Legacy Series Episode 5 - Collateral Damage

0:12

We never lost faith in prison camp.

0:15

That’s one thing I noticed: people always look forward to something better.

1:29

This is near the end of the war, when we were in Eindhoven, Holland.

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We were listening to— We had a little small radio,

1:38

and we got Arnhem Mary on the radio,

1:42

and she said, “We understand there’s a Canadian squadron in Eindhoven, Holland.”

1:48

And she said, “This is not your war, you know.

1:51

You should go home.

1:52

We feel so sad for you fellas, but maybe we could come over and wish you Merry Christmas.”

2:00

So we all laughed; we thought that was a big joke.

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The next morning, there was thirty-five German aircraft over us at six o’clock in the morning,

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and I was down having a shave when they passed over.

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I thought it was our aircraft taking off.

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I went out and I looked, and I was still shaving, and I said, “Boy, aren’t they low!

2:19

By golly they’re so low!

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Holy smokes; they’re not ours!”

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And so they damaged the entire field.

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But anyways, we were all out there after they left.

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And the planes are burning and— One of our fellas, who wasn’t really hit badly,

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but he had enough blood on his face, he said, “Take my picture.

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I want to send it home to my wife.”

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So I said, “Come over by this aircraft, I’ll take your picture!”

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I was never under guns firing at me, except that one day.

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I showed you the pictures where we were strafed.

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I was scared.

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I cried.

3:00

I fell down, busted my chin, and all the guys were telling me to get into the slit trench.

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I was really scared.

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I had to say, “But you’re lucky: you’re not carrying a gun, and you’re not a hundred

3:15

miles up there; you’re a hundred miles back here!

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And nobody’s firing guns at you.

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Those guys are getting killed, so shut up!”

3:25

I have to insist: I was in a war but I really wasn’t in a war.

3:29

The guy that was on the front lines or landing or shooting guns, he was at war.

3:36

But I was in a war, and I grew up.

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I was just a kid when I first flew this Lancaster.

3:54

Now I feel 95-years old…War does make men out of boys.

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But the problem is, there are some who refuse to grow up.

4:05

And that can be their downfall.

4:07

What do you mean by that?

4:09

What I mean is…boys your age feel indestructible.

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Like nothing is going to hurt them.

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So they take foolish risks.

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Doesn't taking foolish risks sometimes win medals?

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But more often than not, you loose a limb, an eye, or even your life.

4:27

You have to be smart in war.

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That only comes with experience.

4:35

So who should fight wars, old wise men?

4:39

No.

4:41

It’ll be you.

4:43

Young men fight wars Cadet.

4:46

Maybe not.

4:48

Come again?

4:49

You see…just like how the Second World War was light years ahead

4:53

of the First World War, wars today are too.

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Soon technology might just remove humans off the battlefield altogether.

5:19

I forget our target that night.

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I think our target was Merseburg, an oil refinery near Leipzig.

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We’d dropped our bombs.

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It was about a half an hour after we were shot down.

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It happened very quick, and I was just lucky.

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I really shouldn’t have got out—really—because I was supposed to go out of the front end

5:37

of the aircraft, and the bomb aimer and the engineer were supposed to go ahead of me;

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but they couldn’t get the darn hatch opened.

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So I said to myself, well I’m not going to get out that way; so I went back and stood

5:49

behind the pilot.

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One of the windows, right there, about that size, just blew open.

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I pulled myself up, jumped out, pulled my parachute and the first thing I know, I was

6:01

floating in the air.

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At about 20,000 feet.

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The parachute worked perfectly.

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The first thing I know, I was floating (laughs).

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My first impression is that I was going up, but gradually I could see I was going down.

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And I was a bit concerned, because I could still hear

6:15

the fighter planes, still flying around.

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I thought maybe he’d give me a burst, but I think he ignored me—I think.

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Then I landed in trees.

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And they captured me.

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They took me to a farmer’s house.

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A very nice farmer.

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This farmer, luckily he could speak English.

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But he was so, so nice.

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A nice fella to talk to.

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And I wanted to give him my watch and my wallet,

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because I didn’t want the Germans to get them.

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He said, “Oh no, I can’t take that.”

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He says, “If I took that, and the Gestapo came in there and found that on me,” he

6:53

says, “they wouldn’t ask any questions.”

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He says, ”they would just shoot me.”

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He was scared of the Gestapo—so scared.

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But anyway, he was very nice to me.

