1 of 2 A Handley Page Halifax flies over a target obscured by smoke during an attack on an oil refinery in the Ruhr area, Germany Photo: GETTY IMAGES A Handley Page Halifax flies over a target obscured by smoke during an attack on an oil refinery in daylight Refinery im Ruhr area, Germany Photo: GETTY IMAGES
On May 1, 1943, a plane with a mostly Canadian crew crashed in the Netherlands.
Eighty years later, the BBC is reenacting the events of that fateful day and its profound aftermath as part of the We Were There project, in which British veterans tell their own stories for generations to come.
For as long as Janet Reilley has known, May Day has been a day when her family pays tribute to the lives lost and saved in battle.
Then her father, “Mac” Reilley, picked up the phone to call his friend “Buddy” MacCallum to reminisce about the events of 1943 that shaped his youth and his future.
Of the socalled “great generation” that fought in World War II, few are still alive to testify.
Now it is up to his descendants to keep his memory alive so others can understand the brave acts, sacrifices and trauma that resulted from one of the defining conflicts of the 20th century.
This particular story from the crew of a Handley Page Halifax bomber is about how a small group of Canadian boys flew across the skies of Europe during the Battle of the Ruhr.
This aircraft was just one of more than 8,000 aircraft lost in Allied bombing raids.
Using her own memories and those of her families, as well as recordings from the Canadian Bomber Command Museum, the BBC tells the story of that plane’s crash, the drama of its capture and how some of the crew survived.
The core of the crew “Andy” Hardy, MacCallum and Reilley first flew together in July 1942.
In the spring of 1943, they were joined by tail gunner “Red” O’Neill, flight engineer Ken Collopy, and gunner Norm Weiler, one of only two nonCanadians.
The other was my great uncle, Air Lieutenant Herbert Philipson Atkinson, also known as “Phil the Englishman”. MacCallum, the radio operator, thought he was lucky to have one of the best pilots in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).
The loss rate of their squadron was so high that they were considered “old” and “lucky” crew.
The statistics were not in their favor according to the Museum of Bomber Command of Canada, only about 15% of RCAF crews flying the same type of aircraft survived a full deployment in 1943.
the deadly night
At 2 p.m. on April 30, 1943, they, along with five other crews, received a twohour briefing on the objective of that night’s operation: Essen, which was described to them as one of the toughest targets in the Ruhr area.
As the location of the Krupp steelworks, the city was crucial for German military production.
Detained by fog over England, they set out at midnight.
Just after 3 a.m. Atkinson gave the order to open the bomb bay over the “huge cauldron with thousands of searchlights and heavy antiaircraft guns” in Essen’s defense.
Suddenly, Hardy, who was sailing, shouted, “I was hit.” An antiaircraft shell had severed his right leg above the knee.
MacCallum tried in vain to save him, using his jacket to keep him warm and offering him morphine in his last moments.
With the navigator dead, Atkinson asked Reilley to drop the bombs and then help him steer the plane away from the target.
Hardy’s meticulous flight log and nautical chart were unreadable with his blood, so using the flight plan and astral navigation, Reilley plotted a course home to England.
Your luck is running out
“Starboard fighters!” someone shouted as the sound of cannonballs pounding the hull echoed. “Everywhere you looked there was fire,” Weiler recalled.
“The captain descended (the plane) and then climbed, and the flames died down a bit, but then intensified and spread down the wing as we descended to maintain airspeed,” MacCallum said.
Atkinson’s decision to dive the plane prevented the plane from stalling and capsizing and allowed his crew to follow his parachute jump instructions.
Reilley and O’Neill had escaped this route before they were the sole survivors of an accident in October 1942.
This event took place in the Canadian countryside of Mount Hudema in British Columbia, which Reilley named in honor of the pilot. It is one of more than 950 sites in the region whose name is associated with World War II.
The last to get off the plane was Calopy Atkinson stayed on the plane to pilot it and allowed his crew to exit safely. He didn’t survive.
But six crew members made it they parachuted into fields and trees around Elst, Holland, where they were captured as prisoners of war.
