Vandalism stirs memories
Canadian whose grave was disturbed in Libya was ‘a bit of a lad’
Nearly seven decades after Martin Northmore’s fighter plane went down over the Mediterranean, the vandals who shattered his grave in a Commonwealth cemetery in Libya have brought the young Toronto pilot back into his family’s thoughts.
“I was just thunderstruck,” Northmore’s niece, Sharon Conway, told the Star from her Toronto home. “But I don’t feel resentment.”
Three years after enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and days shy of his 26th birthday, Flying Officer Northmore’s Hurricane fighter plane crashed into the sea, probably while protecting a supply convoy to the British Eighth Army. A day later, the newly married brother of two was interred inside Benghazi War Cemetery, in Cyrene, Libya, thousands of kilometres from his childhood home in Cabbagetown.
“It was indeed difficult to realize that such a great pal and fine pilot had passed over to the other side,” squadron mate J.D. Cartwright wrote to Northmore’s family, shortly after the ceremony, held on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean.
More than 17,000 Canadian Air Force men died in World War II, according to Major Mathias Joost, of the Department of National Defence’s Directorate of History and Heritage.
Late last month, Northmore again fell victim to the vagaries of war. His headstone, along with about 200 others marking the graves of Commonwealth soldiers, was destroyed by Libyan vandals, another outburst of violence in the conflict-ridden country. The destruction, it is believed, rides a wave of anti-western sentiment following the burning of Qur’ans by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan last month, which U.S. officials say was accidental.
“This is a byproduct of conflict,” Conway said of the vandalism.
Dominique Boulais, deputy secretary general of the Canadian agency of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which oversees plots worldwide, said cemetery restoration normally takes up to two years, but the Commission will give Benghazi, where nine Canadians are buried, priority attention.
Libya’s interim leaders said they would pursue those responsible. Worldwide condemnation was echoed Monday by Minister of Veterans Affairs Steven Blaney, who said he was “appalled and saddened” by the news.
The second of three children to Depression-era clothes cleaners, Northmore gravitated toward mathematics, which the Jarvis Collegiate student parlayed into an early career at Royal Bank. On Dec. 9,1940, Northmore enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and became a member of 94 Squadron, a motley group of Canadians, British, Australian and Danish pilots that fought with the Royal Air Force. Northmore’s letters home recall a ruffian often concerned with alcohol — in one, he wrote that the Eighth Army won its battles fuelled on Canadian and Australian beer. “He was a bit of a lad,” Conway said, laughing. Still, Northmore was acutely aware of war’s paradox, the relentless desire for action, always tempered by fear. “Don’t be fooled,” he wrote his sister, Mary, one month before he died. “There isn’t a Canadian out here who wouldn’t rather be back in Canada. . . . It’s fun up to a point, and that point is quickly reached.” With files from Stephanie Findlay