I wrote this piece for my initial assignment in the MFA program at University of King’s College. I offer it in honour of Remembrance Day and of my father, Dick Melcombe, who died more than 50 years ago. I still think of you every day, Dad.

Edited to add: Someone, somewhere commented on the lifetime of grief I’ve lived with after losing my dad so young. Truer words. Not a Remembrance Day goes by that I don’t give in to my tears and allow myself the luxury of sobbing for a while.

A picture hangs in my living room, a sort of collage, but more organized, befitting its contents. It includes my father’s Royal Canadian Air Force wings and stripes from World War II, a green-and-gold RCAF emblem he embroidered while in traction for months in a veterans’ hospital, and two black-and-white photos, rimmed in gold. The pieces are carefully arranged against dark-blue cloth, framed in gun-metal grey with dignified flecks of gold. The photo on the left, taken before my father shipped out to England in 1942, depicts a handsome, athletic, optimistic, young man in his NCO uniform. To the right are his wings and stripes, a few threads out of place. From the photo on the right, the face I remember smiles out at me in his Pilot Officer uniform at the time of his medical discharge in 1945, still a handsome man.

In the first, he’s twenty-one. In the second, he looks much more than three years older.

There is more than my fathers’ wings and stripes in the space between those photos. There’s a story I only thought I knew until years after he died. By that time, decades had passed since a spring day when I’d shouted angry words at him, words I don’t quite remember, but will never really forget. By the time I understood how wrong they were, it was too late for anything but regret.

I wasn’t the first in my family to lose a father too soon. My father’s father died three years into the Great Depression. At eleven, he became sole support for his demanding mother and five-year-old brother. At sixteen, when he grew too old to continue working as an errand boy after school, he took a full-time job as a clerk at the Hudson’s Bay Company and finished high school through evening classes.

He signed up for the reserves in 1940, a few months after his nineteenth birthday; my mother once told me that, more than anything else, he wanted to get away from his mother and train for a career as an airline pilot. He was called up in 1941, spent a year in flight training, shipped out in 1942, and spent another year in combat training before being assigned a crew and active duty.

I learned much of this from his service records, which I requested from the Library and Archives of Canada in March 2011. My nephew had been studying World War II in school and had expressed an interest. In the meantime, like a lot of aging children of World War II veterans, I’d begun to see that not everything is as clear as I once thought it was—that not all wars are the same any more than all peace is the same. I’d begun looking at my adult son and seeing my father at the same age, hearing stories of Afghan veterans struggling to return to a normal life, and wondering how my father had appeared to cope so well. So I requested his records, hoping to fill in some blanks, unprepared for the large, brown envelope that arrived a few months later.

A few days after it arrived, I sat in my sunny yellow kitchen with my older sister reading through his application papers, and the reports at various stages of his flight training. The comments from his training officers read like dialogue out of an old war flick; I can picture the officers in their high-waisted pants, sitting at desks in barracks offices, smoking pipes while tapping away with two fingers at manual typewriters. “A good sort of lad,” wrote one. “Never flown at all but very keen to be a Pilot . . . should turn out all right.” “His day duel was done in cross-wind conditions but immediately the weather cleared, he improved rapidly,” another wrote. “Captaincy on cross-country flying was good. Accomplished one nickel [an aerobatic loop] successfully.” A third said simply, “Appears to be of the slow steady type, reliable.”

Reliable. That was my dad. Reliable.

