Page 19 - RCAF Centenary

We end this journey of remembrance with one last capsule story, one of the many that earned the young men and women the title of The Greatest Generation. It’s a story of camaraderie, resilience, determination, and outright bravery. It’s a story of a single event spanning only 14 days and involving 3 Canadian airmen on their way to the European Theater in November 1942. It was committed to print in the May 15, 1942, issue of Macleans Magazine and in illustrated style in the October 1943 issue of TRUE COMICS which CHAA has reproduced for this commemorative booklet honoring our RCAF past, present and future personnel.
FL David Harrison Goodlet (1919-1983)
RCAF pilot Goodlet flew for the RAF Ferry Command No. 313 Group based in North Bay. Ferry pilots were tasked with picking up vitally needed new aircraft coming off the production lines in the US and Canada and delivering them over various routes to operational units in the UK, and the theaters in Europe and North Africa. Ferry crews had to be specially trained for these long flights, typically in aircraft sporting extended range fuel tanks for the long flight over the Atlantic. Under Ferry Command over 9000 aircraft made this journey losing ‘only’ about 100 along the way.
The Goodlet story centers on the flight to deliver a new twin engine A-20 Havoc medium bomber from North America to England.
Versions of this Douglass aircraft could reach a peak speed of up to
417 mph and a payload capacity of 2,400 pounds. Armament varied
from four fixed, forward-firing and three flexible 30-caliber machine
guns in dorsal and ventral gunner positions to 6 forward-firing
.50-caliber machine guns, a pair of .50-caliber machine guns in a
dorsal turret, and a single .50-caliber machine gun in the ventral tunnel gunner position. In these configurations the A-20 became a lethal night fighter. It was also particularly effective against naval vessels, using an offensive technique of flying at wave height and releasing a bomb that skips like a stone into the ship at the water line. It could also carry 2 air-dropped torpedoes.
We pick up this story in the early morning on November 10, 1942. Having arrived
the night before, 22-year old Goodlet and his crew members, fellow Canadians Ft/ Sgt Arthor Weaver and navigator Al Nash downed an early breakfast, checked out the weather, went to the flightline where they went through the basic checks on the Havoc then took off heading NE over the cold North Atlantic to their next stop and refueling on the southern tip of Greenland before heading to Reykjavik and then on