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APPENDIX A Weaponry and Wartime Experience
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Experiences ( 8 pages )
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On 6 September 1944 a Royal Canadian Air Force Lancaster was conducting a reconnaissance patrol over the North Sea with six crew members aboard. Suddenly one of its two motors caught fire. They did everything they could to lighten the aircraft, but it lost altitude. The pilot, Gordon Biddle, knew he would never make it to England, so he headed for Norway, a German-occupied country. Not far from Os, on the Norwegian coast, the second motor died and Biddle had to make a landing that in retrospect would seem impossible. The available “airstrip" was at most 25 metres long. The aircraft was heavily damaged but, by a stroke of luck, the crew members suffered no more than a few bruises.
They were close to a school, and in such a remote location few people other than the teacher spoke English. Magness Askvik pointed the Canadians towards the little town of Bjornen. They shed their flying suits and went there on foot. As the Norwegians hid and fed them, the men could look down and see German ships guarding the ford. Soon the Norwegian secret army, Milorg, took charge of the crew and moved them around the region while some 4, 000 Germans searched for them. Times were difficult in Norway and it was no easy matter to feed six young men on wartime rations - to say nothing of concealing them from the occupying force.
The men left the Os area on 1 October 1944 and reached Botnane by boat and on foot. On 9 October, following radio transmissions between Milorg and its British contacts, the Canadians were taken by boat to a rendezvous point on the coast where a submarine was to pick them up. After three days of anxious waiting, they were finally collected.
Eighteen days after their forced landing in enemy territory, the full Lancaster crew returned to Britain without casualties - surely a unique story in the annals of Canadian aviation in the Second World War. 82
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