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He said, “What you need is a drink of schnapps!”

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“You think so?”

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“Yeah!”

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So he went and got the bottle of snaps, and he handed the glass to me.

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I had never drunk snaps before.

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I took a drink: Oohh, down my throat.

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I said, ”That’s too strong!”

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He said “Oh No!”

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He took the glass and drank it himself (laughs).

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The next morning, the local burgermeister came, and they took me to jail.

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But first, before they took me to the jail, they took me to where the plane had crashed,

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and they told me then that all the other six guys were dead.

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They put two guards on me, and took me to the railway station in Frankfurt.

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From there, I was going to the interrogation centre at Dulag Luft.

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When we were in the railway station, there was an air raid on.

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And, of course, all the people were running in and going to the air raid shelter.

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We had to go down steps to get to the shelter.

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And as we were going in, people coming in, they could see me, and I could tell by the

8:00

look on their faces they weren’t too happy.

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They looked at me—and they said, oh, terror figure, you know.

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And, of course, some of these people, I could see their point, you know: a lot of them had

8:07

been bombed before and maybe lost relatives,

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and they wouldn’t be thinking too highly of me.

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So what the two guards did: they put me in the corner, and stood in front

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of me so the people couldn’t see me as they went down the steps.

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And we got out of there without incident.

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And when the air raid was over, we got on a small train, I think, and went to the interrogation

8:28

centre which was very close to Frankfurt.

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There was one young German officer.

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He spoke very good English.

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He got very upset; he more or less threatened me, but the Geneva Conventions said all we

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needed to tell them was our name, our number and our rank.

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That’s all I told them.

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I stuck to that.

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I could tell by the way he was talking that he knew a lot more about our squadron

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than maybe I thought I knew myself.

8:56

The food was terrible.

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But you must remember: at that time, Germany had no food.

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They were right down to rock bottom.

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You know, the general public was starving, too.

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When you’re hungry, you’ll eat anything.

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I remember once (laughs) we were on the march; I got into this farm house.

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I don’t know how I got there, but I did.

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And there was this trough there, and the pigs were eating this stuff.

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I looked down, picked it up;

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it looked pretty good, so I thought I’d have some.

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I ate some; it was pretty good! (laughs) Of course, I have a nature that would rather

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be looking on the bright side, you know, seeing the humour of things.

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Maybe that’s what got me through the war.

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I don’t know!

9:48

I don’t get it.

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How can anyone keep positive while fighting in a war?

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Let me see if I can explain it to you.

9:56

We go through different hells all the time in war.

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And when an act of kindness from a fellow soldier, or a civilian, or even the enemy

10:06

happens, it reminds us that we’re all human.

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And are still capable of compassion.

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That’s something positive, don’t you think?

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I think the most positive thing would be not to kill one another.

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Tough to do in war.

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I’d say it was about the third year into

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the war when we started to feel the pinch.

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You went to the soup kitchen, you got a spoonful of mostly soup—kind of.

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If you’ve ever seen a rotten potato, try to eat that!

10:59

Yeah.

11:00

That was what the soup was made of.

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Wheat flour, if you have a seed, if it’s a year old or a couple of years old, maggots will form in there,

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and this is what they made porridge out of.

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I had a goldfish and I was eating at the kitchen table and the kids—hey, we would eat anything.

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The Germans had set up on the bridges to prevent people from going to the farmers.

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They let people go out, in the beginning, and then, when they came back, with their

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bicycle bags full of—you know, milk, potatoes and whatever—

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you had some vegetables in '43 about,

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they were stopping them on the bridges (chokes up).

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They’d take the food, and drop it over the bridge in the water while you were starving.

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Yeah, that was mean!

12:03

My mother was about 230 pounds when the war started

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and she was 98 pounds when the war finished.

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It would have been a matter of a week or fourteen days, and she wouldn’t have made it.

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What we do to each other in times of war is disgusting.

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To starve people who wanted no part of war is so cruel.

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Yeah it’s cruel.

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Horrible things happen in war all the time.

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They bomb us.

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We bomb them.

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They sink our ships.

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We sink theirs.

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They kill our soldiers.

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We kill theirs.

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They shoot down our planes.

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(in unison): We shoot down theirs.

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I get it.

12:46

I get it.

12:48

It’s a vicious circle Andy.

12:49

Yeah.

12:52

One that goes around and around.

