On the night of Nov. 23, 1943, German fighter pilot Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer intercepted an allied plane with a crew of seven on their way back to England after carrying out a raid on Berlin.
Schnaufer was the Nazi’s night fighter ace, renowned for seldom missing his target, and that night was no exception. Over a little town called Ter Apel in the Netherlands, Schnaufer shot down the Lancaster bomber carrying the seven men.
Navigator Peter Cole—the sole survivor who parachuted to the ground and was captured by the Germans—said after the war that the last thing he saw as he was blown halfway out the door was the pilot with both feet on the dash trying to pull the plane out of the dive.
Among those killed that night was gunner Jim Odell of Wetaskiwin, Alberta. He and his younger brother, Bill Odell, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941. By the time Jim died he had completed 30 missions and had re-enlisted for his second tour of duty.
Bill was a supply officer with a spitfire squadron that operated a mobile air base. The airfield included 1,700 men tasked with building, dismantling, moving, and rebuilding the airfield as the front advanced across Europe, as well as supply and operate the spitfire squadron. Metal tracks laid on a field served as runways.
“His group were stationed in England until a week after D-Day, when they landed in Normandy and were initially stationed in Bayeaux,” says Don Odell, son of Bill and nephew of Jim. “They went from Bayeaux through France, up into Belgium, and into Holland, and he ended the war in a town in northern Germany.”
