The recent reunion of Bill Baxter and Jack Burch is centered around a photograph. The two gentlemen, now in their late 80s, first met when "crewing up" for a bomb squad about 68 years ago in the Air Force during the Second World War.
The photo was taken in the spring of 1944, about a week after they had met at an Air Force base in England. It's a grainy, faded shot of six fairly young men, standing alongside each other in front of a plane, each dressed in flight gear - some with pointed caps tilted to the side. Jack, second from the left, was the pilot, and Bill furthest on the right, was the bomb aimer. To the best of Jack and Bill's knowledge, they are the only ones in that photograph who are still alive.
Bill's nephew had the original photo enlarged and framed as a gift, and Bill in turn did the same for Jack.
Jack and Bill were part of a crew that flew a Handley Page Halifax, a fourengine bomber outfitted with machine guns that was one of 13 planes in the 433 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force. They made 34 trips between June and November of 1944, mostly hitting major German cities and the occasional French oil refinery or railway yard.
The Second World War was the bloodiest conflict in human history, with an estimated 60 million dead. Jack figures they had a one-in-three chance of not making it.
"Out of 50,000 Canadian air crew, there were 17,000 casualties," he says.
?
Seated on the couch in Jack's North Burnaby home, the two white-haired men, both in grey T-shirts and dark slacks, recount the history of how they met.
Bill was the baby of the crew. Originally from Western Ontario, he joined the war effort in 1942, fresh out of high school at age 18.
"You never did have a job, did you," Jack quips, laughing.
Jack, only a year older than Bill, donned a uniform in 1942, when he was living in Vancouver.
"I thought, if I'm going to go into the war, I'm going to do it on my terms," he says, sternly. "If I have a choice, I will be in the Air Force. I really wanted to be a pilot."
By 1943, Jack was flying air patrols along the Eastern Canadian coastline, looking for enemy submarines. Both young men went to England in late 1943 for training with the Royal Air Force.
Jack learned to be a bomber pilot and Bill a bomb aimer. It was at that base in England, in an empty hanger with a bar on one end, where the men picked each other out from the crowd.
"This was a unique RAF procedure at an operational training unit," Bill says. The men were told to "crew up," and they wandered around looking for friendly faces.
Bill and Jack connected and found four more men, and they became inseparable.
At the end of the day, they all went to the pub to get to know each other. Bill's impression of Jack was that he was quiet and confident, while Jack thought Bill was competent.
(An English engineer would later join them as the seventh crew member.)
"We were no longer individuals, we were a crew," Jack says.
They were also eager to get onto operations after spending years training, Jack adds.
"We knew what the story was. The newspapers were full of the Battle of Britain," Jack says. "We heard reports of what the Nazis were doing to the civilian population, creating concentration camps. It was no secret. It seemed like a just cause."
?
After more training, the crew started flying missions with the 433 Squadron, mostly at night. The whole of Germany was blacked out, and the plane's lights were turned off.
"We were flying at night, and you couldn't see a thing," Jack says.
"We didn't want to advertise we were there," Bill adds.
A Pathfinder Force would go in early to mark the targets. With ground-mapping radar, they would drop flares where the bombers were supposed to hit. Another low-level master bomber would identify more targets to be marked for bombing. The flares were colour-coded, but the meanings would change so the Germans would not figure out the significance. Jack and Bill's crew would then get the signal: bomb the red, or bomb the green.
Bill would get the coloured indicators in sight and release a stream of bombs, from roughly five to six miles above ground. The Handley Page could carry up to nine bombs, weighing 400 or 500 pounds each.
There were no sounds when they hit, just silent flashes on the ground and the whir of engines.
The flights were always perilous. Jack recalls a violent storm, with lots of lightning in the clouds, heavily charged with static electricity, creating a St. Elmo's Fire effect.
"The windshield in front of me was just crackling with lightning strikes, the colours - they were flashing between the guns," he says.
Almost every time, they were fired on by the Germans, but it was nothing serious, Jack says. "There were holes in the aircraft, but we could still fly."
At the end of their tour, Jack was awarded (on behalf of the crew, he says) the Distinguished Flying Cross for completing the tour.
For Jack and Bill, the most memorable trip was the last because it was all over they say, laughing.
"It was the best of times and is something I would never have missed for the association of the people you met."
Bill, who describes himself as a fairly unruly teenager, saw the whole thing as an adventure.
Jack adds that they were all part of the effort to overthrow Hitler and his regime.
"I thought we were trying to drink all the beer," Bill says.
?
The crew disbanded and returned to civilian life. Jack held a number of jobs, including work in the community newspaper business, and Bill did a brief stint as a teacher and custodian before another period with the Royal Air Force in England.
They wanted him for his radar experience, and this time the Russians were getting unfriendly.
Both men raised families. Bill and Jack have kept in touch over the years, but this is only the second time they've met.
Bill, who now lives in Calgary, stopped by in Burnaby to bring Jack a framed copy of the photograph.
"It was my calling card," he says. "It's just like old times, we recall a lot of things the other had forgotten."
More than six decades later, the two men bear resemblance to their younger black-and-white selves.
"All the crew survived," Jack said. "I'm proud to say everybody did their job, and it was a team effort."
"We want the people of Canada to remember what those other guys did - the ones who didn't come back," Jack says.
www.twitter.com/JenniferMoreau
