That’s Sir Sanderson
Veteran Dick Sanderson also a Knight of the French National Order for his role in liberating occupied France
The flak was streaking all around from anti-aircraft fire, but Dick Sanderson knew what to do — pitch his fighter-bomber to the left and right to keep the gunmen on the ground guessing which direction he was flying.
The strategy had worked in previous raids over Nazi positions in France. Sanderson liked to use evasive action by bearing left 10 degrees, then over-correcting by 20 degrees the opposite way and back again — relaying each manoeuvre to the navigator sitting next to him to keep track of their heading.
This time, however, their deadly game of dodge-ball turned nasty.
“The beggars nailed us,” Sanderson recalled 73 years later. “(We were) flying along, everything seemed to be good with no search lights, and all of a sudden ‘Boom!’ The whole aircraft and the instrument panel, everything, all lit up. It was just like daylight. “They coned us perfectly.” Sanderson, now 96, had been flying his RCAF Mosquito at 250 miles an hour toward his target – a Nazi marshalling yard more than 100 miles into the French interior. Miraculously, the twin-engine plane was intact and not burning. Still, the blast knocked out the hydraulics. Sanderson was able to steer the plane but could no longer drop the bombs attached to each wing.
Undaunted, he stuck with the flight plan as thousands of rounds whizzed past, leaving smoke trails and flak explosions. He “opened up on them” with short bursts of machine-gun and cannon fire, careful not to deplete his ammunition, as he waved around the nose of the aircraft.
He’s not sure if he killed the fighters shooting at him, but the groundfire stopped. Sanderson continued his dive and dropped two bombs from the belly of the fuselage. An Allied pilot later reported seeing two holes in the main building of the marshalling yard.
“So we must have got it,” Sanderson said. “We were the only ones who got there up to that time.”
Their mission wasn’t finished. He and navigator Ed Free still had two bombs fixed to the wings. Sanderson tried shaking the aircraft to release them but they stayed in place, so he turned back to RAF Lasham Airfield in southern England. To land without hydraulics, Free had to lower the undercarriage by manually pumping a handle.
“I set it down very gently and it rolled to a stop because if the bombs had fallen off, I wouldn’t be here,” Sanderson said.
To survive, let alone tell stories in vivid detail so many decades later, is remarkable considering the profound dangers Sanderson faced every time he strapped in for another nuisance raid across the English Channel.
He flew 42 sorties in all during the Second World War — every one of them over Nazioccupied France.
A Saskatchewan farm boy, Sanderson won’t admit to ever being frightened as he goaded the enemy from the air — only alarmed. His steady nerve, skill and bravery prompted France to appoint him Knight of the French National Order of the Legion of Honour in November last year.
“I was liberating France,” he said with a smile.
Among his memorable missions was the Dday invasion of Normandy. Sanderson and Free took off from Lasham Airfield after midnight on June 6, 1944, joining the first wave of bombers to soften the Nazi defences before the Allies began their seaborne assault.
Up to a dozen crews took off from Lasham that night, each about 10 minutes apart. Sanderson headed toward Cherbourg, a city the Nazis had occupied since 1940, armed with four machine guns, four cannons and four bombs.
The weather was foul with heavy cloud and strong winds. The turbulence buffeted the plane, forcing one wing to plunge nearly 90 degrees and then suddenly reverse the other way. It didn’t seem to strain the aircraft but it strained the pilot and crew, Sanderson said.
Finding a target was another challenge. The airmen used man-made or geographical features for orientation and to keep them out of trouble.
“One was a beam that flashed certain letters or numbers and (the Germans) never shut the thing off,” he said. “It flashed, like a control tower. … We never shot it up because we knew where it was and it was a perfect source of location.”
Free spotted a road intersection, so they descended and bombed it. Sanderson fired the machine gun and cannons to make some noise before steering the plane toward home.
“Just to keep their heads up and keep them awake and disrupt them,” he said.
One advantage of flying a Mosquito was its ability to swoop in at low altitude. Sanderson would begin a dive at 1,500 feet and drop to 200-300 feet before pulling up. He lost several comrades who underestimated the height of a hill or power lines at night.
“They got just a little too low. But I was pretty close.”
Now living with his wife Bernice in a Kelowna retirement home, Sanderson gets around using a walker or wheelchair while his mind remains sharp. At one point during his interview, he paused mid-sentence to recall a word he wanted to use. Just as the silence became uncomfortable, he blurted it out: “trajectory” — an obscure word for most of us.
He remains part of a dwindling cohort of Second World War vets living in the Okanagan. Veterans Affairs Canada’s Kelowna office serves 522 veterans of the war and the Korean War, but doesn’t break down how many fought in each. The average age of Second World War vets in Canada is 92.
The Sandersons planned to visit South Kelowna Elementary for the school’s annual Remembrance Day service on Friday, as they’ve done for three years.
“The kids are learning more (about the war) than our kids ever learned,” Bernice said.