Twenty-five years after the war, in the summer of 1970, I was thirteen. My biggest aspiration for the future was to be a hippie, and my main occupation in the present was to hate my father. I had no reason; it just seemed like the thing to do at the time. I knew he’d been in combat, though that was nothing to brag about then, with anti-Vietnam war sentiment at its height. He never talked about the war, anyway. He liked the movie, The Great Escape, a fictionalized version of a real-life escape attempt as told by Paul Brickhill in his eponymous book. He laughed uproariously at the TV series, Hogan’s Heroes, a sitcom set in a Nazi POW camp. He once said to my sister, after they’d watched The Longest Day, “So that’s what it was like below the cloud cover on D-Day,” the day the Allied Forces invaded Normandy, which ultimately marked the turning point in the war. One day when I was fifteen and had grown out of hating him, my parents and I were leaving for the airport, where they were seeing me off on my school’s spring break trip to Paris and London, a far cry from the kind of European trip he’d experienced. We were running late, and my dad was scrupulously punctual, so I was surprised when he stopped, grabbed a scrap of paper, and scrawled in his barely legible handwriting, “Millie Walters, 33 Hawkesbury Way, West Wickham, Kent.”

“What’s this?” I asked.

“My Aunt Millie,” he said.

“You have an Aunt Millie?” I asked, “In England?”

“Yes. I used to visit her when I was on leave. Give her a call. Tell her your Dick’s daughter.”

That was it. That was all I ever heard him say about the three years between those two photos.

In June 1987, fifteen years after my father’s death, I received a letter and short story from a man I’d never heard of: Frank Devine, a member of my father’s crew. With two babies in and out of the hospital and an aging, ailing mother, I never got around to replying—another regret. But I kept the letter; it provided reference points when I requested my father’s records. In it, Frank described himself as “the Mad Irishman Wop/A.G. jammed between three Cannucks and three Britts.” I hadn’t even known my father’s crew weren’t all Canadian. Frank and my dad had met in October 1943, Frank wrote, and flown together until six days after D-Day. “We taught [your Dad] to ride a bike at Pershore 23 Operational Training Unit, where the first five of us came together and flew in Wellingtons, Dick Melcombe (Titch) Pilot, Jack WestNavigator, St Pierre Bomb Aimer, Fred Bailey (Bill) Rear Gunner.”

Titch. My father had had a nickname. Titch.

At Pershore, Frank wrote, they picked up three new crew members: Jim Clement, Alf Deakin, and Harry Braithwaite. Even the names sound like characters from a 1940s war flick. They volunteered for the Pathfinders, a hand-picked corps of airmen with unparalleled navigational skills. The Pathfinders did precision target-marking, using coloured flares to ensure bombers hit targets accurately, which minimized civilian losses, and later dropping supplies to the Dutch. My father and his crew had volunteered for the 405, the lone Pathfinders unit in the RCAF, but it didn’t become operational until June 12, 1944—about six hours too late for my father’s crew, as it turned out.

In the meantime, they flew with the Ghost Squadron. It’s odd Frank didn’t mention it. I remembered my mother talking about it when I was a child, but as an adult I thought the name comical, and wondered if it might have been an imagined memory. But there it was with his records, on photocopied pages from a military history book. One of the most elite flying units in World War II Europe, the Ghost Squadron had earned its name both by flying night-only missions and by its reputation “for raining death and destruction down on the enemy”; its patch was a skull and crossbones. That gave me pause. It didn’t fit with the father I’d known, a man who’d hardly raised his voice except when watching Hockey Night in Canada. Crews had never served long with the squadron, my mother had said; it was too hard on them psychologically.

Maybe that was why Frank left it out.

In April 1944, after six months with the Ghost Squadron, while waiting for the Pathfinders 405 to take off, my father’s crew switched from Wellingtons to Lancasters. Considered “the pilot’s aircraft,” they were enormous, capable of carrying nearly their own weight again. These were the planes that dropped supplies to starving Dutch civilians in the last year of the war and later ferried 74,000 freed POWs back to England in just 24 days. That’s probably how my father made it back across the Channel. But Lancs were not built for comfort, or defense. Turrets for the gunners and bomb aimers were so small some

crew members had to put their flight boots inside and climb in before putting them on. At 20,000 feet, the temperature could drop so low that airmen returned to base with frostbite. And because they flew almost entirely at night, they had little armour.

Lancaster Bomber, considered a “pilot’s aircraft”
because it was nothing but essentials.
Photo: Cpl Phil Major ABIPP/MOD, OGL v1.0OGL v1.0,
via Wikimedia Commons.

