When the shots hit the tail and the screaming plane dropped from 20,000 feet, Chuck Page must have felt a long way from his St. Catharines home.
Nighttime June 25, 1943. Page was a bomb aimer on a seven-man crew returning from his 19th operation over western Germany.
He didn’t see the attack coming — his position was in the nose of the aircraft, on his belly, where he directed the pilot toward the targets.
The shots took out both port engines, leaving the plane with only two right-side engines. The pilot was yelling, “Abandon aircraft!”
The rear gunner was hit. He called to Page, in the front of the plane: “Can you help me?”
CHUCK PAGE TURNED 100 on Aug. 9 and celebrated by doing more than 100 laps around his St. Catharines townhouse complex.
A photo from 1942, though, shows a proud young man boarding a train. He’s saying goodbye to his parents and sister. He is off to war, to be posted in England.
He was a small-town guy, as were most of the thousands of Canadian men and woman who enlisted to join the Second World War, which ended 75 years ago this week on Sept. 2.
“They had no problem recruiting men, the guys went like flies,” Page recalled. “It was amazing how many guys went right away.
“There were a fair number who didn’t, they took jobs as soon as they could. They had work and they couldn’t leave. They were busy doing war work.
“They didn’t want to leave and their bosses didn’t want them to leave, though a number of them did anyway.”
Like everywhere else, Niagara joined the war effort. Atlas Steels in Welland was producing nearly 4,000 gun barrels a month plus steel for aircraft.
In St. Catharines, McKinnon Industries Ltd., part of General Motors, was cranking out spark plugs, axles and transmissions for the war effort. Outside the city, pilots were being trained for war.
Page wanted to fly. He had never been in a plane and his older brother, Al, was already fighting overseas.
He joined the Air Force in July 1941. Studied at navigation school for navigator-bomb aimers and got his wings in 1942.
And on June 25, 1943, his plane was going down fast.
“THE NAVIGATOR HAD STAYED on course too long, and when I told him … he gave the pilot a course to fly from that point to the point of departure on the European coast,” said Page.
“Well, that was in the open and we got picked up by German radar.”
They were trained to fly, not crash. There was no evacuation plan to fall back on from six kilometres up.
“You didn’t practise for anything like that … You have the idea in your mind it will never happen to us.”
His rear gunner was wounded and calling for him.
“I turned up the oxygen supply to give him as much oxygen as he could get, since he had been hit,” said Page. “I gave him mine, he didn’t have his complete unit.
“So I gave him my helmet and the oxygen mask. And I was without, so I think I may have lost a little bit of knowledge of time.”
Page was the last one out; when he got back to the front of the plane the pilot and flight engineer were getting ready to jump. So he did, too.
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“No problem. Soft landing. Pulled my cord and the parachute opened and I hit the ground,” said Page (his daughter, Nancy DeVuono, said her dad has always been very pragmatic).
Only one crew member, pilot officer Gerald Gagnon, was killed. The rest scattered on the ground.
“I decided which way to walk. I headed eastward (after touching ground in Holland), I don’t know why I went that way, and then I came to a canal … there were small boats using it, there were some farmhouses around.”
He laid low by day and travelled by night, until he was caught.
“I had nowhere to go. I was in the open pretty well, I couldn’t run anywhere, so when I was arrested it was a matter of falling into line.”
Now Sgt. Chuck Page was a prisoner, along with most of the rest of the crew.
Page was taken to Stalag Luft VI near the Baltic Sea — his German captors, he said, “didn’t bother us … they gave us a meal or two a day, they didn’t bother us at all.”
Nearly two years later in 1945, after being moved frequently and ending up at a PoW camp outside Hamburg, Germany, Page escaped.
“Myself and two other guys decided we had gone far enough,” he said.
“We knew where the (Allied) soldiers were … because we got the BBC news and they had a radio, guys used to listen to that every night and bring the news around to the rest of the guys.”
It was April 1945. By the end of the year, he and his brother were back home in St. Catharines.
Page was still anguished over the death of his pilot, and went to Quebec to visit Gagnon’s mother.
Page went to work at Hayes Steel on Oakdale Avenue in St. Catharines. He met his wife, Irene, there. They were married 68 years and had three children. Irene died in July.
“Dad never talked about the war,” said his daughter. “There must have been a reason for that, he never talked about it until we were well into our adulthood and then he started to talk about his experience.”
Said Page: “I came home in one piece. I was happy and they were happy, and we took off from there.”
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