SASKATOON—Canadian World War II bomber pilot Reg Harrison says he was lucky to walk away unscathed from the war, especially considering he crashed four times.
Mr. Harrison joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in 1942, when he was 20. The following year, he was sent to England where he would serve, as were many other Canadians who had enlisted.
“I had no concept of war and what I was getting into before I got to England. None whatsoever,” he wrote in a book that documents his experience.
War Experience
Mr. Harrison’s first crash was on March 15, 1944, on a flight he took to gain some experience. During the flight, the crew of eight dropped bombs on Amiens, France, and then turned to head back. However, what they didn’t know was that one of the bombs had failed to drop. When they went to land, the bomb suddenly dropped and exploded.Mr. Harrison said he never heard it go off.
“We were 26 feet off the ground in the aircraft and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the grass, and I could see stars,” he wrote in the book.
“When the bomb dropped, the plane was in motion, so the bomb blast blew off the back third of the plane, killing the two gunners instantly. There was nothing left of the plane from the wings back,” he added.
“If I had been standing as far back as the pilot wanted, I would not have survived the crash.”
“He has all of these detailed records of all of his flights and all of his missions,” Ms. Driver said at an event at the Nutana Legion in Saskatoon on Nov. 1, where Mr. Harrison, now 101 years old, was in attendance.
“And that’s what we referred to—the details on where he was and what how many bombs he was carrying on what day that was, what that mission was.”
Mr. Harrison’s second crash happened on July 5, 1944. It was his 13th mission. His was one of 20 bomber planes taking off from Croft, England, at night. But one of the engines on his Halifax bomber quit, causing the plane to veer to the right. He said he had to think fast because he didn’t want to crash into the other planes trying to take off.
“I shoved the throttles through the gate—which means you push them as far ahead as possible so the engines roar and you get more power, but you can’t do that for very long because it will damage the engine,” Mr. Harrison said in the book.
He said the plane lifted a little off the ground but then crashed into a stone wall that surrounded a farmhouse. He was thrown onto the wing of the plane, and the impact knocked him out for about 30 minutes. The bomb-aimer who had been with him in the cockpit was thrown against the instrument panel and died on an operating table that night.
“I was sent to hospital for treatment, and I was there for 10 days. I had a badly bruised leg, a broken nose, and about 30 stitches in my face. I was a hell of a mess,” he wrote.
Mr. Harrison received his nickname after this crash.
‘My Exit Didn’t Go Smoothly’
His third crash happened near the end of that summer, on Aug. 25, 1944. It was his 17th mission.On the return, his plane hit bad weather but no orders were given to change course. When the plane neared the control tower at Croft, the crew discovered that all of the other planes in their group had been diverted and landing was going to be a problem. They received directions to fly to Silloth and land there, but they did not have enough fuel. The crew opted to parachute out of the plane as they were over the fells, which was known as sheep country, Mr. Harrison said in the book.
“As the pilot, I would be the last one out of the plane,” he said. “But my exit didn’t go smoothly.”
His parachute got stuck on a lever, and when the lever broke, Mr. Harrison fell and rolled toward the escape hatch and out of the plane.
“I saw the tail end of the plane go by. Then my parachute opened. I swayed to the right and almost immediately hit the ground,” he wrote, noting that the others in the plane bailed out at around 3,500–4,000 feet.
“Years later, I asked some skydivers at an air show how high they thought I might have been when I bailed out. They said I bailed out somewhere between 800 and 1,000 feet. If I had been in the plane another two or three seconds, I wouldn’t be here.”
He and two other crew members located each other and decided to walk until they found help. After spending the whole day walking, they finally came across a hut where a couple offered them food. They were picked up by a UK Royal Air Force (RAF) van and taken to hospital, where they reunited with the rest of the crew.
Mr. Harrison went back to visit the couple in 1984, and there’s a photo of him in the book standing by the hut.
His fourth—and final—crash happened on Nov. 29, 1944. It was his 19th mission and he was flying a Lancaster. On the way back, the Lancaster was fired upon by an allied crew in a Halifax, who mistook it for an enemy plane.
“When that crew arrived back at their base at Skipton, they stated at their debriefing that they had shot down an unidentified four-engine German night fighter. Except that there is no such plane. Our brand-new Lancaster was the plane they almost shot down,” he said in the book.
They returned fire and the Halifax stopped shooting. However, when they later tried to land, one of the wheels would not go down. Mr. Harrison attempted to land at a crash dome, but the plane went into a spin and ended up on the grass.
“By the time our aircraft stopped spinning four or five times, the crash crew were there. They chopped open the cockpit and chopped off my harness, and I bet I was out of there in about 15 seconds. They were that organized.”
After that crash, the RCAF decided to send him home. That was a big change and took a bit of getting used to, he said.
“When I got back to the farm, everything was so quiet [that] after about five days I really wished I’d stayed in England,” he said.
When asked what Remembrance Day means to him, Mr. Harrison said it’s an opportunity to reflect on how many people joined up and those who did not come home.
“I would say one-and-a-half million [served], and there were [45,000] who never did come back. People tend to forget that,“ he said. ”Those that lost loved ones, they don’t just have one Remembrance Day, they have several during the year. That’s the part that I always think about.”
