'In Friendly Skies'
Conclusion
Today, a wrap-up of my tribute to the lost airmen of Pat Bay Airport during the Second World War.
As we’ve seen, no fewer than 179 young trainees from Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand were killed, 1940-1945, without ever getting overseas. Fifty-eight of them have graves in Saanich’s Royal Oak Burial Park, Section D. Others are interred in collective graves at the crash sites. Some have never been found.
Some of the 1000’s of airmen who trained at Pat Bay during the Second World War. —Courtesy of Tom Wagner
In 2016, the Lost Airmen of the Empire Memorial was erected on Mills Road on the north side today’s Victoria International Airport at the site of the wartime Royal Canadian Air Force hospital.
“The memorial,” Victoria Edwards of the BC Aviation Museum informs us, “was selected by the Victoria Airport Authority and a working group to increase the awareness of the proud military history of the airport. The names of the lost airmen were water-jet cut into 25 Corten steel Cooper’s Hawk feathers.
“The Cooper’s Hawk is a predator known for its extraordinary agility in flight and ferocity in hunting. Symbolically, the feathers create an allegorical narrative about the spirit of these fighting men who were training to be Canada’s airborne warriors. The eight-feet-high feathers were arranged chronologically in a military matrix with some removed, representing the randomness and divergent accident locations...”
“There are three civilians listed, including one who was an American citizen and resident.”
The approach to the memorial is flanked by the original gateposts of the hospital and red maple trees on both sides. A seating area which includes a time capsule is made from bricks salvaged from the airport’s original administration building.
Designed by Victoria sculptor Illarion Gallant, the memorial was dedicated in June 2017 with a military band and a flypast of vintage and modern military aircraft, including a PBY Canso that served at Pat Bay during the war.
*The BC Aviation Museum has compiled biographical and crash details, as well as burial sites of each of the names attached to this Chronicle.
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Types of aircraft stationed at Pat Bay during WW2 (in alphabetical order)
Avro Anson I
Blackburn Shark (bi-plane)
Bristol Beaufort (two-engine bomber)
Bristol Bolingbroke Mk.IV (twin-engine bomber)
Consolidated Canso (two-engine amphibious bomber/patrol craft)
Consolidated B-24 Liberator G.R. Mk.VI (four-engine bomber)
Consolidated Catalina (two-engine flying-boat, sister to amphibious Canso)
Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk Mk. I, IV (fighter)
de Havilland Mosquito (two-engine fighter-bomber)
de Havilland Tiger Moth (bi-plane trainer)
Fairey Battle (fighter)
Grumman Goose (amphibian)
Hampden Hurricane (fighter)
Handley Page Hampden (two-engine torpedo bomber)*
Harvard
Lockheed Hudson (two-engine trainer)
Lockheed Vega Ventura G.R. (two-engine anti-submarine bomber)
Mitchell B-25 (two-engine attack bomber)
Noorduyn Norseman
Northrop Delta Mk.II (trainer)
Stinson T
Supermarine Stranraer (two-engine amphibious reconnaissance bomber)
Westland Lysander T (trainer)
The Handley Page Hampden torpedo bomber claimed more lives of Pat Bay airmen than any other aircraft.—Wikipedia
*No fewer than 37 Handley Page Hampden torpedo bombers were lost, most of them out of Pat Bay. They accounted for the majority of the airbase’s mortality rate of 179 servicemen. Originally known as the ‘Flying Suitcase’ because their four-man crews were so cramped, as the death toll mounted they became known as ‘Flying Coffins’.
Losses of this aircraft became so alarming that they were sent up with just a pilot–often a trainee airman–which undoubtedly contributed to the ultimate toll, in part because of their tendency to “yaw and lose stability while banking,” as authors White and Smith grimly noted in Wings Across the Water: Victoria’s Flying Heritage 1871-1971.
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For years after war’s end, rows of unused aircraft were parked in fields alongside the Pat Bay Airport. Upon being declared surplus, most were sold for scrap. Several Cansos were converted into water bombers, Grumman Goose amphibians became an RCMP, provincial government and forest industry workhorse, two-seater Harvard trainers were bought privately for recreational purposes.
A Curtiss Kittyhawk P-40E in the markings of No. 3 Squadron Royal Australia Air Force colours. —Chris Finney, Wikipedia
Well-known aviation fan George Maude purchased and barged a Kittyhawk fighter (now said to be one of the best preserved P-40s in the world), and a Bristol Bolingbroke, to his Salt Spring Island property. He donated the two-engine bomber to the RCAF in 1964.
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I’m by no means the only historian or aviation buff who honours B.C.’s lost airmen of the Second World.
Paul R. Jordan is one, and the B.C. Aviation Museum in Sidney keeps their memories alive with its Memorial Room. Kaatza Station Museum in Lake Cowichan now has a custom-made model of a Lockheed Vega Ventura such as the one that went down on Mount Bolduc, April 25, 1944.
One square mile here is formally designated (and un-logged, you can still see where they hit the trees) as a grave site.
