STOLEN BOMBER
Sask. pilot’s final, daring joyride
SASKATOON Seventy-four years before a stolen airliner streaked across the sky over Puget Sound and then plunged to earth, a Saskatchewan man put on an eerily similar air show in a medium bomber stolen from an airfield near Vancouver.
Like that of airline employee Richard Russell, Royal Canadian Air Force Sgt. Donald Palmer Scratch’s “sensational display of aerial acrobatics” ended when the purloined B-25 Mitchell plowed into a small island in the Fraser River.
“For four and a half hours the apparently crazed airman dived on Vancouver and villages to the south, endangering the lives of many,” The Canadian Press reported hours after Scratch, 25, died in the Dec. 6, 1944, crash.
“In wild, screaming dives he swooped on airdromes, roads and other points where airmen and civilians were gathered, missing people and parked aircraft by inches,” continued the article, reprinted across the country.
“Fighter planes … took to the air in an attempt to induce the student to land, but he paid no attention. Finally, he spun the aircraft off in a half roll at 1,000 feet and dived straight downwards at terrific speed into the ground.”
Astonishingly, Scratch’s final flight was not, as one aviation historian put it, a “temporary aberration.” It was a repeat performance of a similar stunt performed with a “borrowed” B-24 Liberator in Newfoundland six months earlier.
“It’s one of the more bizarre stories (because of) the fact that it happened twice. He got away with it the first time,” said Jerry Vernon, president of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society’s Vancouver chapter.
Scratch was born in Maymont, Sask., about halfway between Saskatoon and North Battleford, in the summer of 1919. Accounts of his early life are sketchy, but he ended up in Edmonton, where he worked as a druggist before the war. The drugstore manager later described Scratch to The Canadian Press as a “splendid boy,” while RCAF Sgt. William Sonne testified at a subsequent court of inquiry that the Saskatchewan man was “generally well liked.”
“He was a very keen average pilot. He was neat in his appearance and had a pleasant personality. He was very quiet and generally well liked,” his flight commander told the court of inquiry.
Sonne and Leading Aircraftman Harold Spicer, a mess steward, both told the court Scratch was not typically a heavy drinker.
RCAF records and contemporary newspaper accounts show Scratch enlisted in 1940 and was commissioned as a Pilot Officer in 1943. He then wound up with 10 Squadron in Gander, Newfoundland, where he flew the Liberator, the same type of aircraft used to bomb Germany.
In June 1944, he was court-martialled and subsequently pleaded guilty to stealing one of the massive bombers while drunk, and flying it at less than 1,000 feet above the ground — an action RCAF records state was “not authorized.”
“(He) took off alone in a Liberator aircraft … and for three hours and 10 minutes engaged in an exhibition of dangerous low flying over the aerodrome and vicinity,” according to a memo included in the court of inquiry records.
While air force documents indicate Scratch told the court martial he was dissatisfied after spending three years flying patrols off the east coast, and was determined to participate in a more active theatre of war, others take a different view.
Speaking to The Canadian Press in 1944, the head of the RCAF in Western Canada, F.V. Heakes, surmised that Scratch “staged his wild ride in Newfoundland presumably because he had not been permitted to fly as first pilot (captain).”
That jibes with Vernon’s assessment. The aviation historian said he believes serious injuries — apparently two broken ankles — sustained in a 1942 Bristol Bolingbroke crash left Scratch desperate to demonstrate his abilities.
Scratch, Vernon said, was “a bit ticked off ” that the RCAF didn’t consider him fit to serve as a bomber captain. Scratch himself later wrote that he adored flying and was desperate to return to the cockpit after the crash, in spite of his injuries.
After he was drummed out of the air force, Scratch should have faded into obscurity. However, not being in the air force apparently disagreed with him, and he attempted to re-enlist as a noncommissioned pilot just 19 days later.
Miraculously, it worked. The RCAF accepted his application and sent him to RCAF Station Boundary Bay near Vancouver to learn to fly the B -25, a twin-engined workhorse used as a medium bomber across the European and Pacific theatres.
“They obviously forgave him. I don’t know if they ’d be as forgiving today as they were then,” Vernon said with a laugh.
Days before his training course on the B -25 was set to end, Scratch did something unusual — he started drinking. Spicer recalled him buying between 12 and 18 bottles of beer, while another serviceman saw him swilling from a brown bottle.
“I could smell hard liquor on his breath. It was not beer. Although his actions did not show it, he appeared to have been drinking or else was under some strain,” recalled Leading Aircraftman Thomas Cooper, who saw Scratch a 3:30 a.m. Just over an hour later, after apparently trying and failing to steal a parked Liberator, Scratch hopped aboard a B-25 that had its engines running in preparation for maintenance — and took off.
Group Captain D.A.R. Bradshaw, who commanded Scratch’s training group, was sleeping in his home a few kilometres from the base when Scratch flew overhead at high speed, low enough to rattle the kitchen window.
Over the next several hours, what the RCAF described as “a most extraordinary episode” played out as Scratch endangered everyone in the vicinity by performing “seemingly impossible manoeuvres” in the stolen bomber.
“His flying was utterly incredible as he continually missed buildings and aircraft at times by scant inches,” according to a description of the “unauthorized” flight included in the court of inquiry records.
“At one time during the last hour he flew the entire length of the tarmac between the line of parked aircraft and the hangers so low that his propeller tips could only have been inches above the ground.”
“Scores of service personnel civilians … narrowly missed death as the big ship screamed down time after time, threatening to smash into the ground where they stood. Twisting, rolling, diving without levelling off during the entire flight,” CP reported.
Then, hours after the base scrambled a pair of P-40 Kittyhawk fighters to ensure he didn’t cross the nearby U.S. border, Scratch dipped the bomber’s nose and dove into Tilbury Island.
He was killed instantly. No one else was hurt.
The court of inquiry concluded there was insufficient evidence to determine whether Scratch was insane, or if he deliberately crashed the bomber on the morning of Dec. 6. It concluded a loss of control or fuel failure could have ended the flight.
Scratch is buried in Ashmont, Alberta, where his parents lived.