Second World War navigator’s helmet comes home to Regina seven decades later

Second World War navigator’s helmet comes home to Regina seven decades later

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Barb Pacholik, Postmedia News6 days ago

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1/3 SLIDES © Courtesy Gerald Beaton

Courtesy Gerald Beaton

2/3 SLIDES © Courtesy Gerald Beaton

Courtesy Gerald Beaton

3/3 SLIDES © Courtesy Gerald Beaton

Courtesy Gerald Beaton

3/3 SLIDES

Lapsing in and out of consciousness as his parachute drifted downwards, airman Ed Beaton miraculously survived the crash of his Halifax Bomber over France in the Second World War.
Seven decades later, fate delivered another surprise for the Regina man’s family. The helmet he likely wore when the plane was shot down, claiming five of the seven-man crew, has also come home. The helmet journeyed from France to Ottawa, where Beaton’s son Gerald, taking a flight from Regina, went to pick it up recently and bring it back home.
“The last 10 to 15 years, I’d always been interested in the story (of the crash), and haven’t really been able to get much direct information,” he says. “To me, this was another piece in the puzzle that came right out of the blue.”
What Gerald knows of the Bomber’s crash comes largely from a letter his father once wrote to a historian in France. Beaton, himself, spoke very little about the war.
“The only thing I recall him telling me was talking about his time in Stalag III, the prison camp … He was always cold and he was always hungry,” says Gerald. The family always knew “there was some bad things that happened, particularly right after he was captured.”
How Beaton ended up in the notorious Stalag Luft III — immortalized in the movie The Great Escape — begins with the crash. Moose-Jaw born, university-educated Beaton enlisted in 1943, joining 427 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force. On June 13, 1944, his crew, piloted by Robert Pearson, was tasked with bombing the Arras railway marshalling yards.
“Once we crossed over the French coastline, it seemed to me that there was greater than usual defensive activity,” Beaton recalled in his typed letter some 40 years later for the historian who was writing a book.
The Halifax Bomber was caught by searchlights. Pearson, a skilled pilot and instructor, initially managed to evade the lights. “But they kept catching us again, each time with a greater number of searchlights concentrating on us.”

The family always knew “there was some bad things that happened, particularly right after he was captured

Like a hammer hitting the aircraft, Beaton heard a quick “bang-bang-bang,” he wrote.
“The aircraft lurched, and at the same time, the pilot called over the intercom ‘bail out, bail out.'”
The navigator’s table, where Beaton sat, was directly over the front escape hatch in the floor. His job was to remove the door and move it out of the way, which Beaton did.
Then, he jumped.
His next memory is of floating mid-air with his parachute. He could see what he suspected was the burning aircraft exploding — but no other parachutes. Beaton hit the ground and again passed out.
“I had no way of knowing how many other crew members, if any, had got out.”
Wounded and alone, the 25-year-old walked in stocking feet — his boots having been lost when he jumped — until he saw the lights of a home, knocked and loudly whispered “RAF.” They helped briefly, but warned there were Germans in the area and it wasn’t safe. He set off walking again, lying hurt in a grain field where he was found by some young farmers. A number of villagers, some likely part of the French Resistance, would help over the next few days. Beaton was given false identity papers, civilian clothes, and a quick French lesson. He and another British flier, not from his plane, tried to walk to Allied territory.
Their near non-existent French language skills proved their undoing. The Gestapo stopped them within a day’s travel.
“So goes la guerre,” Beaton wrote good-naturedly so many years later.
He was interrogated, jailed and shipped off to Stalag Luft III, southeast of Berlin, mere months after the mass prisoner escape that ended in the executions of 50 recaptured POWs.
Beaton would later learn the only other survivor of the crash was a Brit, who successfully made it back. The five others — Pearson, Laird Cartwright, Edward Dubeau, Edward Roy Duffin, and Gordon Parsons — were buried in a military cemetery at Foncquevillers, France. In time, villagers commemorated the deceased flight crew — the only Second World War soldiers in a cemetery filled with those who fought in the First World War — with a cairn and a memorial fashioned from a piece of the crashed bomber’s engine.
Beaton somehow also survived Stalag Luft III and the forced marches until he was liberated at the end of the war. He settled in Regina, married his wife Sheila in 1947, raised a family of five, and became a long-time civil servant in the Saskatchewan government. On occasion, the quiet, academic with a passion for books and learning penned a few Op-Ed pieces for the Regina Leader-Post on an array of topics, including elections, inflation and frugality.

Based on all the information we have and all the evidence we have, I think we can say beyond a reasonable doubt it’s dad’s

He died in 2003 at the age of 84, almost 60 years after cheating fate over the skies of France.
Last year, a Toronto Star reporter called the Beaton family as she tried to piece together a story about the crash and a Second World War airman’s helmet. Gerald explained how it had belonged to Henri Lemaire, a member of the French Resistance who died in 1996. That man’s son, Dominique, went on a hunt for the rightful owner, knowing from his father that it belonged to one of the men in that 1944 plane crash.
The helmet has some faded lettering — an “E” and “A” and “N” — that initially led to speculation it belonged to Pearson. But the discovery of another “N,” likely for navigator, above the other letters and their spacing suggested it more likely belonged to Beaton.
“I don’t think we’ll ever know with 100 per cent certainty,” says Gerald. “But based on all the information we have and all the evidence we have, I think we can say beyond a reasonable doubt it’s dad’s.”
Dominique Lemaire passed the helmet on to Gilles Prilaux, a French archeologist who had a speaking engagement at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa on Jan. 23. That’s where it was handed off to Gerald.
From Beaton’s letter and Gerald’s recollection, his father was always very grateful to the French people who assisted him, and he visited some of them when he travelled to France years later.
“It was always clear to me that they were helping me at great risk to themselves,” Beaton once wrote.
Today, the son of that RCAF airman is equally thankful to the son of a French Resistance fighter.
Gerald and his siblings plan to present the helmet to their mother.

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