven. ‘Bags of Fun’
—
Caught in searchlights, but not held.”
* * *
Outward Bound
was the title of the print on the wall of the TV room in Papa’s house. The original painting, all in blue, was as evocative of a night bombing run as war art could be. Every warrior has his weapon, and Keith’s was a pair of deadly flying machines. He began bombing with the Whitley and soon traded up. By December, he was in the cockpit of the Halifax.
The painting depicted the estuary of an English river shimmering beneath a Handley Page Halifax en route to enemy territory. A trio of criss-crossed searchlights shot up from the shore below, and silver moonlight shone down through the broken cloud cover to sparkle on the sea. Silver-blue was the painting’s only color, except for a hint of yellow around the RAF bull’s-eye insignia on the fuselage of the plane. Guns bristled from the see-through turrets in the nose of the bomber and from behind the dual tailfins, where the rear gunner sat. In front of the whirling propellers on the visible wing, Dane could just make out the pilot who was outward bound with the flames of hell in the bomb-bay belly of the beast.
What a beautiful war machine!
Dane recalled himself as a boy asking his granddad where he’d got the picture.
“During the war, it hung in a uniform shop,” Papa had explained. “I saw it while on leave. I told the shopkeeper that I flew the Halifax and asked if I could buy it. He said no. It was his window attraction. I left a phone number, in case he changed his mind. On VJ Day—the day the war ended—the shopkeeper called. ‘The picture is yours,’ he said. ‘I’m giving it to you for free. When I see you carry it out of here, I’ll know I’m not dreaming that the war is over.’”
* * *
The desperate years.
The years 1941 and 1942.
Hitler was the master of Europe and Britain stood virtually alone when nineteen-year-old Keith volunteered to fly with the RAF. Fifty-seven straight nights of the Blitz had set London ablaze and reduced much of it to rubble. Wolf packs of U-boats under the Atlantic were on the brink of severing the shipping lifeline from America. Rommel and the Afrika Korps, a panzer division trained in desert warfare, had landed at Tripoli. Then Hitler invaded Russia. Kiev fell, and Leningrad and Moscow were besieged. In December 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked, but even when America entered the war, the bad news kept coming. Japan owned the Pacific. Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Burma, and the Philippines all fell to the Land of the Rising Sun. In May 1942, Rommel went on the offensive and began his push through Libya, which would drive him into Egypt as the British fell back in retreat. By the time the end of May arrived, Keith was in extreme peril. More than ten thousand planes in Bomber Command would be lost in the war. Of the fifty-five thousand airmen killed, ten thousand would be Canadian volunteers. Proportionately, it would be the highest fatality rate of all who fought in the war. Two tours of duty—which is what Keith flew—and the odds of going home were almost nil.
May 1942.
The record, thought Dane.
He set aside the flying log and picked up the square box that he’d also found in the dresser drawer. Peeking inside earlier, he’d been puzzled by the small disk in the plain brown sleeve. It was the size of a 45 rpm. The handwritten center label read, “From Mother to Keith. May 26, 1942. For 21st Birthday.” It was obviously a private recording.
Intrigued, Dane went to what had once been his room and fetched the Seabreeze record player, a relic so old that it had probably spun his dad’s childhood records. He dropped the disk onto the spindle, set the speed to 45 rpm, and eased down the needle. The voice that spoke to him through time seemed to come from under the sea.
It’s warped, he thought.
Wait a sec.
A 45?
They didn’t have 45s back then.
Detective that he was, he figured out that the disk was a miniature version of a 78 rpm. Sure enough, when he cranked the knob over to that speed, a woman’s voice spoke to him from the speaker.
It was Dane’s
great
-grandmother.
“Hello, Keith. Mother speaking to you. Happy twenty-first birthday. Hope you received your parcel. If not, it’s on its way. No matter what happens, Keith, know Mother is proud of you. Keep the flag flying, son. All long to see you, and hope it won’t be long till you and all the other lads come home. It’s cold today, but bright. Goodbye, my dear. Keep your chin up. All my love, Mother.”
