I went to Hamilton, Ontario last week. There is a military airplane museum there and I learned that they have a working Lancaster bomber. My dad was a rear gunner in a Lancaster Bomber during the Second World War with the Canadian Air Force. He always had a model of that plane hanging in a cubbyhole in the built-in cupboards in his and my mother’s bedroom. I always knew he had been a rear gunner though he rarely spoke of it until he was older and in a Nursing Home. Then I learned that these bomber crews ostensibly were to do 30 missions but my Dad and his crew did 37 owing to them volunteering when their captain was to do more missions.
I have been asked a few times if he survived but of course if he didn’t I would not be around to write this. The rear gunner position was known as one of the most fatal places to be in the Air Force.
In Hamilton I entered the hangar and could see the Lancaster behind a couple of smaller planes, it was facing away from me. The Lancaster looked bigger than I had imagined. I walked to the rear of the plane to the bubble of steel, guns and clear plastic and suddenly I could picture my father entering that tiny space and I was overcome with emotion and had to turn away.
I had known about my dad being in that plane all my life but being in front of the actual space that he had crawled into 37 times made me see in stark reality what he had in fact gone through.
The rear gunner bubble was quite small with no back on the seat. My dad would have had an electric heater in his flight suit plugged into the plane, though it would have still been very cold. He couldn’t turn around to see or talk to anyone else, not that that would have done much good as except for the mid gunner everyone else was at the very front of the plane, quite a distance away. He would have had a headset to talk to the rest of the crew however.
So for a 6 or 7-hour mission my dad would be facing backward in a tiny space, cold, and isolated from human interaction. He must have been wondering for much of the time whether he would step onto solid ground again.
My dad lived three weeks into the first mandated shutdown of the pandemic and none of his family could go see him. Before that my stepmother had been visiting every other day. He did not have any dementia but he was mostly blind and this isolation would have confused him and his loneliness would have been extreme. He was 96.
Fascinating story. Really sorry you couldn't spend time with him at the end.
My Canadian grandfather served in WWII and was gone from his family for five years, 1939-45. He helped liberate Italy from the south. He carried a single book with him, the collected works of W Shakespeare. My mother showed me the tattered copy once.
Had chills reading this. Thank you for writing it - the words and the spaces between...