WARTIME COLLECTION
‘It’s the people I remember’
Poring over the black-and-white photos in his book, Memoirs of an Erk, 98-year-old Robert Dumouchelle can pull the details and emotions from his memory as if he’s just captured the images.
Now into its third printing since first being published in 1997, Dumouchelle is amazed at the enduring strength of interest in the Second World War even as the men and women who participated age into history.
“I agreed to do it at first because I thought it would be a keepsake for the family,” said Dumouchelle, who along with his wife, Mary Jane, have seven children.
“I never talked much about my war experiences. My daughter, Carol Ann, was the driving force behind it after she found a box of all my pictures.”
Dumouchelle enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1939 and served for three years in Europe as an aircraftsman, a group that was nicknamed “Erks.”
With his prewar experience in photography, Dumouchelle served in air reconnaissance, fitting cameras into planes, allowing him to compile a fabulous collection of wartime photographs.
There’s everything from playful outings with his friends, aerial images of many of the war’s famous aircraft and the devastation wreaked on the European continent.
“It’s the people I remember,” said Dumouchelle, who’ll do a book signing Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m. at Storytellers Bookstore at 1473 Ottawa St.
“How to get along with people is one of the most useful lessons I learned.”
One of those people was a young pilot named Richard Rohmer, who was assigned to Dumouchelle’s ground crew.
Rohmer would go on to become a major-general, a law graduate from the University of Windsor and two-time chancellor of his alma mater.
“He was such a kid then,” said Dumouchelle, then a wily veteran in his mid-20s that the youngsters sought out for advice.
“He came into our truck after one mission wanting to talk. He just started to tell us how scared he’d been and started to cry.”
However, for all the carnage and action Dumouchelle’s unit saw finishing the war as the most forward of the Canadian ground crew units, the memory that haunts him still wasn’t of battle.
It’s of a mother with her two children who somehow had managed to sneak onto the airbase in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
“I came out after dinner to scrape my plate off into the garbage and she asked me for whatever scraps remained,” said Dumouchelle, the welling emotion choking off his voice.
In return, the women offered Dumouchelle her body.
However, such food sharing was strictly forbidden for fear the base would soon be swamped with desperate people.
“I couldn’t do anything,” said Dumouchelle, the tears collecting at the corners of his eyes.
“I’ve never forgotten that. It’s my worst memory, that I couldn’t give her anything.”
Dumouchelle said in 2005, he and Rohmer and their wives returned together to Eindhoven for his only return to Europe for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the war’s end.
There was much to remember.
Surviving blitzes in London, coming ashore on the beaches of Normandy a week after D-Day and fighting across Europe to just south of Hamburg, Germany, by May 1945.
“The most scared I was was on New Year’s Day 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge when our airbase was strafed by German planes,” Dumouchelle said.
“I laid in a field trying to hide and I could feel the thump, thump of the bullets hitting the ground around me.”
Dumouchelle, who had never kept a journal before, was glad he decided to buy a little leatherbound notebook in Bournemouth, England, after arriving in spring 1943.
It formed the basis of the book’s text, which is told in diary form.
“We weren’t supposed to keep notes,” said Dumouchelle, who worked most of his life in camera sales before finishing out his final five years as a health-care administrator.
“I did it because I thought it might get interesting the next few years. I wanted my family to know what I’d experienced.”