A Yarmouth veteran reflects
In this season of remembrance, Jim McRae shares a few thoughts, memories
Jim McRae already had an interest in flying when he signed up for military service in 1941.
“I used to make model airplanes when I was a kid,” he recalled.
Born and raised in Huxley, Alta., McRae was 23 when he enlisted. He had a younger sibling, Earl, who had signed up not long before him.
McRae, a longtime Yarmouth resident who is now 101 and living at Veterans Place — a long-term care facility at the Yarmouth Regional Hospital — was asked to reflect a bit on what was going through his mind back in 1941.
“Well, the war was going on and I guess a lot of young guys my age felt they should take part and decided to join the army or navy or air force,” he said. “My brother had joined the air force and I requested that I be posted to the same place he was, and this is the way it happened. We both went to Brandon, Manitoba ... for early training.”
McRae was two and a half years older than Earl. They had an older brother, George, who didn’t serve. He stayed at home to work on the family farm.
McRae and his brother Earl proceeded to get their wings together. They were headed to the East Coast when they saw each other for the last time. It was at the railroad station in Saint John.
Earl went overseas, where he joined a bomber squadron. He eventually would be killed in action, his body never recovered.
McRae himself wound up in Yarmouth and joined 162 Squadron. On one of his missions while serving overseas, McRae’s plane sank a German
Jim McRae in his room at Veterans Place in Yarmouth.
submarine, but the sub managed to shoot down their aircraft and McRae and his fellow crew members spent at least eight hours in the North Atlantic. Three of them would die.
“The deaths were because of exposure,” McRae said. “We were all in pretty hard shape by the time the rescue got to us.”
As for the crew members who perished, he said, “I don’t think they were dead when we were picked up, but they were beyond recovery, if they were not dead ... I guess some of us were a little stronger or something, but, as I say, we weren’t in very good shape ourselves, the ones that survived.”
But McRae says he, like everyone else, had realized when signing up for military service that there could be moments like this — times when some people wouldn’t make it.
Recalling the incident,
McRae says it didn’t make him any more nervous about going on a mission and didn’t diminish his lifelong interest in flying.
Indeed, one of the things McRae did in the years after the war was co-found and operate a flying school in Yarmouth. Among other things, he also served as one of the town’s paid firefighters and drove a bus. He later rejoined the military and worked as an air traffic controller. He eventually had a job in customs and retired in the early 1980s.
Two years ago, at 99 years of age, he travelled to Alberta, where he and a few other veterans were honorary guests at an event where they got to see an old Canso aircraft take flight again after having been restored. It was one of the very same ones McRae had flown during the war.
“It was quite an experience to see that airplane flying again,” McRae said in an interview with the Vanguard in the fall of 2017, a few months after that memorable trip to his native province.
McRae, who will turn 102 Nov. 28, says his memory isn’t what it used to be, but his enthusiasm for aviation has remained strong.
“I keep an interest in some of the airplanes I flew,” he said. “I liked flying so I was interested in any type of flying. I spent so many hours on the Canso. You get quite attached to those particular aircraft.”