The Crew

Gordon Biddle, Captain; George Death, co-pilot; Maurice Neil, navigator; and three wireless air gunners, Harvey Firestone, Kenneth Graham and George Grandy, were the six-man crew of an anti-submarine Wellington bomber in the Royal Canadian Air Force 407 “Demon” squadron in 1944. Although a Canadian squadron, Demon Squadron was attached to the Royal Air Force Coastal Command. The wireless air-gunners had three roles: radar-operator, radio-operator [8] and gunner. They rotated positions during each flight.

Firestone was from Quebec, the others from Ontario. Biddle, Neil and Graham were married, the others were single. They met at an Operational Training Unit (OTU) at Silloth, an RAF base just north of the England-Scotland border, near the east coast. Biddle had been through OTU there before and had flown missions as a co-pilot. He was promoted to captain and got to choose the other five members of the crew. Graham and Firestone also had operational experience; Graham had been on active duty in North-Africa and India and Firestone had been on operations off the east coast of Canada. Neil and Grandy had worked as instructors in Canada before being posted to Great Britain. Death came directly from pilot training in Canada. The only members of the crew who knew each other before becoming a crew at Silloth were Grandy and Firestone, who had gone through radio and radar training together and had roomed together while on leave in London.

At Silloth, the crew was inspired to work hard because they knew that knowledging and conditioning increased their chance of survival. They worked tirelessly and developed a reputation for being one of the best crews on the course, if not the best. They were particularly proud of their speed in the drills to evacuate the airplane in crash and ditching simulations. When the brass came to visit, Biddle's crew was usually the one picked to demonstrate their skills.

The crew's first operational posting as part of 407 Squadron was to a base at Chivenor on the west coast of England. They hunted for submarines, which for years had been a constant menace to Allied supply convoys on the North Atlantic. The u-boats were not easy to locate in the daytime because they stayed submerged, but at night surfaced to recharge their batteries. Anti-submarine operations therefore were conducted mostly at night, when the aircraft crews used the Allies' superior radar to search for their targets.

Some of the Coastal Command Wellingtons were equipped with Leigh-lights in their fuselage. The combination of radar and Leigh-lights gave the aircraft a huge advantage at night. The aircraft could locate the submarines using radar, and then the Leigh-lights would illuminate the targets so that depth-charges could be dropped on the first pass over the sub, before the submarine had a chance to react. Before Leigh-lights, the planes had to drop flares on the first pass so they could see their target on the second run. This gave the submarine time to either dive or deploy deck-mounted anti-aircraft guns.

D-day, the Allied invasion of Normandy, took place on June 6, 1944. In the weeks leading up to D-day, 407 Squadron was engaged in “Operation Cork,” operating in the English Channel and Bay of Biscay to keep the channel clear of u-boats and to keep the submarines away from the invasion fleet crossing from southern England. In the days before D-day, there was little rest for the crews of 407 Squadron. The crews and their planes were in the air day and night. [A]

After the Allies had landed and were making substantial advances in France, the Germans evacuated their submarine bases in France and elsewhere, and moved the bulk of the u-boat fleet north to Norway's west coast. In response, 407 Squadron was re-stationed to an air base at Wick, Scotland, closer to the u-boat bases on the Norwegian coast, in the first week of August, 1944. They had been flying missions out of Wick for over a month before their fateful flight on September 26, 1944.