Dalhousie Mountain Crash, 1942

Wartime plane crash lives in memory

By MONICA GRAHAM

BROOKLAND — You can see a long way from the peak of Dalhousie
Mountain on this clear, cold November day, and it's so quiet
you can hear the dead leaves rustle in the breeze.

The weather was much different on the night 63 years ago when a
Royal Air Force plane crashed in this spot, about 300 metres
above sea level, killing all five crew members.

It was dark and foggy when the Lockheed Hudson Mk. III slammed
into the south side of the Pictou County hill just after midnight
on Aug. 10, 1942.

Ron Goodall, then of Halifax and now living in West Branch, was
helping ease the wartime farm labour shortage by working at his
grandfather's Pictou County farm that summer and visited the
site the morning after the crash.

"I was just a boy, and it was a long time ago," he said recently
as he tried to find the crash site in the woods.

He and his grandfather and other area residents walked into the
woods behind a barn, now gone, that was then owned by a MacKay
family. They found the wreckage in a stand of large maples, some
sheared off by the plane's impact. Plane parts were scattered
through the wooded site, and one large piece had plowed up the
earth as it skidded along the ground.

"The place was crawling with military people," Mr. Goodall said,
adding the air force took everything away soon afterwards.

"It was wartime, and there was so much going on everywhere else,"
he said, adding that today the incident would get a lot more
notice than it did at the time.

The crash soon became the talk of the community: it carried payroll
that was stolen from the plane before the air force arrived; it
was a spy plane; the crew was selling war bonds; and the impact
made the apples fall off all the trees at neighbouring farms

The truth is that the plane was on a nighttime cross-country
training flight from Debert when it encountered sudden bad
weather shortly after takeoff. The crew was redirected to
Charlottetown, then nothing more was heard from the plane.

"It struck high ground in level flight and disintegrated," said
1st Canadian Air Division historian Chris Charland of North Bay, Ont.
At the time, he said, investigators reported that as the pilot
altered course, he failed to see the hilltop due to darkness and
poor visibility. To be safe, the plane should have been flying
higher over hilly country, the investigation concluded.

Pilot Officer John Alan Bursill, 25, of the Royal Australian Air
Force, was at the controls that fateful night. His body was not
returned to his parents in New South Wales, Australia, but buried
at Terrace Hill cemetery in Truro.

The crew included two Royal Canadian Air Force observers: Pilot
Officer John Kenneth Hobson, 21, of Saskatoon, Sask.; and Paul
Amos Rogers, 22, of Edmonton. RCAF Sgt. Arnold William Cooke, 25,
of St. Lambert, Que., and Sgt. Howard James Vincent, 26, of Canora,
Sask., both wireless operator-air gunners, were also killed.
All the Canadians were laid to rest in their hometowns.

The Royal Air Force's No. 31 Operational Training Unit in Debert
was established to train British and Commonwealth pilots for the
RAF's coastal command, and graduates served around the world,
said Hudson plane historian Bill Walker, of London, Ont.

"The instructors also used the school's aircraft to search for
German U-boats in Canadian waters when the U-boats moved into
the western Atlantic in 1942 and 1943," he said.

Mr. Walker's records show that crews from the Debert school flew
1,041 operational missions, sighting seven U-boats, attacking two
of them and damaging one on July 4, 1943, about 160 kilometres
south of Halifax.

When the school closed in July 1945, it had lost two aircraft
with eight fatalities, including the five men killed on
Dalhousie Mountain.

Now nature is making an obscure bit of wartime history even
harder to find.

For many years, the only way to identify the site was its lack
of vegetation due to contamination by airplane fuel, said Alan
Green, who unsuccessfully searched his Dalhousie Mountain
property for it this week.

But when an older resident showed him the crash site about
15 years ago, weeds had started to grow, he said.

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Halifax Chronicle Herald Fri, 11 Nov 2005