Ada Muser
WWII Danish humourHere is a German press
release that would not
need daily updates: Last
night 400 allied bombers attacked Germany,
80 were shot down. One
German city is missing. *****
On November 20, 1944, air raid sirens
wailed at 11:30 AM. Little
Bruno’s parents ran down
to their makeshift air
shelter, that was probably
incapable of taking a direct hit. 476 US Fifteenth
Air Force bombers fl ying north from Foggia Airfi eld Complex in southern Italy passed over the
South Moravian city Brno
in the Czech Republic on
their way to an important target – the German
army’s oil refi nery plants near the Blechhammer
labour camp in Silesia. Due to poor visibility they had to return. Two
of the three units bombed
Brno instead. 1,600 tons
of bombs were dropped
in three waves hitting
the city centre and part
of the suburbs. Six thousand inhabitants found
themselves homeless.
There had been many
raids on Brno before
but never this bad. Bruno’s baby-sitter Julinka
was killed that day only
two blocks away while
riding a tram – a close
and personal tragedy. Jack R. Myers, pi- lot of the B-17 bomber
explained after the war:
“We had been instructed
never to bring our bombs
home. If we couldn’t
reach the main target, we
were to pick a target of
opportunity and bomb it.” This raid is Bruno’s
fi rst memory. He was
three years and eight
months old. In the dark
shelter, which was a converted cellar, he remembers a steady, low-pitch
hum of heavy bombers
fl ying overhead. He never
forgot the droning sound
and vibrations caused
by thousands of engines.
Then there were the explosions. The fi rst one
was very loud and shook
the ground. It was very
close, but the subsequent
explosions were progressively farther away, growing fainter. The tremors
stopped. The entire experience was fi fteen, or twenty-minutes long. The main street, only a block away, resembled a medieval castle wall crowned with
crenellated battlements.
The buildings that were
left standing alternated
with rubble-fi lled gaps,
all the way to infi nity. *****
Twenty-four years later Bruno came to
Canada with his family.
Calgary was similar in
size to Brno. Calgarians
never had to go through
war, much less experience air raids that crenellated the streets. After
some time, Bruno’s social
circle began expanding,
often through business.
One day he met an impressionable fi gure who knew what wartime was
like from the other side.
Bruno became an industrial salesman and
Ken McKinnon, a man of
medium build but with a
big heart, became his customer. He was a sparkplug, always on the move,
always smiling, but a demanding customer. Ken
owned the largest and
most respected plant far
and wide supplying the
construction industry with
roof trusses. Bruno and
Ken became fast friends.
Ken liked to tell stories, especially of the
time he lied about his age
to get into the Air Force.
He was 17 years-old
when he joined the RCAF
in 1943. He became a tail
gunner on a Lancaster
bomber because he was
small. He remembered
the war as the most exciting time of his life. With a laugh, Ken said he felt immortal, like
most teenagers do at that
age. The rear gunners
suff ered the most casualties among the fl ight crews - but they were
promoted the fastest. So oddly enough, a quarter of a century later
Bruno coincidentally met
a man who had been part
of the war machinery that
caused that dreaded lowpitch hum embedded in
his memories, although
Ken’s Lancaster never
bombed Brno on that fateful day in November 1944. *****
Nanton, Alberta, is a little town just south
from Calgary on Highway 2. It is an easy onehour, 100 km drive, the
same distance as Canmore. It has a population
of just above 2,000 people. Its main attraction is
perhaps the best WWII
aviation museum in Canada, called the Bomber Command Museum.
It is a nice place for a day out. To make it a
full day experience, Bruno began his adventure
in Nanton with breakfast. Kitty-corner from
the Bomber Command
Center is a store that offers coff ee but it is not a
place where one can eat. Bruno asked the store
owner where he could enjoy a relaxing breakfast.
She tried to be impartial,
and suggested, perish the
thought, a modern truck
stop on the south side of
town, or Georgie’s Coffee downtown which is
quaint and one of a kind.
When asked her personal preference the shopkeeper unequivocally favoured Georgie’s Coff ee.
