‘He looked so young, just an innocent young boy’
Dutch teen, 16, embraces the Preston airman shot down over his town in 1943
CAMBRIDGE — Matthijs Zwaal, 16, likes to play soccer, make music and hang out with friends in his Dutch town. He has a job after school stocking shelves at the supermarket.
Oh, and he’s reaching out to Canada to find out all he can about an airman named Ken Masterson, who died fighting the Nazis in the Second World War.
“I live in freedom and it’s so normal to me,” Matthijs explains, over the internet from his home in the Netherlands.
“But it should be special, because you see on the news so many countries where it isn’t as normal as for us, to live in freedom. I think that’s why I want to honour the people who gave their lives for my freedom.”
Ken Masterson was an air gunner with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He died at 20, shot down over Nazi-occupied Holland in 1943.
“He looked so young, just an innocent young boy,” Matthijs said, unsettled by the picture of Ken in his military file. “It hit me. It was special to see that such a young boy had given his life for me.”
Ken Masterson was born in Galt and raised in Preston. He enlisted at 18 and he died within a year of going overseas at 19.
Like Matthijs, Ken liked sports. He grew up playing hockey and baseball. He hunted, swam, canoed and cycled.
Matthijs enjoys music. He plays guitar, piano and saxophone. Ken enjoyed photography. He liked to develop film and print pictures.
Ken liked to hang out with friends, too. He went looking for some in England in November 1942, feeling homesick six months after leaving Canada.
“I thought I’d drop in the Beaver club, hoping to see someone from home,” he wrote in a letter home. “There’s a story about that place — ‘Go there and you’ll see someone from home.’” Ken saw no one he knew at the London club. He left disappointed after an hour. But right there in the street, he bumped into an old pal from Preston.
“We had a darn good chat until I had to go to Liverpool Street to catch a train,” he wrote.
Ken and Matthijs are not kin. They are connected by a cemetery in Matthijs’s hometown of Haaksbergen, a town of 25,000 near the German border. Ken’s name is on a grave there.
He died with his crewmates when their twin-engine Wellington bomber fell from the night sky into a nearby field.
“The story in the family was that he wanted to actually go to war to complete his training, and return and be the commercial pilot that he had always dreamed about doing,” said Ken Masterson, his nephew of the same name.
Before Ken enlisted in the air force, he took flying lessons and completed an hour of solo flying. He yearned to do more than spray metal, brush shoes or build furniture, all jobs he held before answering the call to arms.
“He was very smart,” said Masterson, 60. “Those opportunities didn’t really appeal to him.”
Ken’s father drove a milk cart and a taxi. After his parents split, Ken was raised by his single mother, Daisy Masterson. She believed in arts and education and raised three children on Queen Street in Preston in the hardscrabble 1930s.
“She made all of their clothes.
They were the best-dressed kids in town because she could fancy-stitch,” said Masterson, her grandson.
Ken grew up to become a young man who played tricks on his sister, flew large-scale model airplanes with his brother, and attracted girlfriends here and in England.
On May 13, 1943, Ken and four crewmates took off from England just before midnight to bomb the German city of Bochum. The crew was part of the RCAF’s 426 Thunderbird squadron.
Enemy searchlights captured their bomber, lighting it up for 15 minutes before it reached the target. This made them a prime target for anti-aircraft fire. Flak exploded around them.
Pilot Leslie Sutherland was forced to take evasive action and descend. Damage from shrapnel forced the crew to jettison the bombs just after 2 a.m.
The damaged plane turned toward home and managed to land safely in England at 5:25 a.m. on May 14.
Nine days after that close call, Ken and his crewmates took off at night to bomb Dortmund, an industrial city in Germany. It was a clear night which helped 91 planes drop more than 2,000 tons of bombs within an hour, setting many buildings ablaze. Smoke rose thousands of feet in columns.
The enemy sent up night fighters to stem the attack. A German air ace reportedly targeted their bomber on its return, shooting it down over Holland just before 1:30 a.m. on May 24.
All on board were killed. Today they are counted among 426 aircrew lost by the Thunderbird squadron during the war.
Matthijs, a history-loving student, began to research the crew after joining a Dutch remembrance project that aims to turn the men into more than names on a stone by honouring them in a book. Students and others are researching 20 Allied combatants buried in his hometown.
He searched military records, scoured the internet, and sent emails to faraway families and to an Ontario newspaper reporter. He practised the English he has learned in part by watching films and by reading online about history and music.
Matthijs connected with the Ontario family of pilot Leslie Sutherland, who died with Masterson. Sutherland’s name graces a Royal Canadian Legion branch near Sarnia.
The branch has put a charred piece of their downed bomber on display. Sutherland’s nephew found it at the crash site in 1977.
Matthijs also connected with Ken Masterson in Kitchener, who provided wartime photographs of his namesake uncle.
Masterson is proud of the uncle he never met, and warmed by the outreach Matthijs is making. On the sacrifice his uncle made, his feelings are mixed. Complicated.
“I believe he believed in the cause,” he said.
Masterson recalls how his grandmother mourned her oldest child every Remembrance Day. “She cried and cried and cried.” At times when he sees the world engage in war after war, he laments that his uncle died in vain.
“I’m so frustrated with the world, that we don’t seem to be learning,” he said.
Matthijs feels that Ken and his crewmates died so that he can hang out with his friends, enjoy the Pink Floyd music he loves, study what he wants, work as he desires, and plan a future he chooses.
They stood up to Nazi tyranny and lie forever in his hometown. Seventy-five years after victory, he will not forget them.