Survive life in captivity
Years later, Weiler recalled hearing the bombers in the air on his way home after landing in a cow pasture and feeling “an uneasy and lonely feeling” as he contemplated the fate that awaited him.
They were quickly separated and sent to prison camps scattered throughout Nazicontrolled territory. Collopy and O’Neill went to northern Germany; MacCallum for occupied Lithuania; and Reiley, Nurse and Hamlet, for occupied Poland.
As an officer, Reilley was sent to the Stalag Luft 3 POW camp, where an elaborate escape attempt served as the inspiration for the Hollywood film The Great Escape.
This film shows efforts to dig three tunnels from the prisoner barracks to the woods outside the perimeter fence.
In real life, the plan was to allow 200 British Air Force officers to escape through Germany, using forged documents and civilian clothing, all of which had been made in the camp.
Only 76 officers made it out of the tunnel and only three managed to avoid getting caught. In retaliation, the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, executed 50 people.
Reilley, who was on the run as Number 86, never made it into the tunnel he helped build.
Originally, he didn’t even know he was part of the escape plan he thought he was going to join a prison cricket league.
“My job was to transport the sand that was brought up from the tunnels to where it was distributed. I also provided a bit of security when my knee was really bad,” recalls Reilley, who injured his knee and ankle after a jump while landing in trees from Halifax.
This knee caused further problems when he was forced to march with other Allied prisoners in a bitterly cold winter at the end of the war.
The Nazis wanted to use them as a human shield to stem the last bombing raids on major cities.
They survived four months of aimlessly walking hundreds of miles, facing the everpresent threat of starvation, exhaustion, exposure to the elements, or summary execution. MacCallum, from Nova Scotia, said he had never felt such a “bitter” cold before.
He narrowly escaped death from friendly fire when his muddy column was mistaken for a German unit by Allied aircraft. The scars on his heels from walking barefoot would last a lifetime.
Only Collopy and O’Neill would be spared from the march.
Two years and a day after the accident, Reilley was discharged from the Cheshire Regiment near Lübeck in northern Germany, 25 kg lighter than when the war began.
MacCallum was released on the banks of the Elbe, while Weiler was released near Munich.
life after the war
The six who returned were still in their twenties—young men who had left Canada to serve in the war.
For MacCallum, coming home meant he would marry Rosemary.
They met before the war and agreed that if he returned alive they would marry. They married on July 14, 1945.
2 of 2 Rosemary and George MacCallum on their wedding day, July 14, 1945 Photo: MACCALLUM FAMILY Rosemary and George MacCallum on their wedding day, July 14, 1945 Photo: MACCALLUM FAMILY
All their courtship was through handwritten letters throughout the war.
“It’s amazing that the letters somehow got through between Grafton (in Canada) and Poland or Lithuania,” says their eldest son, Wayne.
They were expected to find a job and get on with their lives. So MacCallum, who went to war right out of school at 18, took an electrician course and built a house for himself and his new family.
With the help of his fatherinlaw, he found work and made a living in his hometown of Grafton with his wife. She still lives there, not far from Wayne.
Collopy returned to work on the family’s wheat farm outside of Frobisher, a village of 150 in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Those who returned alive would end up raising families, knowing full well that the 17,000 men who volunteered for the RCAF would never get that opportunity.
They carried not only physical but also emotional wounds from their experiences.
Wayne only learned after his death in 2021 that his father had suffered from nightmares his entire life. In life he “didn’t tell anyone but Mac (Reilley)”.
Janet, Reilley’s daughter, remembers how her father quit drinking when she was three he turned to alcohol to cope with the constant reminder of surviving the accident, arrest and forced march .
When his trauma became unbearable in the 1950s, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital twice.
“Sometimes in the middle of the night when sleep doesn’t come but vivid memories do, I wonder if it was all worth it. And yet I have to be honest and say that despite everything, I’m happy.” “I think it’s appropriate to volunteer,” Reilley said.
Today, Janet Reilley hopes to maintain the family bond formed during the war with Wayne MacCallum. It is now 80 years old, as are the memories of what the “big generation” gave and lost for peace.