Eighty years ago, a Halifax bomber piloted by B.C.-born Wilbur “Wib” Bentz smashed into a swamp in Belgium, its engine torn off by a German fighter pilot.
All seven Royal Canadian Air Force crewmen and another from the Royal Air Force who were aboard died in the exploding impact that night in May 1944.
The bodies of five of the crew aboard LW682 were recovered, but the others, including 23-year-old Wib Bentz, who grew up in the Fraser Canyon, sank quickly with the wreckage into the deep bog.
Fifty-three years later, Bentz’s nephew and niece, Jay Hammond and Maureen Thom, went looking for the uncle they knew only from his letters home. They visited the site of the crash near Geraardsbergen, Belgium, and convinced Belgian and Canadian authorities to exhume the wreckage. They found the remains of Bentz and the other missing airmen seven metres below the surface.
They gathered some personal items — watches, gloves and a perfectly preserved wallet with a ticket stub from one of the airmen’s last trips home. The plane was pulled to the surface, and the twisted aluminum was repurposed into ingots.
Every RCAF pilot earning their wings now wears a little of that historic plane where eight men lost their lives.
In a ceremony Friday at 443 Squadron at Victoria International Airport to honour the family’s efforts, the air force presented Hammond, a Sooke resident, and Thom, who lives in Ladysmith, with a special set of their own wings.
“To look at this and to realize these wings are made from my uncle’s bomber means that every member of the Royal Canadian Air Force that is awarded these wings remembers my uncle,” said an emotional Hammond.
Thom, who went on to become a pilot herself, called it “a very proud moment for our family.”
Lt.-Col. Matt Dukowski, commander at 443 Squadron, said pilot’s wings have been using the aluminum of the downed Halifax bomber since 2021, and today’s pilots are wearing a “true piece of history.”
“Our modern leadership of the air force is hearkening back to the air force family and saying not only do we wear a uniform, but we’re going to make part of that uniform historic and to remember those before us.”
When the shattered bomber was recovered, the remains of the three remaining aircrew — Bentz, upper gunner John Wilson Summerhayes and tail gunner Fred Roach — were still at their stations.
Still-packed parachutes were in the plane, and there were leather items, a silver cigarette case belonging to the tail gunner, a cross in a boot and flight suits. A piece of hardened chewing gum was still attached to a jaw bone, said Thom.
Hammond said a signet ring worn by one of the crew had been ripped off his finger by the impact, “showing us just how devastating the impact was.”
The men were buried with full military honours in Belgium in November 1997, alongside their five comrades — navigator Thomas Wessel Taylor, bomber aimer Clifford Stanley Phillips, air gunner Jack Edwin McIntyre, flight engineer Roy Ellerslie and mid-gunner Joseph Arbour.
Surviving family members and government officials attended the funeral.
And there was also an unexpected guest.
The German fighter pilot who shot down the Halifax bomber in 1944 stood at the back of the crowd in a long coat.
Martin Drewes, a Luftwaffe ace with more than 50 confirmed “victories” during the Second World War, was piloting the Messerschmidt Bf-110 that hammered rounds into one of the bomber’s engines.
Hammond had been in touch with Drewes prior to exhuming the bomber and later on the two shared each other’s stories for several years. Hammond even visited Drewes’ home in southern Brazil in 2008.
Drewes, who died in 2013, is well known in aviation circles for his night-fighting abilities, with 43 kills in the dark.
Thom remembers Drewes at the funeral as the crowd watched a Belgian flypast. “He was a very small-stature man … I remember thinking it was surreal because I should have been filled with anger at this man for killing my uncle and for the destruction that that man caused in the family … all the families,” she said.
“But I couldn’t find that anger because I realized he was doing his job and it could have just as easily been [my uncle] that shot his plane. You had to look at him through a lens of this is war.”
Hammond said all the family members who were at the funeral that day “were friendly and introduced themselves. There was no anger, angst, nothing. Everyone behaved really well, except for one guy who at the dinner afterward did not want to meet him.”
Hammond said Drewes told him he could not remember shooting down that particular bomber. The German fighter pilot, however, told Hammond and Thom that he would fire into the wings of bombers “in the hope that the boys could get out before the plane went down. He knew there were young men in bombers, just like him.”
Hammond said Bentz’s mother never got over the loss of her only son. She died in 1981.
“At 88 she still talked often about losing her son,” said Thom.
It isn’t the first time aluminum from LW682 has been put to good use, according to the Department of National Defence. The roof of the Bomber Command Memorial in London, England, unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012, is constructed from LW682 aluminum.
The same year, a memorial to the crew of LW682 was unveiled at 8 Wing Trenton, Ont. Polished ingots, each engraved with the name of a crew member, are embedded in a memorial wall at the Air Mobility Training Centre.
Canadian aviation archaeologist Karl Kjarsgaard, with assistance from the Belgian Aviation History Association, managed to salvage a lot of the downed and buried bomber.
Some of the recovered parts were used in the restoration of Halifax NA337 on display at Trenton.
In 2013, a memorial commemorating 16 Americans who served in the RCAF during the Second World War was unveiled in Richmond, Virginia. The war-era RCAF badge and the Virginia state insignia, incorporated into the memorial, are cast from LW682 aluminum.
The remaining aluminum ingots, about 700 pounds worth, are stored at Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alta., according to DND.
The successes of the Bomber Command force came at a terrible cost, the museum says. Of every 100 airmen who joined Bomber Command, 45 were killed, six were seriously wounded, eight became prisoners of war, leaving only 41 unscathed, at least physically. Of the 125,000 who served in bombers, 58,000 were killed, including more than 10,400 Canadians.
The Bomber Command Museum said of those who were flying at the beginning of the Second World War, only 10% survived. Only the Nazi U-Boat force suffered a higher casualty rate.
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