Armand Pambrun
Posted on 11/03/2005 9:04:43 AM PST by NorthOf45
RCAF crash seared into collective memory of Beetley
Randy Boswell
CanWest News Service
November 01, 2005
The generation that lived through the Second World War in Beetley, England, always intended to pay tribute to the crew of a Canadian aircraft that crashed on the edge of the village in November, 1942.
Six decades on, with their own time for remembering running out, the community elders unveiled a memorial at a local church this fall, giving thanks, as they put it, to the brave RCAF airmen who were sacrificed so the people of Beetley -- and all of Britain -- could live free.
Air gunner Roy Burke, 20, of Port Credit, and bomb aimer George Cartwright, 34, a former Rhodes scholar from Toronto, were among the four of six crewmembers who were killed in the crash 63 years ago.
Armand Pambrun, an 85-year-old Winnipeg native who is now retired and living in Mississauga, survived the crash.
Armand Pambrun
Upon learning of the village's gesture, he said he was touched by the villagers' "terrific sense of gratitude."
Mr. Pambrun lived to recall the details of that night because he was ordered by pilot Ray Foltz to bail out of the crippled aircraft during its bombing run over Germany on Nov. 9, 1942.
"The reception committee was not too friendly that night, and one of them got us," recalls Mr. Pambrun, a bomb aimer on the flight.
"The pilot said to jump, so we opened the hatch door. We looked up again to make sure, and he was decisive."
While Mr. Pambrun and another crewman, Joe Delorme, parachuted into the woods near Hamburg, Foltz somehow regained control of the damaged Wellington and steered it back to Britain -- only to crash upon landing in a barley field at Beetley.
Mr. Foltz, a 26-year-old Ohio native who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force before the United States entered the war in 1941, was killed instantly.
Joseph Laporte, a 28-year-old air gunner from St-Lambert, Que., was pulled from the wreckage but died later in hospital.
"I was made a prisoner of war, but at least I escaped that," said Mr. Pambrun, who spent the next three years with Mr. Delorme in various POW camps throughout Germany.
Beetley resident Bill Barker, now 78, was 15 at the time of the crash. He remembers hearing the impact and seeing the charred fuselage the next morning.
The tragedy, he says, was seared into the community's collective memory -- the one day, more than any other, when the horrors of that war struck home for the people of Beetley.
"It made a big impression on all of us," said Mr. Barker, a retired town clerk and councillor. "And we always thought that we ought to do something to honour these men."
Worried that the lest-we-forget ethic of their generation is waning among Beetley's youth, and facing the fact that "in a year or two we might not be here," Mr. Barker and a small group of others decided to create a permanent expression of the town's indebtedness to the Canadian crew.
A marble tablet listing the names of the fallen airmen has been placed in the village church. On Sunday, after a prayer in the field where the four died, the tablet will be unveiled by Barbara Powley, a teenager in 1942 who had tended to the fatally injured Mr. Laporte.
A Norfolk newspaper's story last week about the planned commemoration invited local residents to share their memories of the 1942 crash.
It also made note of the fact that two crewmen were known to have bailed out of the doomed plane: "Nothing more is known about them and whether they may still be alive today."
CanWest News Service contacted the RCAF Museum in Trenton for further information about the crash and then tracked down Mr. Pambrun, a retired Molson employee who spent most of his post-war life in Montreal.
He has since lost touch with Mr. Delorme, a fellow RCAF recruit from Winnipeg.
"You think about it and you feel sorry," Mr. Pambrun said. He remembers particularly how Foltz -- with whom he'd flown on several missions -- had just learned he was transferring to a U.S. base but offered to do "one more flight" with his Canadian comrades.
He also recalls the day a fellow flier with the RCAF's 425 Squadron ended up at the same prison camp in Germany. He told Mr. Pambrun and Mr. Delorme that he had attended a memorial service for the victims of the Beetley crash and that "we buried you."
All six of the crewmen, apparently, were presumed to have been killed in the fiery crash.
Ping
Thanks for the ping NO45.
Lest we forget.
Canada Ping!
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BUMP!
The crews called it the "Wimpy" after the Popeye comic strip character J Wellingtom Wimpy.
The aircraft was fabric over a geodetic (basket weave) frame that allowed it to take a great deal of flak damage and still come home.
Again, it is nice to see that there are still those who remember.
Find a Canadian Legiom member and his poppy tray or find a store that has a poppy tray at the cash register. Make a contribution, take a poppy and wear it.
Lets also remember the Canadians who fell on the Somme,
at Dieppe, on Hill 187 in Korea..
And Ypres - a great uncle of mine there.
Thanks to our British friends for remember the sacrifices of Canadians and other allies. I think they, and other Europeans, actually do a better job of remembering them than we do.
"Lets also remember the Canadians who fell on the Somme,
at Dieppe, on Hill 187 in Korea.."
And the Canadians who joined the US military and served in Vietnam:
http://dede.essortment.com/canadasvietnam_rgwv.htm
Bttt.
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