Thursday, November 7, 2013 Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows pay tribute to their veterans in a variety of different ways.
Inside… • LOCAL NEWS AND HAPPENINGS • mrtimes.com • 604-463-2281 • 48 PAGES WITH REW Lest we forget
German ambush still fresh Just ahead of Remembrance Day, a retired flight lieutenant recounts battles he fought and friends he lost in war. by Mitch Thompson editorial@mrtimes.com
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our hundred rounds. That was all Flight Lieutenant Fred Moritz had to save his inexperienced crew members from the German fighter ambushing them. The attack had come suddenly, after a successful bombing raid on the German city of Aachen. Someone had snuck up underneath their aging bomber and strafed the underside with a hail of bullets. In danger and with their rear gunner injured, Moritz strained to find their attacker. Breaking past his plane’s port quarter, a Junkers 88 swung out and around, closing for a kill. Moritz yelled for the pilot to bank left as he brought his machine guns to bear on the German
fighter. At 400 metres, he poured round after round into the cockpit, killing the pilot and navigator. The Junkers dropped and crashed into the sea below. Moritz had survived his 10th flight. Only 40 more to go. Seated in his Maple Ridge kitchen, Fred Moritz held a scale model of the Hampden bomber he saved 70 years ago. The model banked left and right as his weathered hands traced the dance of the two planes. “We didn’t know what was shooting at us. Once he exposed himself, I had no fear, no nothing.” He set the model down on the table in front of him. “Afterwards, I was sent to the hospital with the other fella. [At] the medical centre I was holding a cup of tea and all of a sudden I started shaking,” he said. Aged 94, Moritz is one of an estimated 91,400 Second World War veterans living in Canada. For his actions during the Aachen raid, he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Medal and
decorated by King George VI personally at Buckingham Palace in August of 1942. A wireless radio operator with the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 6 Group, Moritz flew 50 missions over Germany and continental Europe. Most of his operations occurred in the Ruhr Valley, which he described as “the hottest place in Germany for flak.” Moritz joined the RCAF in 1940 at 21, soon after the start of the war, “Canada was sort of monarchist, and we wanted to fight for king and country. Plus making some money, things at that time were pretty bad. And [we were] seeking adventure, of course.” With his three friends sitting on their school’s steps, they decided that the air force was the better choice. Memories of the First World War and horrific trench warfare were still fresh, and they decided that mud wasn’t for them. Little
did they know that the cost for bomber crews would be so high. “We were flying the worst aircraft at the time,” he said. The Handley Page Hampden, a twinengine bomber built in 1938, was
cramped and difficult to fly, and outmatched by German fighters. “I’m just damn glad I survived. That was the whole thing. Chances of survival at that time were one in five,” he said. And the Aachen raid would not be Moritz’s only brush with death, he explained, recounting another. “Anyone want to bail out?” the pilot asked his crew as their plane limped closer to their airfield. Moritz, now operating radio on one of his squadron’s new Wellington bombers, looked to the stocky man fighting to keep their plane in the air. The crew had been part of an operation to bomb the German port of Kiel, but bad weather and heavy flak had made a dangerous mission worse.
continued on page A13…
Maple Ridge’s Fred Moritz used his model of a Hampden bomber to describe a deadly battle he helped fight 70 years ago.
Mitch Thompson/TIMES
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