Dane lifted the scratchy needle.
Desperate years.
Desperate days.
Without a victory in sight.
And all those dead flyboys listed in the papers.
So she went off to a recording studio in 1942 and made Keith that birthday greeting—in case it was his last.
May 26?
Dane went back to the log.
Four days after his birthday, Keith entered this:
“May 30. Ops. to Cologne. Over 1,000 A/C on TGT. Beautiful blaze.”
* * *
The Thousand Bomber Raid on Cologne on the night of May 30, 1942, was the first turning point in the war. In February, Sir Arthur Harris had risen to the top of Bomber Command, and he was itching for a way to demonstrate to “the Boche” that they had met their match. He planned to overwhelm Nazi defenses with a continuous stream of awesome airpower aimed at one German industrial city. Churchill approved Operation Millennium. When the moon was full, Harris threw every plane he could gather from any source—1,047 aircraft in all—at the third-largest city in the Reich. The raid was a success, and others followed.
“June 1. Ops. to Essen. 1,000 A/C on TGT. Good show. Home on 3 engines.”
“June 25. Ops. to Bremen. Another 1,000-plane effort. Excellent trip, but very ‘hot.’”
* * *
Monty versus the Desert Fox.
That was Keith’s triumphant battle.
A month after the raid on Cologne, Dane’s granddad pasted a mimeographed slip of paper into his flying log:
Secrecy
During the course of special operations taking place over the next sixteen days, no communication will be permitted with any person outside the squadron.
Keith’s comment beside that, on July 4, 1942:
“Attached to Middle East Command (16 Days?).”
On June 21, Rommel had captured the British garrison of Tobruk. “Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another,” Churchill informed Roosevelt. Hitler was so pleased that he conferred the baton of field marshal on the Third Reich’s “hero in the sun.” The Desert Fox was on a roll across the sands of North Africa, and by June 30, Rommel had shoved the British Eighth Army back into Egypt. In Cairo, at British headquarters, military documents were being torched to prepare for a full retreat. The burning was dubbed “Ash Wednesday.” In front of the Desert Fox lay the Suez Canal and the Persian oilfields. All that stood in his way was the coastal railroad station of El Alamein.
On July 1, he attacked. A sandstorm thwarted that knockout blow. The only way for Britain to hold the line was to maintain air superiority. That’s why Keith was on his way down from Britain. Rommel had an Achilles heel: his long supply line.
“July 12. Ops. to Tobruk …”
For three weeks, the adversaries engaged in attritional warfare. All through July, they slogged away in the lung-choking, sandy horror that was North Africa. At times, Keith had just one cup of water a day to drink and one more to bathe and shave in.
“July 20. Ops. to Tobruk. Bombed jetties and harbor installations. ‘16’ days up!!!”
Then, on August 3, Churchill arrived in Cairo. Having decided that the Eighth Army required new leadership, he gave the command to General William “Strafer” Gott. Four days later, Gott died in an air crash. So who took his place? Who else? Montgomery. And Monty bombastically declared that he was going “to hit Rommel for six out of Africa.”
Some sort of cricket thing.
Throughout August (
“Bombed battle lines”
) and on into September, #10 Squadron hammered Tobruk again and again and again. All through September and well into October, Keith’s plane got shot full of holes and he lost friends (
“Ginger missing”
). By then, the focus of the world had settled on the coming battle. If you want to go down in military history, nothing will do it faster than a title match. Wellington versus Napoleon. Grant versus Lee. Sitting Bull versus Custer. Monty versus the Desert Fox.
When the Battle of El Alamein began, on October 23, Keith was in the thick of it. Preening, fussy, and picky though he may have been, Monty had a strategic strength: he knew how to coordinate air power to win a battle on the ground. When the Afrika Korps soldiers turned and ran, instead of surrendering, Keith was on them from the skies, “crumbling” their retreat. Monty preferred to let metal, not flesh, do the blood work of battle.