Locals reflect on WWII crash

By Hailey Trealout

Final prayers to God and family flew through rushing air before crashing into the unknown below, never to be recovered until more than 70 years later.

On Dec. 13, 1940, Flight Lieutenant Peter Campbell, 24, of the Royal Air Force and Leading Aircraftsman Theodore Bates, 27, of the Royal Canadian Air Force collided with another aircraft mid-air during a search and rescue mission.

The other plane and its occupants were found but Campbell and Bates remained missing, said the National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces news release.

After hearing about the crash site, Arthur Anderson, a Canadian Royal Air Force veteran said the recovery of a WWII plane is an unusual occurrence nowadays, but it was even rarer during WWII.

“All of my flying was overseas, planes didn’t collide very often – they got shot down, but that’s something else,” said Anderson, who was 23 at the time of joining the air force as a navigator. “Search and rescue was usually useless because we were over the ocean. If a plane went down, that was it. There was no chance for recovery in the ocean because of its depth.”

The concept of search and rescue started during WWII. Modern Canadian search and rescue teams have responsibility of the entire civilian population – a rare custom that has been maintained since WWII.

Brad Saunders worked with a search and rescue team for 25 years in Trenton, Ont. He said the teams he worked with used a risk management method, where they researched the forecast, the job they were heading to and the skillset of each individual on the craft.

“To prevent things like this from happening, we would maintain the aircraft at a high level. We trained constantly because most of the time we would be flying in very lousy weather,” said Saunders. “We’ll probably never know what happened to them, or how they wound up in the lake, it could have been a number of things.”

The crash site was found on July 27, 2010. Recovery secretly occurred October 2012 to keep the crash site safe.

“I was in an aircraft that was shot down and we crash landed during Operation Market Garden,” said Anderson. “It happened so fast, we didn’t have time to think. You don’t think when you know the aircraft is going down, you just brace yourself and pray. ”

The occupants of Nomad 3521 aircraft were finally laid to rest on Sept. 17, 2013.