Remembering Tommy

In honour and memory of my late father-in-law, John Whyte Main, a WWII veteran

This story is inspired by the wartime recollections from several veterans but mostly it arises from the few snippets sparingly shared with us by my late father-in-law, John Whyte Main, who served in the Canadian Army in the Second World War.

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John could not ever remember a time in his life when he did not know Tommy.

When John was only three, his family immigrated to Canada from Aberdeen, Scotland. They eventually settled in a rented rundown house on the hardscrabble streets of a poorer section of Kingston, Ontario in 1924.

To his delight he discovered, right next door, someone his age, his size, a boy named “Tommy”. They fast became best mates.

John and Tommy grew up doing everything together. They went to the same schools, competed in the same sports, biked and hiked the same trails, and fought the same bullies as one.

In 1939, when the world splintered into warring factions, John’s Scottish ancestral home came under attack. There was no doubt John and Tommy would join the fight.

John tried to enlist but twice was denied. The army doctors said they could hear a heart murmur. He was urged him to stay in Canada and join the Home Guard. John was having none of that, not while all his friends were going off to war. So, while visiting his older brother in Ottawa, who was already in the Army, he made a third attempt to sign-up. This time the doctor did not detect a murmur. John was in the Army now.

After basic training, John was assigned to the Signal Corps. He received additional training in England, then saw action in North Africa, Italy, and Holland. He spent the war years dashing and crawling across battlefields laying wire and sending and receiving messages in Morse Code.

On the day Germany announced its surrender, it was John who was on duty to decipher the dots and dashes of this most wanted message. John was elated. All he could think about was going home and seeing his friend Tommy again.

Tommy had signed up for Air Crew and served as a tail gunner on a Lancaster bomber. Crammed into the rear turret, Tommy was exposed to extremely cold temperatures and he was made him fully vulnerable to fighter planes attacking from the rear. Tommy used to quip about his vantage point, “I never get to see where we’re going; I see only the hell we leave behind.” Despite the risk and extreme personal discomfort, Tommy completed 27 missions.

Shortly after Germany’s surrender, John attempted to contact Tommy. But he received news he didn’t want to hear. Tommy wasn’t going home. In the last month before the war ended in Europe, Tommy had not survived his 28^th bombing run.

Once the hostilities had ended, the Allies faced the enormous logistical task of returning hundreds of thousands of servicemen and prisoners to their home countries. The married and wounded personnel were shipped home first. As John was unmarried, he stayed behind a further nine months, not returning to Kingston until early February 1946.

When he finally got de-mobilized, the army gave him $100 as a clothing allowance as part of his mustering out pay. He was supposed to use it to buy civilian clothes. Get a suit. Get a job. Forget about the war. Move on with his life.

But John could not move on from the war that easily. He had to find out what happened to Tommy.

It took several weeks for John to track down someone who could tell him. The only person who had survived from Tommy’s crew was the pilot. He was living in Toronto. John phoned and told him he needed to see him. They made plans to meet.

John took an early train to Toronto and arrived mid-morning. He made his way to the agreed-upon meeting place, a diner on Yonge St. not far from the train station. As it was still too early for the lunch crowd, the diner was nearly empty. John stepped in, scanned the room, saw the highly polished, chrome-edged countertops, the black and white checkered floor tiles, but he saw no one under 40. He took a seat in a booth and sat alone, staring at the door, imagining what the pilot might look like.

As he sat there, he felt waves of anger welling up, which surprised him. He realized he was making the pilot the target of blame for what had happened to his lifelong friend. Why couldn’t the pilot have done more? Why did HE survive and no one else?

Within about 10 minutes, an obviously broken man shuffled in. Their eyes met. John gave the man a nod, and the pilot made his way to John’s booth. The man’s shoulders were hunched. He had a pencil-thin mustache, and dim, worried eyes.

The anger drained from John. His feelings turned to sympathy as he observed this hurting creature. Coffees were ordered and small talk ensued about John’s train ride into the city. They laughed about the Maple Leafs’ chances in the run-up to the Stanley Cup. Then their conversation hit a dead end.

