The Night the Plane
Fell From the Sky

I'd always wondered exactly what had happened to my father in 1944. So I went with him and my mother to Belgium to find out.

By Myles Leslie

MY FLIGHT BREAKS THE CLOUDS ABOVE FLANDERS. Down there, somewhere, is a hill over which a great deal of blood was spilled. Over the course of four months, 70,000 lives were spent to take the ridge at Passchendaele, a ridge later retaken in less than a week. From up here, it looks billiard-flat and green: a baize table of woods and farms, with an occasional glint of standing water from recent rains. It was over these flat fields that my father’s plane burst into flame early one spring morning in 1944.

Some 60 years later we have all come from Vancouver to return to the farm where he found help. The Flemish farmhouse, near the village of Kerkhove, sits at the end of a long drive through pastures filled with grazing cows. Arranged around a cobbled central courtyard, the main living area is screened from the river by six immense poplars. When I enter the house the woman whose husband walked Dad to the local chateau for safekeeping beams at me. Her carte d’identité says she is 85, but she has the quick movements and rosy complexion of one half that age.

Anna, the widow of Maurice, is an industrious maker of soups to feed a small army of field hands and grandchildren. Her French is rusty, but better than mine, and mine is better again than Dad’s. Language proved a challenge during the war, too, and again in 1964 when Dad and Mom first returned to Belgium. With the help of another resistance fighter from Brussels, Mom and Dad found Kerkhove and entered a bakery run by two sisters. As Dad walked in the door, the sister behind the till took one look and said: “You’re the one who lived in the tower of the chateau, aren’t you?”

He’d been the worst and best kept secret in the area, his identity never straying beyond the gossip of those loyal to the Allied cause. When Mom, Dad and the Brusselois pulled up at the farm that day, Maurice, emerging from the stables, began to cry before a word was uttered.
Now, with Maurice 11 years in his grave, we sit around a table set out with celery root soup and wine. At one point, Anna shuttles back into the kitchen. I follow with a stack of dirty soup plates. I explain that I’ve spent my trip across the Atlantic composing paragraphs in French to thank her for helping my father survive. She takes my elbows in her thick, red farmer’s hands: “Nous sommes très contents que tu es venu.”

My father’s aircraft, K for King, and its crew of seven had been separated from their bombing group by a malfunctioning compass. Flying over the fiery remnants of some other mission, Dad and the frustrated navigator agreed that here, wherever here was, was as good a place as any to drop their cargo. The anti-aircraft batteries and Junkers night fighters, roused by the earlier wave of bombers, now closed in on the plane in the sky. Although K for King had begun taking evasive action against heavy flak, she appears to have succumbed to the 20-mm cannon fire of a JU-88 that got underneath them. With her control lines severed the aircraft became unresponsive; Dad recalls giving the order to bail out. As he scrambled for the exit, the plane blew apart, sending him headfirst through the cockpit canopy. He came to tumbling in the moonless night.

The second in a chain of minor miracles saw him find the ripcord on his chest pack. He tugged it, and the chute deployed violently enough to rip off his flight boots, leaving him to land in corn stubble in stocking feet. After cutting clear his chute, dazed and wounded, he blew on an emergency whistle to assemble his crew. The whistle faltered, falling from his mouth as he turned to the farmhouse on the far side of the field. Windows carefully blacked out against bombing raids were now lit by the burning wreckage of K for King. He stood amazed; surely no one could survive that inferno. The sound of vehicles in the distance broke the trance, and he staggered to a river, following it for several kilometres before collapsing into a haystack.
He spent two nights there, watching the farmers work the fields through the day and fretting that their Flemish sounded like German. Could they have been that far off course, to have come down in Germany? With one eye bled shut and the last of his emergency rations gone, he flipped a coin in his mind and walked toward one of the two farms he could see. Had he not chosen Maurice’s, he’d have wandered into the yard of Nazi sympathizers.

CONTINUE