Only the best pilots flew Lancasters. Only the most skilled crews became Pathfinders.

On a June day in 2011, I sat in my kitchen with my sister, flipping through pages from the big brown envelope, the morning sun flooding in. I’d made it past the mostly glowing comments from my father’s superiors to the actual service records, which were dark and hard to read, cramped writing in tiny lines detailing every post he’d ever been assigned and every mission he’d ever flown. I found my mind wandering from the bright day outside to a runway in England at night, imagining our dad in the cockpit of his Lanc.

No, that’s wrong: I was imagining my son. Though he’s now older than the man in the “before” photo, and taller, my son looks remarkably like his grandfather. He’s slight and fair-skinned and carries himself with self-assurance. I can see him sitting in the pilot’s chair, on an airfield lit by only a few runway lights. He’s checking gauges and chatting good-naturedly with his crew to put them at ease while internally focusing on the mission ahead. My father was a small man piloting a mammoth machine, a quiet, sensitive boy who’d been responsible for others for most of his life. He’d seen death as a child, having been in the car when his father was killed. He’d learned never to appear weak, especially to his mother. He’d grown up in a paradox, supporting his brother and mother, yet always under his mother’s thumb. At just twenty-two, he’d become responsible for the lives of the six young men under his command, and the deaths of countless others.

He was probably aware of that paradox, too. Later in life, he would tape messages to the dashboard of his car, reminding himself to have “Strength” and “Confidence” as he readied for the day ahead during his morning commute, donning a mask few people ever saw behind. His crew would never have seen. They would have seen nothing but a commander who took charge and took care of them. Even when they went drinking, Frank wrote, “his limit was two small beers, whilst the rest of us got sloshed, he always looked after us and we all admired him for resisting our devious efforts to get him Tipsy. You must realise that Bomber crews were as close knit as families, probably more so at times so you can appreciate how I feel about hearing that Dick has passed away.”

At thirteen, I didn’t know this. It wasn’t until forty years later that I applied for his records, and then sat at my kitchen table with my sister, comparing them against Frank’s letter, piecing together the time between those two photos and specifically the wee hours of June 12 1944. I knew about his life before the war, and had driven past his boyhood home in Vancouver’s varsity district. I knew how he’d met our mother after the war, a wounded veteran courting his nurse at Shaughnessy Hospital. But it wasn’t until years after his death, when my nephew asked about his grandfather and my son was considering enlisting to have medical school paid for, that the reality of the space between those two photos began to sink in.

They’d flown four missions in five days, Frank wrote, when they were shot down over German-occupied France. They hadn’t even had time to celebrate my dad’s promotion a few days earlier. On June 6 1944, they’d dropped bombs at Omaha, trying to give the troops who’d poured off the boats into hailstorms of bullets a chance to make it past the beach, over the dunes, into the forests. What my father hadn’t mentioned in that one-off comment to my sister was how difficult it must have been for all the Canadian flyers that day to realize it was cloud cover that had undermined their efforts. It wasn’t their fault they’d dropped their bombs too far behind the front lines, leaving many more bodies on the beach than anyone had imagined.

But it was war. The dead were dead. The living couldn’t bring them back. They could only move forward.

So on the morning of June 8, my father’s crew attacked German troops in the Fôret de Cerisy, and the following morning they hit Rennes airfield. On the night of June 11, they were called out at short notice to bomb a panzer division at Tours, where German forces had been called up from the south to reinforce the defences at Omaha beach, the codename for a beach in Normandy hit during the D-Day invasion. They were scheduled to drop their load at 00:45. I don’t know whether they did, because as Frank wrote, “We were hit at 00:45!”

Some sixty-five years later, feeling uneasy with the comforts of my kitchen and the sunshine-y day outside, I looked through page after page of statements by my dad’s crew, his superior officers, and even M. Maillet, the farmer in whose field he’d crashed, and I found myself unable to continue. The reports of his growing competence in training had been easy enough to read. Even Frank’s letter and his one-page account of the crash had not made the image of my father’s plane falling out of the night sky quite real to me. It had always been like something out of a movie—a black-and-white movie with officers smoking pipes and tapping on manual typewriters.

