Leamington flyer forever linked to famous bomber

Local Tales of Remembrance

By Mark Ribble

BELGIUM — In the early morning hours of May 13, 1944, a Canadian Halifax Bomber was shot down over Belgium by Luftwaffe fighter ace Martin Drewes.

Leamington’s Fred Roach was the tail gunner on that ill-fated flight, as it crashed into a swamp in rural Belgium, about 40 km south of Brussels.

The LW682 Halifax and its crew of eight, was part of a 120-aircraft raid being conducted by the Allies over rail yards at Louvain, Belgium.

As German forces arrived at the crash site, only five of the eight crewmen’s bodies were recovered. The aircraft sank in the mud, taking 25-year-old Pilot Officer Fred Roach and two of his comrades with it. Wib Bentz, from Penticton B.C. was the pilot of the craft, while Jack Summerhayes from Brantford was the mid-upper gunner.

The three were lost and listed as missing in action until 1997, when the plane was recovered 20 feet down below the marshy bog where it had crashed that fateful night.

Leamington-born tail-gunner Fred Roach in a photo published by the RCAF.

Fred Roach had been a Leamington farm boy, who could have easily qualified for a farm-worker exemption from military service, but chose to join the air force like his buddies.

His half sister, Marjorie Wyse, was 14 years younger than Fred and remembered the day he left for overseas.

“I remember being excited that I got his bedroom,” she said in an interview in 2012.

She remembered Fred as an exceptional big brother and a standout baseball player in the Leamington sports community.

“I rode my bike to school one day and for some reason, I rode it home at lunch time,” she said. “The family was all sitting around crying and they showed me the telegraph.”

The telegraph had informed the family that Fred’s bomber had been shot down and he was ‘missing in action.’

Fast forward to 1984, when Pilot Bentz’ nephew decided he’d look into the mystery surrounding his uncle’s death. He was eventually put in touch with the Vice President of the Halifax Aircraft Association, Karl Kjarsgaard, who joined the search for the bomber.

Finally in September of 1997, with cooperation from many agencies — including the Department of Canadian Heritage — the crash site was excavated and the aircraft recovered, along with the remains of the three airmen, all still sitting at their stations.

Karl Kjarsgaard loads aluminum ingots from the LW682 bomber for transport to England, where they were used in the construction of the RAF bomber Command Memorial, which opened in 2012.

Some 25 descendants of the bomber crew were invited that November to a joint funeral for the three airmen with full military honours. Marjorie Wyse was able to touch her brother’s casket and say goodbye. She was given his watch and cigarette lighter, which were recovered with his body. She also got to meet Martin Drewes, the man responsible for shooting down the bomber.

“He hugged me but I didn’t hug him back,” she said in 2012.

Meanwhile, the aluminium from the Halifax LW682 was extracted and melted down into ingots for future use. One of those uses was to contribute to the material for the RAF Bomber Command in London, England. The roof of the memorial was constructed using aluminium from those ingots.

In 2017, the RCAF replaced their gold coloured ‘wings’ worn on their uniforms, with silver ones. Each badge has a portion of aluminium alloy in it from LW682, preserving the memory of Fred Roach and his seven comrades forever.