THE HELMET AND THE WAR MYSTERY
Katie Daubs recounts Frenchman’s quest to identify a downed Canadian airman — 70 years later,
Dominique Lemaire always felt a heaviness when he looked at the leather helmet from the Second World War.
It came to his father in the days when planes, men and bombs fell from the sky. In the early hours of June 13, 1944, a Royal Canadian Air Force bomber was shot down on the outskirts of Foncquevillers, the village where both his parents grew up. How did his father, a member of the French Resistance, come to own it? Dominique never knew.
Henri Lemaire died in 1996. He had always revered the artifact, but to his son, it was an object of war that didn’t belong to him. This year, he decided it was time to reunite the helmet with its proper Canadian family.
When he looked closely, he saw the apparent remnants of a last name on the worn leather, a faded E, A, and then after a gap, an N — the only clues pointing to the helmet’s rightful owner.
The quest would start in a French graveyard, traverse the Atlantic Ocean, and reach back several decades to descendants and experts alike, all trying to answer the question: Who was wearing the helmet when the plane crashed? ‘Bail out! Bail out!’ It was less than a week after D-Day. Bomber Command, the long-distance arm of the Allied countries, was trying to hammer the German positions from the air so the Allied armies on the ground had a better chance at pushing the Nazis out of northern Europe. Robert “Pat” Pearson and his crew took to the skies from their base in Yorkshire, England, in a Halifax bomber after11p.m. on June 12, 1944. They were headed for a rail yard in the city of Arras in northern France.
Likely after midnight, Pearson made a left turn over Amiens. Highpowered German searchlights crisscrossed the sky. Pearson and his crew had flown 32 operations together, so they would have been used to this. He dodged the light, but the Germans saw a sliver of his plane. They were relentless, and they found the Halifax again, bathing the plane in light. BANG BANG BANG — like someone hitting the plane with a hammer. It may have come from a German night fighter lurking nearby, or from the ground, a shell that exploded, sending shards of jagged steel into the plane’s aluminum skin. The Halifax lurched. “Bail out! Bail out!” Pearson yelled. The plane came down on the edge of the rural village of Foncquevillers. The next morning, a constable climbed through the wreckage to bury the men. Locals watched. Some were curious, others were desperate for anything of value, according to a history of the local occupation. Lemaire’s mother, a teenager at the time, remembers the Germans later detonating the bomb the plane was carrying. Lemaire doesn’t know if his father was in the village at the time. He was a member of the resistance, often in hiding. The pilot: Robert Charles Pearson The crash still holds a prominent place in the village that had been destroyed in the First World War, and occupied by the Nazis. In 1999, locals hauled the motor and propeller out of the field and later created a memorial at the church in the centre of town. A ceremony honours the men every Canada Day.
The dead from that flight are buried alongside the men of their parents’ generation who died on the Somme battlefields of the First World War. Lemaire has an orchard near the cemetery, and often visited the men who died that night: Cartwright, Dubeau, Duffin, Parsons and Pearson.
It looked as though the only match to the E, A and the N on the helmet was Robert Charles Pearson.
Pearson, who went by Pat, grew up in Pincher Creek, Alta., a ranching town where the chinook winds howled temperate air across the rolling hills. He was the second oldest, with two brothers, Stanley and Donald, and a sister, Gwen.
He was the quiet one, a goodlooking guy who joined the RCAF, and was so skilled they picked him to be a flight instructor in nearby High River. He was careful and patient, but had a bold streak when it came to romance. Once, he was giving stu- dent Murray Peden a flying lesson, when he took over and plummeted toward a farmhouse like a “vengeful Stuka pilot,” Peden writes in A Thousand Shall Fall. Pearson levelled the plane out with three feet to spare, and the two men roared past the kitchen window — where Peden saw, in a split second, a woman pouring coffee. “I felt like I was close enough to reach out my hand and fill a cup,” he writes. Dorothy Buchanan — one of the prettiest girls in Pincher Creek — came outside and waved. She and Pearson would marry and welcome a son, Robin, in 1943.
Robin Pearson, 72, has no memory of his father. He thinks they met, but doesn’t know for sure. His mother never really spoke about it. Robin learned more from the Pearson side: how all three boys went to war and only one came back.
Youngest brother Donald was shot down over the Mediterranean in 1943. Stanley, the only brother to survive, died in 2011. The remaining sibling, Gwen, 89, has missed her brothers terribly all of her life.
Robin Pearson visited his father’s grave in 2007. Gwen visited 12 years ago with her family. “It was kind of a surreal day,” Gwen’s daughter Deb Detmold says. “Just as I had my arm around mom she was crying and two French air force jets flew over and broke the sound barrier.”
Robin has his father’s flight logs, but not many of his personal things. “I would love to have it,” he says of the helmet.
When Lemaire is sent a photo of Pat Pearson, he replies with some information that casts doubt on the first hypothesis. He had noticed another “N,” above the other three letters. Was it part of a first name?
I called the Canadian War Museum to see if they had any advice. Collections specialist Arlene Doucet and Second World War historian Jeff Noakes said that if Lemaire was looking at the cemetery or the local monument, he would only see the names of the five men killed.
“It doesn’t mention two that survived,” Doucet says.
Kenneth Bulow, a flight engineer from the Royal Air Force, and Edwin “Ed” Beaton, the flight navigator from Moose Jaw, Sask., jumped out the hatch in the seconds before the crash.
