Lost Crews

Heroes Remember

Lost Crews

Transcript

As far as I know, there were only two other air crew from Thunder Bay - at that time Fort William - that were in the southeast Asia command area of operations. One of them was a navigator and when he came on the squadron, our crew was selected to have them, to monitor their first flights. So, we got this skipper and the navigator. And he was a fella I went to high school with, and public school, in Fort William. We were very good buddies. So, I took him on his first two flights and unfortunately, on his third or fourth one, he never came back. But nobody knows to this day what happened. He’s one of the crews that is missing. Interviewer: The whole crew?The whole crew. Yeah. They don’t even know where. There were no witness to any downed aircraft or being shot down or anything. Just gone into thin air. The other was a young lad whose mother was a very good friend of my sister. He was on our squadron as an air gunner and he ended up in the hospital in Digri, I believe it was, with appendicitis and didn’t survive the operation. But they were the only two people from my own home town that were on that squadron. There may have been some went through at other times, before or after.

Description

Mr. Hosegood remembers the crews that didn’t make the journey home.

William George Hosegood

William George Hosegood was born May 7th 1924. A carpenter’s son, Mr. Hosegood grew up with four brothers and five sisters in Fort William, Ontario. All of his brothers were in the military. “Money was scarce”, says Mr. Hosegood, who worked full time as a clerk at age 16, and held many other jobs before joining the army at 17 or 18. Originally placed in the reserve army, Mr. Hosegood joined the RCAF the next year. After graduating at the top of his navigational training class in Saskatoon, he was selected to go to Burma as a navigator. Mr. Hosegood says that his career in the military fashioned the rest of his life.

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