Somebody said ‘Christ, we’re hit.’ And there was a crash and rending and tearing of metal and a thump. We heard the bombs go off when it hit the ground.[Gary Eason]

Jan. 7, 1945, nine Mosquito aircraft and 645 Lancaster bombers took off from airfields across the United Kingdom for grim duty over Munich.

Munich was a major railway hub through which Germany sent troops and materiel to other parts of Europe. It was also home to the first headquarters of the Nazi party, its wartime headquarters and site of one of Adolf Hitler’s residences.

This was the last major Allied raid on the city, which endured some 70 bombing raids during the Second World War. It was the 12th, and last, sortie for Flying Officer William John (Jim) McArthur and the mostly Canadian crew of Lancaster NN766 of Bomber Command’s 103 Squadron, Royal Air Force, based in Elsham Wolds, Lincolnshire, in eastern England.

The crew had earlier finished five weeks of training in the Heavy Conversion Unit, an intensive course on how to operate the Lancasters, then had been transferred to No. 103 in November 1944.

Their first mission was on Nov. 18, and in the next seven weeks, the crew gained experience on raids over Freiburg, Dortmund, Karlsruhe, Leuna, Ulm, Mönchengladbach, Scholven, Osterfeld, Nuremberg and Hanover.

Their war ended on Jan. 7, at about 9 p.m. when residents near Hohrodberg, north of Munster, France, heard the whine of a troubled aircraft, then an explosion. The Lanc hit a hill, and its bomb load exploded, snuffing out seven young lives.

Eighty years later, the story of their aircraft has been told but a few times, while their personal histories have been shared even less, as is the case for most of the 10,673 flyers whose names appear on the granite memorial at the Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alta.

After the war, many veterans weren’t comfortable sharing their stories. That resulted in fewer people preserving the memories of those lost, including the crew of NN766. It’s doubtful Canadians today would ever stumble across the names of those doomed men, many of whom hadn’t yet chalked any other adult milestones before they enlisted.

They were:

Flight Sergeant Donald
Joseph McAulay of Toronto,
mid-upper gunner, the youngest,
who died just shy of his 19th birthday.

Sergeant Roy Percy Candy, 24, of Bozeat, Northamptonshire, the only British member of the crew.

Flight Sergeant Donald Fletcher Campbell, 25, the rear gunner, who hailed from Kelowna, B.C., and had served in all three services during the war. He enlisted with the Royal Canadian Navy in 1940, then after release on medical grounds and recovering, he joined The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada before transferring to the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Warrant Officer Millard Henderson Horne, the 31-year-old wireless operator, was born in Iroquois, Ont., but lived with his grandparents in Gananoque while attending high school. When he enlisted, Horne and his wife resided in Kingston, Ont. He had not met his son, who was born after he went overseas in 1944. On bombing missions, Horne operated the radio and two machine guns in the Lanc’s upper turret.

The pilot, McArthur, 28, was born in Winnipeg and enlisted in the fall of 1941. Prior to that, he sang with the Metropolitan and Knox choirs. In 1986, an island in Chatwin Lake, in remote northern Manitoba, was named after him.

Bomb aimer Flight Sergeant Meyer (Mike) Greenstein, 26, was a recent graduate of the University of Toronto when he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940.

Flying Officer Ralph James (Jim) Lougheed, 20, the navigator, was a student at Winnipeg’s United College who listed building model aircraft and operating wireless radio among his hobbies when he joined up at 18.

Letters in the collection of Library and Archives Canada trace how Gladys and Dr. Morley Semmens Lougheed, parents of the latter, found out what happened to their son. They were among more than 44,000 families who received telegrams notifying them that a loved one was killed or missing in action and presumed to have died. 

The day after Jim’s plane crashed, Wing Commander Alan F. Macdonald wrote his parents a letter.

“Your son was an experienced and efficient operational Navigator and a popular member of the Squadron,” wrote Macdonald. “His loss is sadly felt by us all.”

Some nine months later, on Oct. 9, a Certificate of Presumption of Death was issued, followed by a Missing Memorandum on Oct. 17 stating a nun saw a plane crash at about 9 p.m. and the bodies recovered were disintegrated and buried on the top of the mountain, with stones weighing down the plot. The pilot’s identity disc had been found.

The Canadian Casualty Branch presented a grimmer scenario on Oct. 22.

