On a flight with my father aboard virtual Lancaster
Pardon me while I wipe an occasional tear from my keyboard having just flown with my dad in a Lancaster bomber on a mission over Germany.
For 14 minutes, I sat in the cramped confines of the Lancaster bomber “F for Freddie” as it flew into the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe.
From my seat just behind the pilots, as we flew closer to war-torn Berlin, I could see the night sky being split by shafts of light from aircraft-seeking spotlights. Here and there, bursts of flak sought and sometimes found Royal Air Force (RAF) planes. Those in my plane flew bravely on.
My father, Kazimierz Czerny-Holownia, was a navigator with the Royal Air Force in the Second World War. He escaped to England from Poland during the war and then signed up to fly with the 300 and 304 Polish squadrons of the RAF.
I have his logbook and know that he survived 30 operational flights, which ranged from Foret de Nieppe to Stettin and LeHavre to Stuttgart. Some of his other bombing flights included Dusseldorf, Dortmund and Essen.
Sometimes, he would return from one mission and set out the next day on another. The median age of airmen in the Bomber Command was 22. Sometimes, their working day ended in death, their fight for our freedom over, but others fought on.
As we flew in our virtual bomber, I could hear the crackle of radio communications between members of the crew. The pilot calmly talking to the tailgunner to take on a night fighter plane. The pilot announcing that the bomb doors were open, with the payload on its way seconds later.
As the Lancaster banked and turned for home, the pilot was congratulating the crew on a bombing success, the night sky belching with bursts of explosions. The ground below was a riptide of flame destroying enemy installations.
War is hell, it has been said, and flying a bombing mission in a Lancaster was no picnic. My dad flew in nine types of aircraft during the war, but I had no idea until recently what his flying experiences — the real life-and-death experiences — were like until friends Susan Meneer and Ken Magill, took us to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Mount Hope, Ont.
In an alcove near the museum’s main hangar displays, there were six chairs and an invitation for visitors to try the “Virtual Reality Experience — BBC
1943 Berlin Blitz.” We signed up for a session, and an hour-and-a-half later, were seated and wearing headpieces that resembled the top part of a welder’s helmet with goggles and earpieces.
Our takeoff was smooth. The propellers of its four, roaring engines spun in unison just feet away from the fuselage as I looked out the windows from my perch in the cockpit. I have flown in a few aircraft, large and small, as well as in helicopters, so seeing the ground fall away as the aircraft gained altitude was nothing new.
But this was no pleasure flight. Soon, as we moved into the early stages of our simulated, almost-eight-hour journey, we crossed the English Channel and the havoc began with fighter attacks from the air and flak attacks from the ground.
The simulation was sensational. The BBC created this virtual experience using the recordings of war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas who bravely flew “F for Freddie” on Sept. 3, 1943, and recorded what transpired on that flight over Berlin.
We were told, before we donned the headsets, to look around during the “flight.” I did and found that by doing so it provided an extremely realistic feeling to this wartime mission.
By turning 360 degrees, I could see the action inside and outside the bomber. I had my camera in hand and a couple of times had to stop myself from taking pictures of the pilots at the controls, or the landscape that was lit up with flame and flak as the virtual Lancaster droned onward.
At one point, I turned 135 degrees to my left and looked down. There, at a small table was the navigator, his eyes poring over a map, his mind calculating. His hands moved across the table as he plotted a flight path and conveyed that information to the pilot. The navigator’s area, not far behind the pilots at the front of the plane, was cramped and dimly lit. It’s then that I almost lost it. No, I did not vomit, I was not bothered at all in that way. But as I looked down, thoughts of my father flooded into my mind. I imagined how he must have felt during his flights, knowing that at any minute a successful flak strike or burst of bullets from an enemy fighter, could have ended it all for their brave crew.
I got choked up thinking about it and it took me a while to regain composure after we left the VR station. I got emotional again, as I set about writing this, knowing that my father died in a postwar airplane crash at Coleby Heath, Coleby, England, when his Mosquito bomber, serial number TH984, crashed during inclement weather. He was just 28 and I was just four. It was Dec. 20, 1949.
The BBC’s Berlin Blitz VR was a travelling exhibit at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum when I visited there and has moved on — which is a shame.
If there is any way that this experience could be made available to all students across Canada, especially on Remembrance Day, it would help underscore how brave people fought, and died, to give us the freedoms we enjoy today.
We must never forget — I know I shall not.