This was not a movie. This was survivor testimony. And my eyes were too full, my brain too overwhelmed, to read it. It was my sister, always more pragmatic than I, who grabbed a scrap of paper and began sifting through the pages, dissecting each man’s statement, extracting names and times, checking details against his service record, assembling the crew’s last moments together like pieces of a puzzle becoming a whole picture. I realized with some chagrin that, until then, that was all it had been to me. A fuzzy-edged picture I’d never gotten ‘round to focusing.

It was focused now.

They were between 1200 and 1500 feet when the first bullet hit. Braithwaite saw the fires in the inboard engines, dying down and growing again. 

The pilot’s training and experience kicked in: Adjust engine pitch. Shut off petrol. Press extinguisher button.

The fire in the starboard engine went out, but the one in the port engine grew, fast.

Deakin yelled, “Fire in the fuselage . . . and under the starboard wing.”

“What’s our height?” West shouted.

”Bale out!” the pilot answered.

Deakin led the way, headfirst out the rear door.

Clement went next, and West followed, out the front hatch.

Glancing out the rear, Braithwaite saw ground rushing toward him, stepped back, braced for impact.

He felt a bump as the plane hit the trees, then a slight rise: the pilot pulling the nose up? Then—blackness.

From hit to crash, it had been less than three minutes.

Braithwaite came to surrounded by flames.

Maillet had seen the explosion and raced toward it. As he neared, he saw a man run into the woods. No time to spare, Maillet hurried toward the plane.

Two airmen were unhurt in the burning wreck, but the pilot was badly wounded. Maillet beckoned to the airmen, who ran after him.

The pilot, head traumatized, leg pulverized, was still strapped into the burning cockpit, tracer from the ammunition belts flying around the fuselage like deadly fireworks.

By the time Maillet returned, the Germans had arrived. The pilot was gone.

The soldiers searched the farm but found no one. Maillet had hidden Baily and Braithwaite quickly, but well; they remained there undetected for the rest of the war.

I had known from the time I was quite young that my father had been a pilot in a war and had been in a big plane crash; that was why he limped, and why he wore those funny-looking shoes that he had to mail order from that special place. The story of the crash had been told over and over, in his absence, by those who hadn’t been there. It had grown to epic proportions.

Sitting in my kitchen with my sister, the real story hit.

Except for the year I’d decided to hate him, I had always imagined my father larger-than-life, the dad who never lost his cool or seemed afraid. I’d never considered what he might have been thinking as his aircraft took fire, as the flames grew, and the plane dove. I’d never heard his voice shouting the order to bale out, or felt the adrenaline pumping as he’d struggled to keep the plane aloft until he reached the trees at the edge of the farmer’s field, his only hope of surviving the crash. I’d never asked if he’d been conscious as he lay there in excruciating pain, immobilized by his injuries, wondering what would become of his crew now that he’d gotten them to the ground alive, now that all he could do was listen to the jeeps screaming toward him, the soldiers shouting in German, the young men whose comrades’ lives his own bombs may have taken dragging his wounded body from the cockpit. I’d never asked if he’d been unconscious after the plane crashed, unaware of what was happening until he’d been awoken by the screaming pain of the jeep hitting every bump in the road, or in the operating room before they put him out and set his leg so badly it would never be right again, or in a bed where French nurses took his pulse and German soldiers stood guard as he came slowly to realize that though he’d survived the crash, if he even remembered it, his life was now out of his hands.

There are no records of my father’s time as a POW. The next piece of paper in his file was a copy of the letter to his mother. “Dear Mrs. Melcombe: Before you receive this letter you will have had a telegram informing you that your son . . . is missing . . . [He] was very popular with this Squadron, and was an excellent Pilot. He is greatly missed . . . There is always the possibility that [he is] a prisoner of war . . .”