John stared at the man and blurted, “What the hell happened?”

The pilot, a man named Eugene, without looking up, responded, “You really want to know?”

Seconds later he added, “I guess that’s why you’re here… Alright, here’s what happened…”

“It was almost a year ago now, the spring of ’45. The way the war was going, this could have been our final run. We were sent to take out Dortmund, its oil factories and everything else.

It was a nighttime run, but the moon was full and bright. I could see we were just one of hundreds of planes flying that night. Our flying time was to just over three hours.

We were in close formation, almost nose to tail, wingtip to wingtip. There was lots of turbulence. We were pitching and tossing. Then I saw two bombers ahead and above us collide and fall out of the sky. One plane had its wing torn off. It spiralled down toward the North Sea.

On their way down, those planes hit two other aircraft. Now four planes were falling into the sea. We couldn’t break radio silence to get them help. That would have compromised the whole operation.

We couldn’t do anything but watch them fall into the sea. It was horrible, horrible. We saw silhouettes of parachutes, sometimes just bodies, falling out of the planes and down into the sea.”

Eugene paused for a moment, closed his eyes, then snapped them open again as if to get that stark image out of his head. He inhaled sharply and continued.

“We flew on and did our best to take out the guns. I felt nothing but relief when it was over, and I banked the plane to head back to our airfield in Mildenhall. We had almost made it back into formation. The moon was right in front of us. Then something darted out across the face of it. The shape was unmistakable. It was a Junkers 88 night fighter, one of their deadliest.

It started playing with us. Our own fighters were not around. There was nothing we could do.

We got strafed from front to back. A round whizzed through the cockpit just behind me. We took on heavy damage, but no one was hit. The enemy pilot must have figured we were done for, so he peeled off to find other targets. There were so many more planes to shoot at.

I knew the plane was badly damaged, but I thought we could make it back without it breaking up. I was wrong. Pieces of the fuselage, wings and tail rudder started to tear off. Fuel was getting low. It was taking all my strength to keep it upright.

I gave up trying to reach our own base and once I saw the coast, I went looking for the nearest runway. But the plane was getting more and more unstable. It was beginning to stall. I didn’t think I could land it.

I gave the order for the crew to jump.

Everyone got out, including your friend and my pal, Tommy. What a great guy.

I found a landing strip and fought to get the plane down. By some miracle, I dropped the plane onto the runway. It skidded and spun around till it stopped. The ground crew came running, amazed that all that busted metal could have ever flown. They pulled me out and trucks pushed that wreck of a plane off the runway.

Within an hour, I was told all my crew had been located, but none of them had survived the jump. We were too low for their chutes to open. I had given the order too late.

On my orders, they had jumped to their deaths.”

Eugene shook his head, like he was trying to fling that memory out of it, then with a resigned, choked voice he said, “And no one needed to jump at all.”

The two veterans stared at each other in silence. Eugene reached to lift his mug of coffee, but his hand was shaking too hard. John put his hand on Eugene’s to settle it. Eugene put the mug down and rested his hands on the table. He retreated into the memory and his eyes began to well up. It was not a mental place he wanted to be in.

There was no fight left in John, just an overwhelming disgust at the needless nonsense of war. He stood up, let his hand linger on Eugene’s shoulder for a minute, then reckoned there was nothing more he could do. Let each man attend to his own grief, he thought. Grief is the ultimate private affair.

He tossed two bucks on the table, walked out of the diner, and slow-walked his way back to the train station. A wet, late winter snow was falling on the city.

John found the platform for the train bound for Kingston and clambered aboard. He sought a seat by himself, away from everyone else, because that’s the way he was feeling. He said nothing to no one all the way back to Kingston, but his shirt was never not stained with tears.

For the rest of his life, John never went to a war memorial ceremony at the city’s cenotaph. He never marched with the other vets on Remembrance Day. He knew the memories of Tommy would overwhelm him.

No, on those days, he would sit quietly in his favourite chair, drink a beer, and resurrect only one memory, that of his friend Tommy, of the life they had and the life they had lost.

There is no glory in war.