The Valour and the Horror

Surviving:

The airmen who were fortunate enough to survive such a crash were taken to a special burn unit at East Grinstead outside London,where horribly disfigured faces and bodies were rebuilt. These airmen were considered lucky because they at least survived their tour with bomber command. Most aircrew...did not.

In the village of Tholthorpe, in Yorkshire, a small monument in the town square commemorates the Canadian presence here during the war. On it you can just make out the motto of the Royal Canadian Airforce: Per Ardua ad Astra - Through Adversity to the Stars.

KEN BROWN

Actually, as we learned later, I don't think I knew it then, the average life of a bomber crew was six weeks.

DOUG HARVEY

Well, it was one in three...survival rate...

FREEMAN DYSON:

I found the subject of survival rates taboo. The whole weight and authority of Air Force tradition was designed to discourage the individual airman from figuring out the odds. Stringent precautions were taken to ensure that any of our Command documents on survival rates should not reach the squadrons.

MOFFAT:

I think each guy in each crew really had one objective - to survive for that one tour, 30 missions. After your magic 30, you were allowed to go home.

On the first year I was in the squadron I only remember 10 crews finishing. We used to think that experience counted for a lot, because most of the guys would be lost on number two or three.

And then a bunch of guys would be lost between 25 and 30, and you wouldn't know what the hell to think. We had one squadron called Ghost Squadron cause during its first few months, only

one crew survived the tour. Once I got close to 10 missions, I started to feel pretty lucky.

Favreau:

It's like like going to hell and coming back to paradise: Picadilly Circus, warm pubs, the good times you know. And then the next morning, back to hell. The fear, the flak, the searchlights.

This for me is the worst part of it, the worst. This to and from. Often, when we come back from a raid, I...I'm sitting back there all alone, I just cry, I cry like a baby. I have to. That's the only way to get out of it.

Of the 125,000 air crew who served in Bomber Command almost half, 55,500, were killed. One in every five was a Canadian, and by population Canada suffered the greatest loss: 9,919 pilots, navigators, flight engineers, bomb aimers and gunners. 900 of those Canadians are buried here at the Commonwealth war cemetery in Stonefall, Yorkshire. At the end of the war, fighter pilots were given a special campaign medal for their contribution to the war effort. Bomber pilots were refused similar recognition even though many more of them died in combat. They were treated as an embarrassment - they had been ordered into the skies over Germany to bomb cities, and then they were blamed for the civilian deaths that resulted.