‘You’re scared as hell’
Hal Gooding was still young when, as an RCAF fighter pilot in WWII, he routinely confronted death Six decades on, the heroic medal winner reminisces about being back in the cockpit, writes Bill Taylor
Six decades later, Hal Gooding still dreams of potatoes.
Flying potatoes.
“ I crash-landed in Belgium.” His eyes are distant as he casts his mind back to 1944, when he was a squadron leader in the RCAF, flying Typhoon fighter bombers. “ I got hit in an oil line and my engine seized. I came down with my wheels up . . . bellylanded in a plowed field planted with potatoes.
“ That’s what I dream about. Sliding across that field with potatoes flying up and going by the wings on both sides.” Gooding laughs. “ I sat there for a minute or two and then a man comes over. He was a doctor, spoke pretty good English. He was telling me he was with the Free French forces and I’m saying, ‘ Where are the Germans? I wanna get outta here!’
“ He said, ‘ They’re coming up the road.’ He took me to his house and gave me coffee. And then people started coming in droves to shake hands with me. Well, that would’ve been a dead giveaway! He shooed them off and I spent the night there. Didn’t get much sleep. Next day, a small plane came and got me.”
Gooding, 86, lives in the veterans’ wing at Sunnybrook hospital. He’s kept his pilot’s eye and silver tongue. A staff member comes into the room and he says, “ Sally, you’re looking pretty sharp there, kid.” A native of Ottawa, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941. Between June 1942, and August 1943, he flew Kittyhawks alongside the U.S. air force in the Aleutian Islands between Alaska and Russia. Then he flew Typhoons over Europe, based at first near Bournemouth on the southern English coast. He commanded 440 “ City of Ottawa” Squadron. Gooding finished World War II with his hide intact, three tours of duty and 309 combat missions under his belt, two Distinguished Flying Crosses and the American Air Medal “for heroism in action.” And the knowledge that he’d been lucky but pretty darned good, too.
“Yeah, I could fly,” he says. “ Heck, if I could get my licence tomorrow, I could still hack it.” Gooding flew three sorties over the beaches of Normandy on D- Day, June 6, 1944, going in low with bombs and guns to hammer the German positions as Allied troops struggled ashore.
“ D-Day was . . . something else,” he says. “ Columns of ships . . . and Germans up on a hill shooting down on our guys. Boy, were they catching it.
“ We came down and we were shooting up anything that was moving. The more we saw, the lower we got. We were like a bunch of savages at them.
“ We could only stay up an hour and a half. It was that quick. We got back and sat in our airplanes and the intelligence people came and talked to us. Then off we went again. A wild day.” Gooding often limped home with his plane battered and bullet“Oh boy, all the time. You’re so busy, you don’t really think about it much, but all the same, you’re scared as hell.” Fighting in the Aleutians meant flying 320 kilometres over the northern Pacific to attack the Japanese and then back. “ A long haul,” he says.
“ There’d be a lot of flak. One base was like a horseshoe with mountains behind it. Once you were in, you were in and you had to fly right around and out the other side. It was pretty wicked.
“ We used airstrips made from metal mesh. It was sometimes a little slippery, but you’d be so glad to be back on it, it looked pretty good. The weather was bad. Foggy and miserable.” Gooding got home briefly to marry the woman he’d met at the Ottawa Exhibition before the war. “ Doris. She’s still with me, which is pretty good.” The worst part of being a commanding officer, he says, was writing to the families of pilots killed in action. His son James is named after one of them.
“ James Garfield, a close friend, a fine fellow and a good pilot. That was a big blow. We were coming back off a trip and he was flying as my wingman. We had Bournemouth in our sights. He said, ‘ Hal, I’m gonna have to get outta this.’ He’d lost his oil pressure. I said, ‘ Get the hell out.’ I pulled over real close beside him. His parachute caught on the tail of his aircraft. I watched him go down. That shook me up pretty much. But then you get back in there and go and it takes your mind off it.” Gooding’s daughter Tracy Roberts has three sons: James, 18, Michael, 15, and David, 10. For a school contest, a presentation on “ my favourite Canadian,” Michael wrote about his grandfather. He won first prize.
“ I explain it to my grandsons as plainly as I can,” Gooding says. “ I don’t pull any punches. We came out of that tussle pretty well, but now . . . they’re playing with dynamite fooling around with Iran and Iraq.”
After the war, he got a job flying VIPs around for the government and then worked for Imperial Oil for 30 years as a pilot and aviation manager.
Apainting by Paul Goransonin the Canadian Museum of Civilization shows Gooding wearing his life vest, a spotted scarf beneath his open tunic and a map tucked into his flying boot. He looks at a print of the picture and gets misty- eyed. “ Hard to believe I lived through it all without a scratch.” But he had another battle to fight. In 1999, he suffered a stroke that brought him to Sunnybrook. His daughter recounts, “ He was on a feeding tube and they were talking about life- support. He always said he didn’t want that, so we were saying, ‘ Maybe we should just let him go.’ They said, ‘ Give us six months.’ ”
“ It’s unbelievable what he accomplished with their help.” Gooding grins. “ I couldn’t talk, Icouldn’t move. But I thought to myself, ‘ Heck, I’ll get better.’ ”