🌺 The Young Airman who left Canada for Europe and now rests in Germany The Story of Sergeant Lundy

Описание: 🌺 “The Young Airman who left Canada for Europe and now rests in Germany” — The Story of Sergeant James Lundy, RCAF 🌺

James Lundy was born on 30 December 1920 in the quiet prairie town of MacGregor, Manitoba.
He grew up in a world of wide fields and long winters, raised by his mother Helen after his father, Allan Ferguson Lundy, passed away during James’s youth.

Life on the prairies built him strong.
Hard work, early mornings, responsibility on young shoulders — that was the rhythm of his boyhood.
By his early twenties, James was working as a farmer, helping keep the family afloat.

But the world was changing.
War had pulled Canada into the fight, and young men from small towns found themselves called toward something larger than their own horizons.

On 28 September 1942, at just twenty-one, James travelled to Windsor, Ontario, and enlisted into the Royal Canadian Air Force.
He chose the path of an Air Gunner — one of the most dangerous roles in Bomber Command.
Training was harsh.
Cold flights in open turrets, endless drills, claustrophobic mock-ups, and the knowledge that a gunner’s life expectancy was measured in weeks.

But James passed.
Earned his Air Gunner’s Badge.
Earned the respect of his instructors.
And earned a place among an extraordinary crew.

He was posted to 428 (Ghost) Squadron, an RCAF unit flying Halifax bombers out of RAF Middleton St George in Yorkshire.
These were young men from all over Canada and Britain — farmers, shop clerks, mechanics, students — who became brothers under the black night skies of Europe.

By autumn 1943, James had flown nine operations, surviving flak, fighters, mechanical failures and the endless cold of the high-altitude war.
Every night could have been his last.
Yet he climbed aboard again, and again, and again.

Then came his tenth operation, on the night of 3/4 October 1943.
That evening, Halifax V EB213 lifted off at 18:52.
Its mission: a large bombing raid on Kassel, Germany.

Weather was poor.
Thick haze lay over the city.
Pathfinder markers were smothered.
Chaos followed.
Bombers drifted off course.
Searchlights probed the darkness.
And German night-fighters rose like silent hunters.

As the Halifax neared Kassel, it was intercepted by Oberleutnant Walter Riedelberger, a Luftwaffe night-fighter ace.
At 22:23 hours, high above the German countryside, EB213 was attacked and set ablaze.
Other fighters converged.
Within minutes, the aircraft broke apart and crashed near Staatsgut, Frankenhausen.

There were no survivors.
The entire crew — Canadians and British, including one young prairie farmer turned air gunner — were killed.
Sergeant James Lundy was 22 years old.

Local people gathered the bodies from the wreckage and buried the crew respectfully in the cemetery at Hofgeismar.
After the war, the Imperial War Graves Commission (today known as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) moved them to Hanover War Cemetery, where James now rests beside the men he flew with.

The early wooden cross over their grave carried three names together:
Sgt J. Lundy, F/O R. P. Goldstein, and “One Unknown British Airman” of the R.C.A.F., all dated 3-10-43.
Three lives, one simple marker.

His crew were his brothers.
They fell together.
They rest together.

Back in Canada, months after the crash, James’s mother received the dreaded telegram:
her son was missing, believed killed.
Years later, in 1950, another letter arrived — this time explaining that his remains had been identified among those buried at Hofgeismar and re-interred in a permanent grave at Hanover War Cemetery, cared for and marked forever.
A small, fragile comfort for a mother who had lost her only boy.

🌺 Lest we forget Sergeant James Lundy — the prairie boy who became an air gunner, and gave everything he had in the fight for a world he believed in. 🌺

#RCAF #JamesLundy #BomberCommand #428Squadron
#Halifax #ThoseWhoCameBefore #LestWeForget