Bruno’s day out in Nanton

WWII Danish humour -- Here 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 flying north from Foggia Airfield 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 refinery 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, pilot 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 first 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 
flying overhead. He never forgot the droning sound and vibrations caused by thousands of engines. Then there were the explosions. The first 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 fifteen, 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-filled gaps, all the way to infinity. 

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 figure 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 suffered the most casualties among the flight 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 low-pitch 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 one-hour, 100km 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 coffee 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 Coffee.

That did it. Bruno took his time exploring the coffee shop before settling in to eat, which he discovered occupied the entire main floor 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 floor, 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 filled in. The furniture at George’s Coffee 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 decadent 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 offered 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 coffee shop filled 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 flawlessly run by volunteers, 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-flying airplane 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 fighter 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 makers, 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 flights. 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 three-year-old kid back in 1944!