As I sat in my kitchen with my sister, the details sorted and my tears done, I read past the unlikely optimism in the last line and went back to the first few sentences: He was very popular. He was an excellent pilot. The past tense hit me like a slap, as it must have hit his mother. I thought of my own son, so much like his grandfather. I thought of him achieving his life’s dream of becoming a doctor and going off to Afghanistan to repay his debt, much as my father had become a pilot and then gone off to war.

A hole opened up in my heart.

Years earlier, to my adolescent mind, there had seemed to be no difference between an offensive war and a defensive one, between fighting a real threat and an imagined one. But as I grew older and learned more, I realized that though many leaders have tried many times in history to justify offensive wars by framing them as defensive, that was not the case in World War II. One can argue all day that Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were the product of previous wars and atrocities, but I can’t persuade myself that once any individual has gone that far and diplomacy has been exhausted, those living with imminent threats are wrong to defend themselves.

To my middle-aged mind, the sheer madness of World War II Europe has little in common with the irrational fear of “the red dog of communism” that fuelled the Cold War and gave rise to the wars in Korea and Vietnam. But in my thirteen-year-old brain, I saw only the images of naked children burned by napalm and innocent villagers killed at My Lai that streamed into our living rooms each evening, and I conflated them with my ideas about World War II. In my wannabe flower-child thinking, I believed all wars were crimes and my father was a war criminal. In the years after he died, I knew he understood I was just being a teenager, I knew he’d always loved me and I him, I knew he had forgiven me for my thoughtless words. But it wasn’t until that day in my kitchen decades later, poring through his service records with my sister, that I felt deep down in my bones how far off base my adolescent appraisal of him had been, how much my outburst must have hurt him, how powerless he must have felt to respond.

Most of my father’s crew—Deakin, West, Baily, and Braithwaite—survived what remained of the war, but I don’t know anything else about them. According to my father’s records, Clement, the second to bale out, had initially been hidden by the French, but later captured, probably interrogated, and then shot by the Gestapo. Devine, whom Maillet had seen running into the woods, had been captured and hit by “friendly” fire en route to interrogation, but had survived the war and emigrated to Van Nuys, California, from where he’d sent that letter.

The whole story reads like a script from a war movie. But it wasn’t a movie; it was my father’s life. It was what I didn’t know when I was thirteen and intent on hating him because it was hip at the time, and I wanted to be hip, to be a hippie, to fit in. I couldn’t see then that war, like life, is full of paradoxes. At thirteen, in the middle of an argument I remember nothing else about, I shot out some of the most ignorant words I’ve ever said. I don’t remember them exactly now, but I’ve never forgotten the tone, the intent, the spirit.

I was reminded of them recently when watching an episode of M*A*S*H, the 1970s sitcom set at a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War, a sitcom that reflected America’s growing intolerance for the continuing and senseless US presence in Vietnam. In the scene of M*A*S*H that I mimicked during that argument with my father, Hawkeye Pierce, the charming rogue and brilliant chief surgeon who’d been drafted into a war he wanted nothing to do with, was talking to a pilot. The pilot was clean, friendly, and almost completely unscathed by the violence and death all around him. As the story told it, a bomber pilot wouldn’t need to see a war up close and personal. This bomber pilot flew high above it all, dropped his bombs, and made it home every evening to where his Japanese wife awaited him with slippers and a hot meal. In the story, the pilot hadn’t thought much about the war, it was just his current job—until one day he found himself sitting outside an operating room watching Korean children being carried past on litters, crying out for mothers and fathers who had been injured or killed themselves. It was just the moment the maverick surgeon, Hawkeye Pierce, had needed to give the heartless pilot a piece of his mind about what was going on down on the ground every time he dropped his bombs. His monologue was admirable, I thought at the time, his tone righteous and moral and right. And so, on that day when I was thirteen, in the middle of an argument with my father, I called the scene up from my memory and gave my father a piece of my mind.