What if the person wearing the helmet when the plane crashed wasn’t on the plane at all?
That “N” that caught Lemaire’s eye? Maybe it stood for navigator. The navigator: Ed Beaton Ed Beaton faded in and out of consciousness as his parachute drifted down, wondering if the others escaped. In his mid-20s, he was the “old man” in the plane, the only child of older parents. He saw a fire in the distance and passed out when he hit the ground. Hours later, he awoke with severe pain in his back. He shuffled to a nearby house and rapped on the window. “RAF,” he whispered hoarsely.
A sleepy couple came to the door. Beaton spoke almost no French, they spoke no English. The woman brought a basin of water so he could wash the blood from his face.
He hobbled through the village and passed out in a field. Young farmers found him and brought him to a safe house, gave him food and drink, civilian clothes and a false identity paper. He was now Henri Kovricki, a Polish labourer.
Beaton stowed away in the storage compartment of a buggy, covered with rhubarb, to move to another town a few days later. He learned some French and heard about a British airman planning to walk to the front lines to escape occupied France. Beaton decided he would join. Their French turned out to be not very convincing — they were captured on their first day. They were interrogated and sent to the Gestapo. In Paris, an officer handed Beaton a shovel to dig a grave for his death, apparently scheduled for the next morning.
He was instead taken to Stalag Luft III, a prisoner-of-war camp southeast of Berlin, best known for its portrayal in Hollywood’s The Great Escape. In March 1944, 76 men broke out, but 73 were captured, and 50 were executed.
Beaton arrived a few months after the executions. He told his family he was never abused, but always hungry and cold. When his children once complained about dinner, Beaton told them about the soup at Stalag Luft with the horse’s hoof. “Now how do you think the soup tastes?”
John Harvie and Beaton were the only Canadian “kriegies” (a slang version of the German word for PoWs) in Room 13 at the camp.
“It was hard to believe that anyone could sleep as much as he did. He was at his best at night, excelling at cribbage, bridge and chess,” Harvie wrote of Beaton in his book, Missing in Action. “Ed was a knowledgeable person, the only one in our room, I had been told, who had a university degree.”
In late January 1945, with the Russian army closing in, the prisoners were sent on a gruelling march west. They were eventually sent by rail to another camp and then, after a few months, another forced march ended at a farm, where they awaited the war’s end, and wondered how they would be received at home.
“Some had worried ceaselessly since their capture that perhaps they had jumped too soon from their flaming bomber,” Harvie wrote of those final days. “Perhaps they had made errors which caused the deaths of their comrades. How did you explain to the next of kin why you survived when their loved ones did not?”
When Harvie wrote the postscript for his book in1995, he had not heard from Beaton since the war. “Perhaps at this moment he is curled up under a blanket having a nap!”
After the war, Beaton worked for the Saskatchewan government, married Sheila and raised five children in Regina. He didn’t watch war movies, nor did he join the legion. He rarely spoke about the war.
Beaton liked reading, writing and taking classes at the nearby university. The former navigator was careful with his words, fastidious with his actions, frugal with his dollars.
“If you ever wanted to hassle him, take out a map and fold it incorrectly,” his youngest son Gerald says. “That just drove him buggy.”
Sheila, now 90, remembers going to visit the Pearson family in the late 1940s. They were treated like “royalty.” “Ed was telling them about the good times before their flight went astray,” she says. “I often wondered how hard it was for them to face Ed. They were very brave people.” The historians’ verdict At the Canadian War Museum, Doucet and Noakes say it is not likely the helmet would have survived the crash. In German-occupied France, a downed airman trying to stay alive would ditch anything, and Lemaire’s helmet is in excellent shape.
And so they believe this is Ed Beaton’s helmet. “Jeff and I agree it says Beaton,” Doucet says.
When Lemaire learned about Beaton, he was relieved. He had always felt uncomfortable about the prospect of the helmet coming from the crash site.
Maybe it flew off in the air and Lemaire’s father found it in the woods. Maybe Beaton swapped it for civilian clothes and the resistance hid it. Maybe Lemaire’s father was part of the effort.
The helmet didn’t lead to Pat Pearson, but a connection made through the search has brought some closure. Pearson’s niece, Deb Detmold, connected with Beaton’s son, who told her about the crash and the memorial in France. As a little girl, she never wanted to cause pain by asking her grandparents.
“I kind of broke down at one point,” Detmold says . “It’s been a lifetime of watching my grandparents’ sadness and my mom’s sadness at losing half of her family.”
Ed Beaton died in 2003, at age 84. He was always grateful to the people in France, and he made a point to visit the cemetery in Foncquevillers.
“I think that bothered him most of his life, that fate had it that him and Ken survived, and the other five who were younger, didn’t,” his widow Sheila says. “I think there was a bit of why me?”
In 1994, Beaton wrote a letter to a French historian to again thank those who risked their lives to help him 50 years earlier. “I would like to visit Arras and district again, but I am not so young now (I am age 76) and we do not do so many things when we get older,” he wrote. “But thank you again for writing to me, and for all the good things you did for the many flyers from Canada.”
Lemaire will make sure the helmet finds its way to the Beaton family in Regina. Beaton would probably shake his head.
“Won’t be any good now, throw it away,” Sheila imagines he would say.
“That’s where he and I differ.”