Page 18 - Nov_2018

Four of my favourite veterans:by Will Chabun He joined the RAF and was offered a cushy job in an
Will Chabun, a long-time member of the Regina
chapter of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society,
spent 40 years as a reporter at the Regina Leader-
Post. He always offered to interview veterans and
offers a list of four who made an impression on him.
Fred Tease, who chatted with me after a
Remembrance Day commemoration event at
(appropriately) west Regina’s Dieppe School in 2002.
Fred had been an 18-year-old assault pioneer
(demolition specialist, in Canadian Army lingo) in the
Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada in one of the first
waves to hit Juno Beach on D-Day. Months later, in
the Hochwald Forest, he lost a leg to a land mine. But
Fred was anything but bitter or grim and talked that
day with great, jovial energy about the infantryman’s
lot and, in particular, how he thought that the lessons
learned so much cost at Dieppe 1942 had cleared the
way for a successful landing on June 6, 1944, saving
many lives—including his own.
William Ivor Williams, born in the United States but
raised in Canada -- and by 1943 a very young fighter
pilot at the RCAF fighter operational training unit at
Bagotville, Quebec, where he eventually was
transferred into 127 Squadron under the renowned
Wally McLeod. This unit went to Britain in the spring
of 1944 and soon was renumbered as 443 Squadron
to avoid confusion with the Royal Air Force’s 127
Squadron. Ivor had to leave the squadron relatively
early after he was diagnosed with pneumonia.
McLeod, a driven, hard-nosed man from
Saskatchewan, was shot down and killed near the end there was some minelaying going on -- when the crew
of September 1944. More than 30 years later, Ivor
realized I was a history buff and arranged for me to
copy McLeod’s logbook -- a remarkable historical
document. That’s why I liked Ivor so much -- he was
an officer and a gentleman with a keen sense of
history and his own place in it.
Howard Leyton-Brown, who was raised in
Melbourne, Australia, and was headed for a terrific
classical music career in the late 1930s. Accompanied
by his mother, he’d gone to study in Germany, but
the political winds were howling by then. So, they
relocated to Britain, where young Howard watched
the Luftwaffe’s “blitz” on London in the autumn of
1940.
air force orchestra, but he wanted to fly and fight. In
time, he earned his wings in Britain, then came to
Canada as an instructor--at Estevan. Howard made
the point that his time there was the best of his life
and that he would do it all again if he could. Not only
was he a senior instructor, but he was regularly asked
by air force brass to borrow an Anson and fly to far-
flung stations on the Prairies to give violin recitals.
Posted back to Britain in the summer of 1944, he flew
Lancaster heavy bombers and decades later recalled
the tricks he learned to keep his crew safe, like
counting down the seconds after being “coned“ by a
searchlight so that the Lancaster would be at a
different altitude when flak arrived and exploded. He
also learned to use his musical ability to fine tune the
pitch of the engines to get the best fuel consumption,
important if bad weather forced it to divert to
another base in Britain. He married a delightful lady
from the Estevan area, and later came back to
Saskatchewan, working as a music professor of music
at Regina College (now the University of Regina) and
as the conductor of the Regina Symphony Orchestra.
Truly a happy warrior!
Weldon Moffatt, who trained as a wireless operator,
then went overseas in 1944 and was posted 427
Squadron in the RCAF’s famous 6 (Bomber) Group.
He recently told a story about the last few days of the
war in Europe, after the death of Adolf Hitler had
been reported (April 30, 1945) but before the war
fighting ended a week later. His aircraft was
somewhere over Europe – squadron records indicate
of Weldy’s Lancaster spotted a German Me-109 flying
parallel to them. The ‘109 pilot did not open fire, nor
did the gunners aboard the Lancaster. After a few
minutes, the ‘109 broke off, leaving the Lancaster
crew with a dilemma: Should they report they’d
declined to open fire? If they did, would that get
them into trouble for a lack of aggressiveness? Back
at their base, they told their story to a debriefing
officer, who listened sympathetically, then sent them
for a meal. When they came back, he presented
them with his report, which said, simply, “NO
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