“It was snowing at the time and no bodies were found until eight days later when the snow had melted. Even then, only a few parts of the bodies, a head and a hand, all badly charred were found.”

Local officials were arranging to have the bodies reinterred in a nearby cemetery.

Meanwhile, Bomb Aimer Greenstein’s parents, Percy and Mary, never accepted his death, despite telegrams and letters from the government.

“It doesn’t mean they have to agree with it and they never did and they never accepted it [his death],” Hersh Gross, Mike’s nephew, said in Ellin Bessner’s Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II.

Residents near Hohrodberg, north of Munster, France, heard the whine of a troubled aircraft, then an explosion. The Lanc hit a hill and its bomb load exploded.

In 2007, the family established the Meyer (Mike) Greenstein Memorial Student Award for Writing Excellence at the University of Toronto in his memory.

The aircraft crashed and exploded, but what led to the crash? Many planes went down during the war, some without a trace, the cause of demise unknown. Mechanical failure? Or icing? Enemy action or mid-air collision?

Although aircraft were given specific routes, times and altitudes, they encountered unexpected jet streams, flew through thick cloud cover often for hundreds of miles over enemy territory during which enemy fighters could appear at any time.

Unfavourable conditions increased the risk of a pilot blundering into another of the hundreds of aircraft in the formation.

“Tragically there were scores of spectacular mid-air collisions,” on bombing raids, wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Mark K. Wells in his master’s thesis “Aviators and Air Combat: A Study of The U.S. Eighth Air Force and R.A.F. Bomber Command.”

“Few crewmen would survive these kinds of mishaps.”

Fifteen Lancasters failed to return from the Munich raid on Jan. 8, 1945. Canada’s War Diary 1945 lists among them two, possibly three, mid-air crashes as well as four aircraft lost, three over Germany and one lost without a trace.

Lancaster NN766 was originally listed as flying into high ground, however, it later emerged that it was involved in a mid-air collision with Lancaster ND968-G (O for Oboe). Its crew from the Australian 460 Squadron operating from Binbrook, Lincolnshire, survived the encounter and made it back to England.

As the the bomber formation approached Munster on Jan. 7, it encountered thick cloud and heavy turbulence at 4,267 metres (14,000 feet) and the Canadian and Australian crews were among many that decided to climb higher to try to avoid it.

“It was bumpy, it was horrible,” recalled O-Oboe rear gunner Sergeant Dave Fellowes. O-Oboe emerged from the pea-souper at about 4,572 metres (15,000 feet).

“There were other aircraft [ahead] who’d already gone up there and it was quite clear,” continued Fellowes.

“Then somebody said ‘Christ, we’re hit.’ And there was a crash and rending and tearing of metal and a thump. Some other aircraft had come out of the cloud just below us and struck his port wing into us right under the mid-upper turret.”

Somebody said ‘Christ, we’re hit.’ And there was a crash and rending and tearing of metal and a thump. We heard the bombs go off when it hit the ground.

As for the Canadians’ plane, “we think it just went into their flight deck” because it went straight down. “We heard the bombs go off when it hit the ground.”

O-Oboe went into a spin, but its pilot, Flying Officer Art Whitmarsh, wrested back control about 914 metres (3,000 feet) above the ground, regained altitude, then dropped its bombs for crew safety.

The crew of NN766 are buried together in France’s Munster Communal Cemetery near the site of the bomber’s crash.[Johan Pauwels/ww2cemeteries.com]

The damage was frightening. The aircraft had been ripped apart from the starboard wing, jamming the ailerons, obliterating the radar dome and almost severing the tail section. About a metre of wingtip was gone.

“Miraculously the mid-upper gunner was still in his turret,” reported Fellowes. Fearing it could fall, other crewmen used a rope to get Sergeant Ken de La Mare onto safer footing.

Fellowes was left wildly swaying in the tail section. Whitmarsh suggested Fellowes bail out, but he declined. “There was still the possibility that we could get jumped by a night fighter,” he said.

O-Oboe made an emergency landing at Manston airfield, and the crew got a look at the damage. “We thought, ‘Dear God. How did we get this aeroplane back?”’ said Fellowes. “So yeah, we considered ourselves very lucky.”

O-Oboe was repaired and it, and its crew, returned to service.

A memorial to the crew of NN766 was erected by the community of Hohrodberg, France, at the crash site. The crew’s remains were interred together in a grave in the nearby Munster Communal Cemetery.