Flight Sgt. Norrie died on his first bombing mission
Air gunner's life one of thousands honoured in online memorial
Flight Sgt. Thomas Norrie was taking part in his first bombing raid of the war — a mass attack on the industrial city of Essen, Germany — when the huge formation was met by a pack of German night fighters.
It was June 2, 1942, and the dark sky was suddenly alive with search lights, flak, machine gun and cannon fire.
Norrie, 24, an air gunner whom everyone knew as “Tommy,” would not live to complete his first operational mission, nor see the birth of his only son, Robert. His young wife, Phyllis, was five months pregnant at the time of his death.
“I never got to meet my father. I've only visited his grave,” Norrie's son, Robert Cadwalader, 78, a retired pilot, said Wednesday in an interview from his home in Maryland.
The Citizen is today telling the story of Flight Sgt. Thomas Norrie because his name was issued on Remembrance Day by a Twitter account, @WeAreTheDead, created nine years ago as an online memorial.
It publishes one name at 11 minutes past each hour from the list of 119,531 uniformed Canadians who have lost their lives in service to their country.
Norrie's name appeared at 11:11 a.m., a random event that made him the subject of a one-day reporting effort to uncover the facts of his life and death.
The research, conducted Wednesday with the help of Citizen readers, revealed that Thomas Lloyd Joseph Norrie was born in Haverhill, Mass., on May 5, 1918.
He was one of three children born to Mary Blanche Campbell, the daughter of a tavern owner in Charlottetown, P.E.I., and an American father, Joseph Noury, a factory foreman. The marriage produced three children, Earle, Thomas and Rita, but the union was not a happy one.
By 1920, Campbell had returned home to P.E.I. with her children and changed the spelling of the family's surname.
In Charlottetown, Thomas Norrie attended Queen Square School, then Saint Dunstan's University, which is now the University of Prince Edward Island. He loved sports: hockey, football, baseball and swimming.
“He liked poetry and roaming around P.E.I. with his brother, Earle: They were close,” Cadwalader said. The brothers would enlist together in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Thomas Norrie joined the R.C.A.F. in October 1940 as the Battle of Britain raged over the skies of the English Channel.
His only flight experience, the enlistment officer noted, was as a passenger on two flights.
Norrie was dispatched first to Toronto, then to a wireless school in Calgary and a bombing and gunnery school in Paulson, Man. He was sent to England in September 1941. At the Personnel Reception Centre in Bournemouth, England, he met young Phyllis Jane Clegg, who was serving as a records clerk in the women's branch of the British army. Clegg had used her cousin's identification to enlist in the army at 16.
Norrie and Clegg met at a dance for military personnel and were married two weeks later at Bournemouth's Sacred Heart Church on Nov. 29, 1941. She was 17.
The young couple's life together was brief.
In March 1942, Norrie was sent to #23 Operational Training Unit based at RAF Pershore, near Worcester, England. The unit trained night bomber crews on the Vickers Wellington aircraft, a longrange, twin-engined bomber.
Three months later, Allied Bomber Command prepared to mount “a thousand-plane raid” on Germany to boost morale on the home front.
Norrie was the air gunner on board Wellington R1266. The bomber took off at 11:05 p.m. from RAF Pershore for the 600-km flight to Essen, site of the Krupp ironworks plant. As the bombers — 956 in all — streamed across the English Channel over Nazi-occupied Europe, German night fighters rose to meet them.
According to research by the Dutch Airwar Study Group, one of those fighters was a twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf110 flown by Lt. Hermann Reese.
Norrie's bomber was “coned” by a number of searchlights, which singled it out for attack by Hermann, an experienced fighter pilot with four confirmed kills under his belt. Reese's attack crippled the Wellington and it plummeted towards the Dutch town of Kerkriel, about 60 kilometres southwest of Amsterdam.
Norrie was the only member of the crew who managed to bail out from the stricken aircraft, but he did not survive his parachute jump, likely because he had been too close to the ground when he jumped.
His body was found at the edge of an impact crater by the night watchman of a nearby brick factory. He was buried that same day as an unknown airman in the yard of a Catholic church in Uden.
Norrie's granddaughter, Heather Schwartz, said her grandmother was in a bomb shelter when she heard the announcement that the second thousand-bomber raid had taken place. Somehow, Phyllis knew her husband had died in the raid. “She said she just knew,” Schwartz said.
The Essen raid gave Bomber Command its propaganda victory, but, like many night bombing missions, it produced modest results. Cloud obscured the target and an after-action report concluded the raid had destroyed 11 houses and killed 15 people. (Analysis of Allied night bombing raids on Essen between March and June 1942 showed that 90 per cent of the bombs fell between five and 100 miles from their targets.)
Bomber Command abandoned the thousand-plane raid concept by the end of June.
Norrie's son, Thomas Lloyd Robert, was born on Oct. 16, 1942. (He would be adopted by Phyllis' second husband and would change his name to Robert Cadwalader.) Months later, Norrie's widow, Phyllis, received a “war service gratuity” of $252.94.
Norrie's body was disinterred after the war in 1946. He was identified by his watchband and his airgunner emblem and reburied in the Uden War Cemetery.
Cadwalader visited his father's grave in 1973. “The care the Dutch took with the graves of Allied servicemen was something to see,” he said. “The cemetery was like a golf green, beautifully kept.”
Schwartz continues to cherish his memorial cross.
“I grew up hearing about my grandfather and our family's service,” she said. “It means everything because he didn't have to do it, he didn't have to go … I can't put into words how awe inspiring that is to me, how incredibly tragic it is, and how important it is to remember.”