Helmet found in France returned to WWII pilot’s son in Canada
The last Beaton to feel the soft leather of the helmet was Ed, floating through the dark sky over occupied France beneath his parachute in June 1944, a burst of flames in the distance from the Halifax bomber he had just escaped.
The next Beaton came to the helmet in peacetime, leaving his Regina home in the early morning to fly to Ottawa, driving past the snowcovered birch trees to the War Museum, to reclaim a piece of his father’s youth, on a crisp Saturday afternoon 71 years later.
“I did the easy part,” Gerald Beaton, 55, said.
In November 2015, the Star told the story of a Canadian helmet that Dominique Lemaire had inherited from his father, Henri, who was a member of the French Resistance. Lemaire, who lives in northern France, was told that the helmet belonged to one of the five Canadians who died when a bomber was shot down in his father’s village after D-Day. He wanted to return it to the right Canadian family. With the help of historians at the Canadian War Museum, the Star discovered that two men had survived the crash, and all the clues on the helmet, including the faint letters of a last name, pointed to Beaton.
Ed Beaton died in 2003. Lemaire sent the helmet to Ottawa with Gilles Prilaux, an archeologist with France’s National Institute for Preventive Archeological Research. Prilaux was at the museum to talk about the buried fortress of humanity and weapons that remain beneath France from the Great War — so many millions of shells that it will take eight centuries to depollute the sector near Arras, Lens and Vimy.
After his talk on Saturday, Prilaux presented Beaton with the helmet as asmall crowd gathered in the atrium.
“Merci beaucoup,” Beaton said, marvelling at the object he didn’t know was missing until last year, the letters much clearer in person than the photo he had seen in an email. He gave Prilaux a photo of his father’s crew to pass along to Lemaire.
And then Prilaux, Beaton and Second World War historian Jeff Noakes knelt around the helmet like a group of kids excited by a found treasure, while Beaton asked about the helmet’s care, the mystery and Lemaire.
Noakes passed along an interview that Ed Beaton gave to officials that he found as part of his research.
“Did you bail out? If so, state yes,” Beaton read aloud from the form, followed by his father’s answer: “Yes.”
“Yeah, he’s a man of few words,” he said, smiling.
Ed Beaton loved reading and writing, but didn’t like making a fuss.
He knows his dad would shake his head about the cost of flying to Ottawa, but Beaton thought it was important to be here. He said as much to his 90-year-old mother — Dad wouldn’t be happy. “She said, ‘No, he sure wouldn’t be.’ ”
Sitting in his rental car afterward, Beaton said this story is really about the fathers. “They’re the ones that had the experiences, and we’ll never really know what they were in any sort of detail.”