A Whole Crew Lost

Interviewer: Can you tell us a little bit about your friend that got killed? He … yeah, he was a very pleasant guy. He was from Edmonton. He was nineteen and I was twenty-nine. But he was a very jolly fellow and always making quips. He says, “Look at those fools up there flying. Don’t they know it’s dangerous? ” I had another navigator friend that died. I don’t know whether to tell this story about him or not. He came back from his first trip and he was my friend. We were (inaudible) quite chummy. He says, “I’m not going up there again. I don’t care what they say. I’m not gonna to fly again. To heck with them. I’m through.” So we talked him out of it and he went back up. And another couple of trips, they ran into a big thunder storm. They pretty near got ripped to pieces, but they got home. Three trips later, they ran into a mountain and didn’t get home. So, I often wished I’d let him quit. Interviewer: The whole crew was killed? The whole crew. The whole batch were killed. The whole bunch of them. We were quite chummy with them. Floyd Ross and Bob Clark and Ralph Fisher, those were the three. And nobody ever remembered them. Nobody made a fuss about them. They make such a fuss these days about, God, the whole crew. Even us, that knew them. I think we were pretty hard-hearted. Interviewer: How did it make you feel when you heard about that? Beg your pardon? Interviewer: How did it make you feel when you heard about that? I felt sad. But we didn’t hear about it all at once. They just didn’t come home. We thought they landed at another base, and it was a day or two before we found out. And then I had to pack up all his belongings and send them to his wife, and write. Wow.Interviewer: It’s a hard thing to do.Yeah. Not very pleasant.Interviewer: These were all young men? Yeah. Nice young men.