That did it. Bruno
took his time exploring
the coff ee shop before settling in to eat, which
he discovered occupied
the entire main fl oor of
a genuinely old brick
building. The restaurant
is a big open space thanks
to a beam running the
length of the store which
held up the upper fl oor, supported in uneven intervals by columns of
peeled logs. The variation
Bruno observed in the
beam’s size was probably
due to its construction.
It had been made from
2x12 boards of random
lengths nailed together.
The building is over 100
years old and has withstood the test of time and
many heavy snow loads. Bruno had his pick of tables, and it seems
he arrived just in time,
because in the next hour,
the restaurant fi lled in.
The furniture at
George’s Coff ee are a
collection of genuine antiques that had been lovingly yet amateurishly
repainted by latex with a
brush. The counter, where
customers place orders, is
on the west side of the
room. The menu is simple,
but there is a lot of baked
stuff with positively deca- dent high-calorie content
displayed on the counter to woo the customers.
Bruno wanted eggs, bacon, and ham, with
hash browns. A little oddity was that they cooked
their eggs only one way
- fried. It reminded him
that Henry Ford off ered
his Model “T” cars in
any colour you wanted
as long as it was black. When the food came, Bruno was not disappointed. The bacon was cooked to perfection, and
the hash browns were
cut and fried in-store.
They were the best hash
browns Bruno ever had.
Over the next hour
the coff ee shop fi lled to
capacity, obviously the
good citizens of Nanton like their eggs fried. *****
Visiting the Bomber Command Center was the
highlight of Bruno’s day.
It is fl awlessly run by vol- unteers, who were available to help and explain
things to visitors. The
displays in the anteroom
are professionally done
and very informative.
They cover the history of
bombing raids from 1940
to 1945, tell touching
personal stories, and describe POW experiences. Bruno took his time
to absorb the displays,
which explained various
bombing techniques. It
was not just as simple
as delivering a bunch of
bombs over to Germany and dropping them.
There were also special
bombing techniques like
blowing up river dams.
It is done like skipping
pebbles across the surface of a pond, dropping
barrels full of explosives
from a low-fl ying air- plane and skipping them
towards the dam by momentum. Only the most
experienced crews were
assigned to such raids.
The best part was that the
main hangar contained
several completely restored WWII bombers
and fi ghter planes. These included trainer airplanes, and individual aircraft parts set up for visitors to climb into. This
is heaven for children.
Volunteers restore airplanes in a smaller hangar
on the side, some almost
from scratch. The restorers must manufacture
missing parts from rusted
or rotten pieces used for
templates. Nanton must
be peopled with many
enthusiastic mechanics,
former tool and die mak ers, and even carpenters.
Some airplanes had been
built almost exclusively from wood, such as
the famous British Mosquito – known to many
as “Mossie” – which
was a versatile aircraft
used extensively during
the war. It had an excellent speed and range. Constructed primar- ily from plywood with a
balsa wood core, Mossies are easier to rebuild.
The quality of work,
precision and workmanship are exquisite. Bruno found himself
captivated by a Lancaster Bomber, which is the
centrepiece of the exhibition. Lancaster is not the
same as the B-17 Flying
Fortress but it also has
four engines that were
more than capable of
creating the low-pitch
hum he remembered
from his childhood. They
could carry more payload than the B-17s and
were all-around better
planes according to Ken
McKinnon’s memoirs.
Bruno wanted to see
the rear gunner’s turret
that his friend had occupied during the fl ights. Obviously, as a point of
observation, the rear turret had no rival. The gunner’s other duty included reporting what was
happening behind the
plane to the pilot. There
were no rear-view mirrors on these bombers.
Ken died at the age of 92, but Bruno still likes
to make trips to visit the
Bomber Command Museum. The RCAF with
Canadian boys on board
successfully defended not
just England, our mother
country, but also helped to
liberate the rest of Europe.
But it came with a price! Bruno remembers
how Ken once told him:
“You know I was young
and stupid at the time
and I should have been
killed. But it did not happen and those were the
most interesting and intense years of my life!” Ok then, Ken, Bruno does not begrudge you
or your comrades in arms
anymore that you scared
the bejesus out of a threeyear-old kid back in 1944!
