Thanks to a body part donation from another Lancaster called Lady Orchid, one Canadian Lancaster bomber is still flying. And the man indirectly responsible was Lady Orchid’s pilot, Ron Jenkins. His daughter Deb explains the fascinating chain of events.
Georgina Harvey’s RCAF photo album reveals a fascinating slice of life in the wartime air force, compiled by a young woman from a well-known family in Kelowna, British Columbia who joined up in 1943 and trained as a photographer. Georgina Harvey was born in Kelowna to the distinguished Harvey family, still a well-known name in that community. […]
Wartime mail was critically important. Imagine saying goodbye to your husband or son, knowing that you will not see his face or hear his voice for years — maybe forever. Mail was the lifeline, both for the boys over there and the folks back home.
The aerial photo interpreter who made the biggest impact in the Second World War was the brilliant, beautiful Constance Babington Smith. (My wartime novel Bird’s Eye View is fact-based fiction about an aerial photo interpreter.) Constance Babington Smith is well-known in some circles, although most people have never heard of her. But she is credited with […]
Danesfield House is now a luxury hotel, but during the war it was requisitioned by the Royal Air Force, renamed RAF Medmenham, and served as the headquarters for aerial photographic interpretation. It has personal meaning for me, too. I visited this lovely place in 2022, when I was invited to be the guest speaker at a […]
My friend Russ Jeffs was a Royal Air Force veteran who rose to the rank of RAF Wingco, or Wing Commander, before leaving England in the 1950s and moving to Canada. He was an inveterate story-teller with an endless stream of anecdotes about his days in the air force. After Russ moved to Canada, he spent the next […]
Russian women, often known as Night Witches, were the only females in the world engaged in aerial combat during World War Two. These daring young women, some of them just teenagers, flew lightweight aircraft that dodged and darted and dropped bombs on the enemy under cover of darkness. So feared were they that the Germans […]
Bomber crews who flew toward the end of the war, when there were fewer German fighters in the air, were sometimes considered to have an easier ride. But not always, as told in this hair-raising excerpt from Leo Richer’s own memoir.
A career in photography was the goal of Lou Marr, who called herself “the original turnip who fell off the back of the truck” when she joined the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division.
Canada’s greatest living fighter pilot, Stocky Edwards, is a legend in aviation circles. But when I visited him and his wife Toni at their home in Comox, British Columbia, this humble gentleman still attributed much of his success to simple luck, and prayer.