“Why should I listen to you?” I demanded. “You’re a murderer. Did you ever think about the people you were killing on the ground? The children? The babies? Or did you just drop your bombs and fly home to dinner? I don’t need to listen to you. You’re a murderer. You’re a hypocrite. You’re a baby killer.”

My father was not easily riled. I think he lost his temper twice when we were kids, both times with me, but this was neither of those times. This time, he simply stood in our front yard in his gardening clothes and a scuffed-up pair of the orthopedic shoes he’d worn every day since he’d made it out of traction and begun walking on crutches, and then on canes, and finally on his own. He’d been left with a pronounced limp, back pain, and a complete inability to regain the athletic prowess he’d enjoyed as the handsome, optimistic young man in the “before” photo, or even to fulfill his dream of becoming an airline pilot.

The day I shot him down was warm, but he wasn’t wearing shorts because he was embarrassed by the brown scar that ran the length of his calf. He never talked about it. He just covered it up, the same way he covered everything up. All “the boys” were told not to talk about things when they got home. As Frank wrote, “I thought then, probably very selfishly, [talking about it] is doing no good . . . I will forget about the whole thing which I tried to do, but it is impossible to forget and now I know I was wrong to try. There is so much which should have been done and still should be done, so as in future years people will appreciate truly what the men in Bomber command went through . . . I feel so guilty now.”

Guilty. Frank Devine was guilty of nothing. Nor was my father. My father did as he was told, as he’d been taught to do all his life, as a boy who’d become a man at eleven, a pilot who’d saved every member of his crew at the risk of his own life, and a veteran who’d been told to forget and move on. He never talked about the war, not even on that day when I was thirteen. On that day, after those words shot out of my mouth like tracer around a burning fuselage, my father just stood there, no expression on his face. I don’t recall who walked away first, but I never forget that I spoke such vile, callous, ignorant words. I’ve never in my life said any words to anyone that I’vewished more I could take back.

My father died of a sudden heart attack three years later. He was fifty-two. I was sixteen. I’d grown up a little, and our relationship had improved a lot, but I’d never gotten around to apologizing.

For years after his death, I held onto his war mementoes. Every year on November 11 I’d take them out and look at the pictures and run my fingers over the stripes and the RCAF emblem. I’d tell my children what I remembered of their grandfather and what little I knew of the night he was shot down, and I’d go to their Remembrance Day assemblies at school and cry a little.

A few years ago, not long after receiving his service records, my youngest daughter had an idea for a Christmas gift for me: something meaningful, something I’d never expect. On Christmas morning, we did the rounds, taking turns opening gifts and thanking givers. At one point, I think my daughter said, “I know it doesn’t seem like you’re getting much, Mommy, but there’s something big coming for you at the end.”

I might have muttered, “Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Eventually, the pile under the tree was depleted. My daughter said, “Mom, there’s one gift left, for you. You didn’t get a lot this year because this was really expensive. It’s from all of us, but it was my idea.”

“Okay,” I said, bemused.

She left the room, reappearing a moment later with a large, flat, heavy parcel loosely wrapped in brown paper. “I didn’t wrap it,” she said, laying it on my lap. “Be careful,” she said. “It’s fragile.”

So I opened it carefully, pulling back one flap of brown paper, and then the other. And when I saw it—the wings, the photos, the RCAF emblem—I stopped breathing. My face got hot. Tears flooded down my cheeks. A sound choked out of my throat. My vision blurred at first, and then my eyes squeezed tightly shut. From a distance, I heard my daughter ask, “Do you like it, Mommy?”

“Yes,” I said. “I like it.”

But what I wanted to say, what I wanted one more chance to say, was “I love you, Daddy. I miss you. I’m sorry.”

Now that picture, that collage, hangs in my living room. I look every day at the young man who went to war and the much older man who came home, and I know the story that fills the space between those two photos. Every year on November 11, I take out Frank’s letter and read it, wishing I’d gotten around to replying before it was too late, and lingering over the closing lines: “Bye for now great to be in touch with you after all these years I hope you will regard me as an uncle. God bless and protect you. Sincerely yours, Frank”.