The Lancaster Bomber

Meet the Lancaster Bomber - being restored in Nanton, at the Bomber Command Museum of Canada.  You can check out their amazing website (here).
Last Saturday, right after my birthday, I met family in Nanton to watch the "Lanc Crew" fire up all four engines on this baby. Now, this doesn't happen very often so it was a big deal.

 Oh how I wish my dear dad could have shared it with me.   The plane no longer flys, but she has taxi capability I'm told and the fact that she is in as good a shape as she is, is due to the hard work of a crew of enthusiastic volunteers who have spent thousands of hours on the project.

After the second world war this plane wound up in a farmer's field in Vulcan where it sat, slowly sinking into the field until 1960 when three intrepid guys from Nanton got the idea to make it part of a budding aviation museum for their town.  Abandoned planes dotted the prairie landscape, bought cheap for scrap.  Nobody wanted to be reminded of war.
The Museum is dedicated to the Bomber Command which from what I can make out was something of a suicidal mission for their 7 man crews..  Apparently these boys were extremely lucky if they made 30 missions and came back alive.  Some 10,000 RCAF flyers did not. The tragedy for me, standing in front of the wall of names, was that they were so young - 18, 19, 20 year olds. Their names are on a cairn in front of the museum.

We met this man in front of the cairn wall.  The gentleman is dutch, in his 80's now and emigrated to Canada from Holland  in the '50's.  He asked us if we had any family members listed on the Cairn and then he told us his story. 
Notice the little bomber airplane pin on his lapel?  It belonged to his best friend, one of the Lancaster Bomber pilots who dropped food parcels into starving Holland during what they called the "Mana Bombings" toward the end of World War II.

.   This man was on the tarmac, a starving 16 year old, catching  packages and cheering and he told us he waved at the pilot- that same bomber pilot who he met in Nanton.  When the pilot passed away a few years ago, he inherited the lapel pin.  Six degrees of separation works.