Montreal’s ‘worst air tragedy ever’
(From The Gazette, April 26, 1944)
Stunned by the worst air tragedy ever to occur in the Montreal area, citizens of this largest of Canada’s war centres last night counted 15 dead and at least once person among the missing following the crash of a giant four-motored Liberator amid a row of houses at Shannon and Ottawa streets, in the heart of the Griffintown district of the city.
Known dead were the five airmen who made up the principally Polish crew of the aircraft, and ten citizens, among them women and children whose homes were flattened and burned to charred ruins by the crash and fire which followed.
Known missing and believed dead, was a middle-aged man whose body or what is left of it was still being sought late last night by grim tired city firemen, C.P.C. members, police and R.A.F.T. C salvage crew members. The body of an unidentified baby about a year and a half old was found early this morning.
In addition to the known dead and missing, it was feared possible that one of more persons unknown may have been trapped in the razed area, while of four persons taken to hospital three were reported to be on the danger list. The fourth patient, an R.A.F.T. C salvage crew member, was injured while at work clearing the wreckage.
An official R.A.F.T.C. inquiry into the crash got under way late yesterday afternoon, it was learned. No indication was obtainable as to the cause of the aircraft’s difficulties immediately before the crash. It was a huge Liberator’s maiden flight in the service of the Transport Command, having been delivered only re- cently from California, it was learned unofficially.
The disaster occurred shortly after 10:30 o’clock yesterday morning, a few minutes after the giant bomber had left Dorval on a scheduled flight to an “overseas destination.”
Thousands of Montrealers had a foreboding of the tragedy as the plane roared low over mid-town, its nose pointing southward. Pedestrians and office workers in that section of the city stopped to watch the Liberator swoop down within inches of the St. Antoine street Post Office building and over old Bonaventure Station, expecting at any moment to see it crash into one or another of several buildings.