The crew: Flying officers John Ernest Moyer, 27, from Vineland, Ont. and Ambrose Moynaugh, 22, from Souris, P.E.I.; Warrant Officer First Class Lawrence Kerr, 21, Miller, Alberta; Warrant Officer Second Class Brimsley George Henry Palmer, 21, Saskatoon; Sergeant Harry Arthur Maki, 18, Lockerby, Ontario; and Leading Air Craftsman Murray Thomas Robertson, Pat Bay, B.C.
Their burned remains are buried on-site in a common grave.
An RAF Lockheed Ventura Mk 1. —Wikipedia
This crash site west of Cowichan Lake, with its wreckage and common grave, attracts many visitors. Several years ago, I attended an on-site Remembrance Day ceremony with members of the Mesachie Lake Fire Department and RCAF from Comox airbase. A low overcast day with a light mist was so in keeping with the solemness of the event.
The highlight was a spine-tingling rendition of Amazing Grace played by an RCAF piper, followed by a volley of shots fired by hunters on the road below. It was something never to be forgotten.
Some of the aircrew of ill-fated Ventura 2218 who are buried beside the remains of their plane on Mount Bolduc, west of Cowichan Lake. —Author’s Collection
Others have made Remembrance Day on Mount Bolduc an annual pilgrimage, such as that described in an email from Paul Jordan: “We have now performed 2 memorial tribute runs this year with the Cowichan Valley ATV Club to Mount Bolduc.
“One on April 21 2019 to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the crash, and one on Sunday November 10th for Remembrance Day. They were all well attended and a service was held by Pastor David Sterling of Royal Canadian Legion Branch #210. In November 50 people listened to a piper who played Amazing Grace in the still of the forest and a 2-minute silence was observed to honour the crew and all RCAF personnel who died in WW2.”
As of three years ago, “We have recently concluded extensive research on the crash, and with the aid of official reports have reconstructed the last flight of Ventura 2218. We’re proposing another visit to the site on April 25th 2020 to mark the 76th Anniversary of the crash. In association with the Vancouver Island Military Museum.”
In another email he wrote: “We are also considering a memorial display for our local museum [Kaatza Station] in Lake Cowichan to honour the crew and to include accurate models of the 2 aircraft which set out on the Navigation Training Exercise from 115 Squadron in Tofino on the evening of April 25th 1944.
“We are therefore looking for photographs and as much information as possible on the 6 aircrew who lost their lives and would like to hear from any surviving family members....”
In November 2021, Darrell Ohs, former president of the Nanaimo Historical Society informed me: “On October 30, I placed four more portraits of the Ventura crew on [Mt.] Bolduc, to add to the existing one of Sgt. Harry Maki. I sourced these from The Canadian Virtual War Memorial which is an ongoing database by Veterans Affairs. It’s much like the Canadian Letters and Images Project started at VIU in 2000.
—Darrell Ohs photos
“There’s no photo yet of LAC Murray Thomas Robertson; in lieu of that I placed a letter from his mother to DND Ottawa regarding the conceptual plans for the Ottawa Memorial that was erected in 1956. This memorial is dedicated to the Allied Air Force members who lost their lives in Canada and have no known grave.”
Last month, he and others made their annual pilgrimage to Mount Bolduc and the matter of confirming LAC Robertson’s photo remains a work in progress.
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This light-hearted poem by RAF P/Sgt. Alec W.F. Fear (with his “apologies to Lewis Carroll”) appeared in The Patrician, the base magazine, in November 1942. Fear never made it back to “Blighty,” or even off Vancouver Island, the “distant Isle” of his poem.
On Sept. 17, 1943, he matched “a halo with his wings” when his Hampden bomber crashed and burned while trying to land at Pat Bay airbase.
YOU’LL GO HOME WHEN YOU GET YOUR WINGS!
“The time has come,” the Groupy said,
To think of other things,
Of cockpit checks and faster kites,
To fly with brand new wings.”
And so we left our service schools,
Our hearts and heads were high,
For we were really pilots now.
And we could truly fly.
Nine weeks we dwelt on distant Isle,
Where spuds and girls abound,
The spuds were good, so were the girls,
Too good for us we found.
“The time has come,” the wool-woof said,
To think of other things.
Of grass that’s free and kites that fly,
And chiefy’s crown and wings.”
And so we left that lovely Isle,
Its maids still sweet and pure,
For though we did our level best,
|Those girls were much too sure.
“The time has come,” the mountains said,
To think of other things,
The man who can’t fly now, will match
A halo with his wings.”
The time’s not come for our next trip,
We sit around, we gloat,
Believing fondly it will be
Aboard a “blighty” boat.
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In the late 1940s, James Morton, poet and author of a biography on former premier Honest John Oliver, published The Churchill Tree: Sons of War and Peace. Dedicated to “friends of the fallen,” the poems included this memorial to members of the RCAF who are interred in Royal Oak Burial Park:
THE CROSSES SPEAK
“These were not in the battle killed,
And yet were slain by war,
Crashing like lightning from the sky
Or like a falling star
More softly drowned in heaving seas
Without a wound or scar.
Yet falls for them, as fell for those
In heart of battle slain,
The bitter tears o’er shortened years,
The heartache and the pain,
‘Till Time shall heal the wounded hearts
And make them whole again.