13:12

One thing I did do—and I’m quite proud

13:13

of it, too, and it really makes me feel good when I think of it—we went over, and the

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Dutch were starving; we took food over, and dropped it to them.

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The Germans had said that they wouldn’t send up any fighters or anything;

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they allowed us to go in and drop the food.

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And as we flew over Rotterdam, coming to the drop zone, and

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there were hundreds, hundreds of people they were all lined up, and they were waving at us.

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And we dropped our food, and wiggled our wings, and set tail for home.

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So I think they really appreciated that!

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It didn’t take long for people to catch on.

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The big apartment buildings: they were on the roofs, and they were waving.

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The nice part was, you know,

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if you see the Lancaster, the airplane, at the tail end,

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you see those guns (makes waving movement like the guns), he was waving with his guns,

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(chokes up) double guns.

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The Dutch people were wonderful.

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They would come up to you on the street—of course, we wore our berets and everything.

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They knew who you were, but they’d come up and give you a hug

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—kiss you, and everything else.

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Makes me cry just to think about it.

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Anyway, you’d go into a restaurant sometimes, and they wouldn’t even charge you.

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Wonderful people.

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And they really liked the Canadians.

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So even in war, bitter enemies can do the right thing?

15:07

Do something good for each other?

15:09

Yeah, but usually it comes at a cost.

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It shouldn’t be that way though.

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Doing something good should come with no strings attached.

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What world do you live in?

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Eventually, everything comes at a cost in this life.

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I received a first letter from my mother,

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“Everything is fine, except your father and my youngest brother disappeared.”

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Later on, I found out that they were killed in Auschwitz concentration camp.

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And we got to a place called Belsen.

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There was a German concentration camp.

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We went in to this concentration camp, as we were allowed to do.

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And to make us safe in there—because there was typhus in the camp—they sprayed us with

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white powder, which turned out to be DDT.

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They put it down our clothes, they put it in our hair—they put it all over us and so on.

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What we saw in there was very traumatic.

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The people—mostly Jewish

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prisoners that had been in there—were thin, thin, people dying.

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Some would be walking along, and just fall over.

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But we saw what was there.

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And I never forgot that.

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Never!

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I hated the Germans.

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I hated them with intensity.

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I didn’t know about what happened.

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I really didn’t!

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I have never seen anybody doing something bad like that.

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I couldn’t imagine it.

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But then, of course, I had to realize that it was the truth.

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They showed us the pictures, and

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it is terrible. It should never have happened,

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and I cannot understand who is doing that.

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It’s horrible.

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It’s horrible.

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When I got home, I found out my daughter was doing— Tracing the family tree, and so on,

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and what does she find out?

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That I had more German in me than British English or Scotch or French (laughs).

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Big joke!

18:07

We are all cut from the same cloth.

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How can fellow humans beings have so little regard for life?

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How can someone send people into a gas chamber?

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What will it take to change things?

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I’m just a pawn in this war Andy.

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I don’t know…a miracle?

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You tell me.

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We were celebrating.

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That evening, everybody was so happy, and the civilians were rejoicing.

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They were hoping that the rations would be over, and they could start living again.

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Everybody was excited. Yeah!

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There was excitement in the air.

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Well the war was over here, too.

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People in Montreal went crazy, and the churches were all filled up.

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It meant the end of our being away, was what it mostly meant to us.

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On our base in our part of Gander, I don’t recall even knowing the war was over.

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So there definitely was no great celebration, because we were still doing shift work.

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The planes were still coming and going.

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The people in Ottawa all congregated downtown

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for a huge rally celebrating the end of the war.

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It was packed downtown.

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Guys were drinking beer, and guys in their uniforms and all this.

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And the women were kissing the guys in their uniforms, and all this kind of nonsense.

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And of course all the beer parlours were loaded, you know.

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It went on all night long.

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There was an awful lot of hangovers the next day.

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So I’m alone in this big Nissen Hut, all on my own, and it’s VE Day, you know;

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I can still remember that to this day.

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And I’m feeling very sorry for myself,

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being stuck in this Nissen hut, with nobody there but me.

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So I just went to bed. (laughs)

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I think we’re still celebrating.

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A lot of dancing.

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Street dancing was all over.

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That lasted a couple of weeks, actually.

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The Canadian soldiers and that was all in the street squares, and they were out with

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the bands and yeah, that went on for a long time.

21:01

All I remember is that there’s no flying.

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Oh well, now what do we do?

21:06

There’s no flying?

21:08

Holy crow!