Unravelling the tragic story of my uncle, RCAF Sgt. Jack Gilbertson
When I was growing up, my mother kept a small brass picture frame with a faded photo of a young man in military uniform on her dresser.
It was a way to remember her brother - my uncle. His name was John Harold Gilbertson, but they called him Jack. I came to know that something terrible happened to him.
As the years went by and I learned more about the Second World War, I was told he served overseas with Bomber Command" of the Royal Canadian Air Force. He never made it back to his family in Hamilton.
On March 24, 1944, he was a 19-year-old tail gunner in a Halifax bomber that crashed at night in a farmer's field in England during a training mission. My mother said she understood the plane ran out of fuel while waiting to land on an airfield. All five on board, including a pilot instructor, were killed. She said her dad was never the same.
Many years later, in the late 1980s, Nationair Canada was running charter flights from Hamilton Airport to London, England. My wife, Linda, and I decided to make the trip.
Among other stops in England, we planned to visit Harrogate, in Yorkshire, to see Jack's grave and the Lindholme Air Base where he was stationed. It was clear my mother was never going to make it over there. She was getting older and did not like air travel even when she was young.
We would be her eyes and ears, taking pictures and placing flowers on the grave on her behalf.
It was heartbreaking to see the many rows of air force graves at Stonefall Cemetery. I remember a groundskeeper kindly brushing off lichen and dust from Jack's stone to make it more presentable for our photos.
We could not visit the Lindholme base because it had been closed and converted into a prison. The former flight tower, visible in the distance, had been repurposed into a watchtower.
But then came the really difficult part. As we drove around trying to figure out where the crash took place, we came upon an elderly farmer who lived in the area. After we told him the story of my uncle, he broke down in tears recalling as a boy seeing planes crashing and erupting in flames on his family's farm.
We asked whether he remembered a crash that took place in March 1944. He said no. There were too many to recall.
Then, a few weeks ago - more than three decades after the trip to England and 14 years after my mother passed away - I got an email from a distant relative with a link to Jack's military file which he had downloaded. He thought I would be interested in reading it for my family history research.
In all, there were 60 electronic pages in the Sgt. John Harold Gilbertson file, including a couple of head and shoulder photos that were taken of him shortly after he enlisted in January 1943. He looked weary and sad.
The file mentioned he liked hockey, baseball, bowling and roller skating. He also enjoyed photography. He was five feet, six inches tall, and weighed 140 pounds, probably a good size to squeeze into a gun turret on bombing missions.
One form said he had attended Adelaide Hoodless elementary school before going on to Hamilton Technical Institute. He worked for a while at Chadwick Carroll-Foundry before taking a tool-and-die-maker job at Kennametal Tools on Sherman Avenue North.
There was a will, with instructions to leave his estate to his dad, John James Gilbertson. A couple of pages contained an inventory of his possessions at the base that were shipped to his home on Burris Street in Hamilton. The items included an RCAF duffel bag, a couple of decks of playing cards, a black scrap book, a Maxwell chrome pocket watch," a pigskin loose leaf notebook" and a pennant marked Hamilton Beach."
A letter from air force Group Captain L.W. Dickens, addressed to my grandfather, said: Before you receive this letter, you will have been informed by RCAF Headquarters, Ottawa of the very sad loss of your son ... The aircraft, a Halifax, was carrying out a night landing when it stalled and crashed from a very low height.
It will, I know, be some consolation to you to know death was instantaneous, the entire crew being killed outright ...
May I now express the very deep sympathy which all of us feel with you in the sad loss you have sustained. Your son was a popular and enthusiastic member of a first-class crew, from whom we confidently expected much good work. His untimely end is therefore a great loss to us here, and, indeed, to the Service."
The final document in the file was the flight accident report. It said, among other technical details, that the crash was caused by someone unintentionally raising the flaps instead of the undercarriage when overshooting."
The accident was not because the plane ran out of fuel, as my mother understood. Someone pulled the wrong switch during an aborted landing.
I sent the report to some folks at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton and the Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alberta, for interpretation.
Karl Kjarsgaard, the curator of the Bomber Command Museum, was particularly helpful. He is a pilot and expert on Halifax bombers. He is leading a project to rebuild one for the museum.
He says as the plane was coming in for a landing, the pilot changed his mind, to overshoot" as they say. It might have been fog, something on the runway or maybe the lumbering Halifax was coming in at too steep an angle.
Whatever the reason, the plane needed to quickly ascend. To do that, the pilot should have raised the landing gear and slightly raised the flaps, while accelerating the engines. Instead, the landing gear was left in the down position and the flaps fully raised which hindered the plane from rising. The plane was driven into the ground.
The switches for the flaps and landing gear inside the cockpit are close together and easily confused. Was the error made by the pilot in training, the pilot instructor, or the flight engineer in training acting on instructions? We will never know.
People think of bombing missions as being very dangerous ... But so was the training that airmen went through. A lot of things could go wrong," Kjarsgaard said.
In addition to the 13,000 RCAF personnel killed during military operations in the Second World War, another 4,000 died during training.
Perhaps it is something to reflect on for Remembrance Day on Thursday.
Lest We Forget.