Closure sought for WWII airman presumed dead
Relative wants DNA identification of remains in Germany
A family film clip shows Fernand Léo Jolicoeur, hair newly cut, collar points rising teenager-style over his knotted necktie, striding up to kiss the cheek of his sister, Rosaline, on her wedding day in Ottawa in June 1938.
Not seven years later, the young man, by then a Royal Canadian Air Force gunner, would disappear like so many others when his Lancaster bomber was caught by an enemy fighter and crashed into the German countryside. Just two crew members, both wounded, would survive.
After the war, his name would be placed on a “collective” grave in a military cemetery, but to his family, Fernand Jolicoeur, age 20, never came back to earth.
“My grandmother kept telling me, ‘ Oh, I expect him to show up anytime,’ ” says Rosaline’s grandson, Jean-Pierre Gendreau-Hétu. “She waited for years thinking he might be somewhere.”
Perhaps — probably — there is some part of his great uncle in that plot at the Durnbach graveyard south of Munich, Gendreau-Hétu acknowledges. But only modern forensic techniques, he adds, could bring certainty.
Gendreau-Hétu believes remains in collective graves should be subject to the same DNA profiling and other tests used to identify newly discovered war remains, such as those of Jolicoeur’s fellow Ottawa airman, John Joseph Carey, found in the wreckage of a Halifax bomber in a German lake in 2008. Carey will be buried on July 9 in another Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Rheinberg, Germany.
“Of course, it’s always a question of money,” says the grand-nephew. “But I believe that if I can get my DNA identified, my DNA signature done ... if a piece of bone allows you to do it, well, that would be important.”
There was little certainty in the documents sent to Jolicoeurs at the time. The first, a telegram in French, told them with regret that Fernand was missing after an air operation on Jan. 28, 1945. A letter in English from the bomber group’s chief chaplain urged them to “keep courage” but counselled that “your son is in the hands of God, no matter where he is or what may befall him.”
In late April came news that one survivor had learned from his German captors that the rest of the crew had died, and had been shown Jolicoeur’s coat and badge. But the report, the message continued, was “less than exact” and could not be confirmed.
What happened at the crash site is unrecorded. It is known, however, that German forces would bury bodies of Allied airmen at the scene or in local cemeteries and advise the Red Cross of the location and, if known, names of the dead. After the war, Royal Air Force teams combed through Europe to retrieve remains for reburial in commonwealth cemeteries.
Norm Christie, a war historian and one-time records officer with the war graves commission, said burial officers would decide whether remains would be committed to individual or collective graves, depending on what they saw. But no name would be placed on a grave unless the officer was confident it held that serviceman’s remains.
Christie says the Jolicoeur family should have received a final verification report as part of the process. Gendreau-Hétu, who lives in Quebec City, says no such report is among the documents handed down to him.
Collective graves are “not uncommon” for aircraft and tank crews, given the nature of their wars, says commission spokesman Peter Francis. “The aircraft crashes, you know that you have the crew, you cannot individually identify the crew, but you know you have them.”
Francis, based in Berkshire, England, says he fully understands how, for family members, a collective grave will inevitably raise the spectre of how their relative died. But it does offer dignity — and certainty. “He’s not unidentified, not unknown, as it were. There is a grave, there is a burial connected to that grave.”
Could such graves ever be opened for further verification? It seems unlikely. First, the numbers would be daunting. The remains of thousands of Canadians killed in two world wars lie commingled.
But on any scale, such exhumations would be counter to the philosophy of the commission, founded by its member nations to bury their war dead as close as possible to where they fell, and promising equal treatment and perpetual care for all, regardless of station.
Pierre Gendreau-Hétu seems prepared for such arguments. To him, all these years after Fernand Léo Jolicoeur was declared missing, the question can seem almost philosophical. Our country says Never Forget, but how deep is our commitment?
But at other times he thinks of his grandmother waiting for her younger brother to touch the ground before her. What proof is there he is anything but missing?
“I just don’t like the idea of going to a collective grave,” he explains, “and not being sure that the body that is in there is the body of my great uncle.”
History buffs and others seeking information about First World War dead will soon have access to a trove of documents offering details about the fallen and efforts made to ensure they were remembered.
On July 7, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission will make available an online archive of about 300,000 original documents that include handwritten lists of the dead, map references pinpointing where many servicemen fell and descriptions of the personal inscriptions chosen by family members for headstones. The data will support records of 1.7 million individuals already online.
The release comes as observations begin of the centenary of the Great War, which is expected to heighten interest in the conflict that left more than 16 million dead, including 65,000 Canadians.
Commission spokesman Peter Francis says the records were scanned to protect the original documents and to make the information more widely available. Converting the archives has been a huge undertaking.
“We’re talking about 450 linear metres of shelving, about 3,500 boxes of archives, 3.65 million documents — it’s a massive project.”
I just don’t like the idea of going to a collective grave and not being sure that the body … is the body of my great uncle.