Crews on Lancaster missions were unmatched in bravery

As war raged in Europe, young Canadians answered the call, John Carswell writes.

Sunday, Jan. 17 is the 78th anniversary of the night my father's Lancaster was shot down after a raid on Berlin in 1943.

Andy Carswell was a 19-yearold from Toronto and a sergeant pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was also the sole pilot of his Lancaster bomber of No. 9 Squadron of the Royal Air Force with its crew of seven. Andy had enrolled in the RCAF on his 18th birthday in 1941, when the principal told students at Malvern Collegiate that anyone doing war work would be exempt from exams.

It's now hard for us to understand how a young man from Balmy Beach would have bombed Berlin and parachuted from his blazing Lancaster.

But Andy, and the thousands of men and women who joined the Canadian war effort, lived in a different reality.

Britain was on its back heels in 1941. Europe was occupied by the Nazis. U-boats were ravaging Britain's convoy lifeline in the Atlantic and Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps threatened the Suez Canal. Hitler had invaded Russia.

Andy completed his training in 1942. That was better year for the Allies. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had brought the United States into the fight against the Axis, but the Allies still didn't have the strength to invade Hitler's Fortress Europe. They turned to daylight bombing raids by the U.S. Army Air Force and night attacks by the RAF to aid their new Russian ally.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Arthur “Bomber” Harris wanted to use RAF Bomber Command to destroy Germany's capacity to make war from the sky. More modern four-engine heavy bombers made this possible. The Lancaster was an instrument of destruction.

The problem was that the casualty rate of bomber crews was dire — 50 per cent of Bomber Command was lost throughout the war. The rate was even higher in 1942 and early 1943, when German anti-aircraft guns and night fighters were decimating bomber aircrew.

My dad was inducted into the RCAF in the summer of 1941 and shipped out to Britain six months later. Andy did two operational missions and was shot down on his third, so he and his crew were statistically average. But in the end, Andy was lucky to have survived, as the Lancaster was notoriously difficult to bail out from. He parachuted into the frigid winter of northern Germany. Two of his crew died in the crash and its aftermath. He and four other surviving members of his crew spent the rest of the war as prisoners of war.

Andy is now 97 and lives in North Toronto with my mother Dorothy, whom he met and married after the war. He has lived a full life, serving as a peacetime RCAF pilot and Ministry of Transport aviation inspector. He kept in contact with his surviving crew and wartime friends. He wrote a book, Over the Wire, about his wartime experiences, and volunteered at the Sunnybrook Veterans Wing for many years after retirement. He is very proud that the Veterans' House for homeless veterans in Ottawa is named after him.

It's hard to imagine how brave these men of Bomber Command really were, flying missions when they knew the odds were unequivocally stacked against them.

I flew with my Dad in the Canadian Warplane Heritage Lancaster for a fly-past over the Parliament Buildings in 2015. I couldn't help think of the sheer

terror he and his crewmates must have felt that night in January 1943.

When you look up at the night sky on Sunday, think of a flaming Lancaster and the 19-year-old from Balmy Beach, swinging in his parachute in the freezing night air, watching his doomed Lancaster's death dive and wondering what would happen to him next.

John Carswell is founder of Canso Investment Counsel.

He supports military and veterans' causes, including the Vimy Foundation, Veterans' House Canada a nd the True Patriot Love Foundation.