Monument to a special marriage

Kyt · May 3, 2008

Scrap a touching monument to a special marriage

ROULEAU -- One of Dorothy Hughes's most beloved possessions is a piece of junk, truth be told, worthless without its story.

If picked from a heap of scrap metal, the heavy iron ball, pitted, rusted and perched atop a bent stem, would make a good what's-it, a curiosity. Little would its finder suspect the artifact spans seven decades and two continents in a tale of war, of remembrance, of life, of what turns out to be a small world around us, and of Saskatchewan's place in it.

We begin north of here, near Stony Beach. Not far from where the Belle Plaine potash mine now cuts an industrial skyline alongside the TransCanada Highway was the home of a young John Robert Hughes. Born in 1922, the son of Welsh and English immigrants, Robert lived a boyhood common to most Saskatchewan farm lads of the time, one that would lead all too soon from the simplicity of wheat stooks and ball games to the complexity of training manuals and military objectives. War would call.

In 1944, RCAF Flight Sergeant John Robert Hughes, by then known as "Bob" to his air force mates, was plucked from his own crew to serve as a second pilot for an ill-fated raid on Nuremberg, Germany.

On the evening of March 30, he took flight in his Lancaster bomber, one of 782 aircraft dispatched for what was supposed to be an intense, 17-minute attack on the city. In the clear moonlight of the evening, however, the German Luftwaffe and ground forces prevailed. Ninety-six Allied bombers would fail to return; 545 airmen would die.

For Hughes, it was hell, his Lancaster rocked three times in the barrage. From his own memoirs: "We were now limping along, losing altitude. At the last attack a shell had smashed the instruments and windshield and possibly two engines on the starboard side were not working. I asked the pilot if he had jettisoned the bombs and he pointed down beside his seat and there was a gaping hole in the side of the aircraft where the bomb bay lever had been shot off. So we were riding on a 4,000-pound bomb."

On orders to bail, Hughes scrambled. The ring on his parachute ripcord caught against something. "I was appalled to see a billow of white silk burst forth."

In desperation, he gathered up the loose chute in his arms and jumped. His harness jolted. "I thought the parachute had been hooked on the aircraft. I looked up anxiously and saw the most beautiful flower I had ever seen -- a white blossom with orange segments. I remember thinking that 'for you the war is over -- I hope.'"

The war for Bob Hughes was not over. After navigating a 20,000-foot, 15-minute descent into trees, his only injury a face scraped by the violent snap of the parachute shrouds upon opening, Hughes took a bearing from the north star and attempted his escape from enemy territory. Apprehended the next night, Hughes was detained as a prisoner of war.

A year passed at Stalag Luft 6 while the Axis crumbled. In a forced march of POWs away from oncoming Allied forces, Hughes and a buddy, Gus Goeson, waited for the column to round a bend and then made their break for the woods. Dodging German guards, scurrying and hiding, the two eventually reclaimed their freedom in the protection of a unit from the British 8th Army.

John Robert Hughes -- Bob -- was on his way home to Stony Beach.

- - -

The war years for Dorothy Smith were altogether different. No town in Saskatchewan ever changed so much, so rapidly, as did Mossbank in the years that bridged the 1930s and early '40s. Emerging from the dust and poverty of drought and depression, Mossbank simultaneously welcomed the new, bustling base of the British Commonwealth Air Training Program. As the 12-year-old daughter of the CNR station manager, Dorothy lived in a town she remembers for its skating parties and dances, social gatherings in which cadets and locals mingled, sharing Mossbank as a home. The typical airmen she knew were dapper young gents in new uniforms, not a war-weary P.O.W. subsisting on meager food rations and sleeping on a hard cot.

Peacetime would bring Dorothy Smith and Bob Hughes together.

After the war, Hughes returned to farming and had two sons through a marriage that ended in divorce. Dorothy, by the 1950s an office secretary in Regina, became his second wife. On the farm they raised their young son and daughter, Bob's third and fourth child, until 1963 when a newly announced pilot project for solution potash mining -- the Belle Plaine installation today -- required large tracts of farmland, including one of the Hughes quarters.

The family relocated to a farm north of Rouleau. A newspaper article in 1971 calling for information from survivors of the disastrous raid on Nuremberg put them in contact with author Martin Middlebrook, who included Bob's account in his eventual book.

That led to a letter one day from a German pilot who, from records, had determined he was the one who shot down Bob's Lancaster. Mostly though, life was life on the busy Hughes farm, and the war was the past.

- - -

Bob Hughes died in 2004, from cancer that had been in remission for 13 years.

After his death, Dorothy's son, Ron, eager to find her a diversion, a hobby, suggested a computer. Reluctantly, she took to the keyboard, and soon found that collecting specific details about one man's story in worldwide war, a job of research that in the past would have meant endless letters and countless dead ends, became an almost-instantaneous matter of e-mail correspondence and mouse clicks to websites. She became fast Internet penpals with a 50-year-old newspaper journalist from Germany, Norbert Vollmannn, who makes it his own pastime to learn more about the crash sites from the Nuremberg raid, incuding one impact depression deep in a forest -- that of Bob's Lancaster II LL633, near Michelau im Steigerwald, a village close to where Vollman lives.

Details swapped furiously in communication with Vollmann: maps, pictures, war records, burial sites of crewmen, old newspaper clippings, confirmations and collaborating accounts, even a story from the daughter of the land watch officer who had held Bob in their home after his capture.

"That computer was what I needed to escape the loneliness," Dorothy says. "It's like having company in the house all the time."

Last May, Dorothy and her friend Isobel Patterson signed up for a 16-day tour of Europe. Upon learning the travel itinerary took her close to Vollmann's home, she made arrangements for a side trip, to meet her new friend.

She and Isobel had tea with Vollmann and a friend, Georg Schulz-Hertlein, in Wurtzburg, Germany. There the two German men presented Dorothy with a small cardboard carton. Inside were assorted pieces of wreckage that Schulz-Hertlein had recovered from the crash site, including one rusted heavy iron ball with a bent steel stem.

A throttle level, Vollmann had determined the part to be, from engine No. 1 or 4, in either case a control upon which Flight Sergeant John Robert "Bob" Hughes of Stony Beach, Saskatchewan, had laid his hand.

Not junk.

Not a trophy, either.

Rather, a token of international friendship, presented a lifetime after the guns fell silent.

A treasure.
Click to expand...

Kyt · May 3, 2008

408 Squadron
Lancaster LL633 EQ-L
Mission to Nuremburg

T/O 2204 from Linton-on-Ouse. Shot down during the leg into the target by the dual efforts of a ME210 and a Fw190, crashing at Gerolzhofen, a small town some 18 km SE of Schweinfurt. Those killed are buried in Durnbach War Cemetery. Apart from F/Sgt Hughes, who had joined the crew as P2 for operational experience, this appears to have been a scratch crew with a great variation in sorties flown, ranging from 14 credited to Sgt Bates to a minimum of 25 flown by F/O Labow. This scratch-crew would have been the direct result of an early return of the aircraft from 115 Squadron

F/O J G White RCAF PoW
F/Sgt J R Hughes RCAF PoW
Sgt J E Bates PoW
F/O G Schacter RCAF PoW
F/O G L Wood RCAF PoW
F/Sgt F G.Leahy RCAF Killed
P/O A A Patton RCAF Killed
P/O J I Labow Killed (also spelled Lablow)

Roxy · May 3, 2008

Canadian crews based at Linton-on-Ouse (still an RAF airfield today) were billeted at Benningborough Hall (now owned by The National Trust). Visitors can read tales from the Canadian airmen during their tours - including getting a chastised by (IIRC) a certain Leonard Cheshire!

Roxy

Kyt · May 3, 2008

Thanks Roxy. Just had a look around and found this:

Archie - A Pilot in RAF Bomber Command - 35 Squadron

Antipodean Andy · May 4, 2008

The wonders of the modern age where talking to someone on the other side of the world leads to a memento from 64 years ago. Amazing.

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Monument to a special marriage

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