Two World War Two bomber wrecks in Canada have been commemorated by dive-teams. Both aircraft crashed and sank in 1943, were rediscovered in 2022 – and in each case only one body from their four-man crews has ever been recovered.
On Canada’s west coast, divers from the Underwater Archaeological Society of British Columbia (UASBC) laid a 90kg concrete plaque on 9 November to mark the 26m-deep location of an RAF training aircraft that crashed into the Pacific near Vancouver Island. They also retrieved the navigator’s compass, which had been lying on the seabed, for conservation.
The Handley Page Hampden P5433 medium bomber of RAF Operational Training Unit 32 took off from an RCAF aerodrome at Patricia Bay (which is now Victoria International Airport) in the late afternoon of 14 March, 1943.
The aircrew consisted of two Australians, the pilot P/O Allan Hunt and navigator P/O Reginald Manttan, and Canadian wireless operators / gunners P/O Grant Hall and Sgt Howard Piercy.
Their routine training flight was intended to enable practice in flying low over the Pacific, and later flying by night, but at around 5.30pm the aircraft was seen going into a spin at an altitude of 450m and diving vertically into Saanich Inlet. All four airmen were killed, though only P/O Hunt’s body was ever recovered.
The widely scattered remains were discovered in 2022 by diver Lyle Berzins while he was out filming octopuses. When UASBC divers investigated further they found propellers, an engine, landing-gear, the compass and boot soles.
It took considerable research by the team to narrow down the particular Handley-Page Hampden from the 104 that had been stationed at Patricia Bay during WW2, because no fewer than 26 of them had crashed.
The Hampden twin-engined medium bomber was said to have acquired a reputation for engine failures. It had served in the early stages of the war in Europe, operating mainly by night, but was retired by RAF Bomber Command in late 1942 as four-engined heavy bombers came to be preferred for raids. See a 3D model of part of the wreck-site.
Bombardier’s box
The aircraft wreck on the eastern side of the country, a Royal Canadian Air Force B-24 Liberator, lies 40m deep in 56km-long Gander Lake, in the centre of the island of Newfoundland. A “bombardier’s box” was recently retrieved to be displayed at an aviation museum in the town of Gander.
The bomber, designated 589 D, crashed shortly after take-off on 4 September, 1943, also as a result of engine failure, killing all four crewmen: pilot Wing Commander JM Young, Squadron Leader John Grant MacKenzie, Flying Officer Victor Bill and Leading Aircraftman Gordon Ward. Only MacKenzie’s body could be recovered from the inverted wreck by hardhat divers at the time of the crash.
The aircraft was located through sonar-scanning and ROV in 2022, followed by exploration on scuba by Shipwreck Preservation Society of Newfoundland & Labrador (SPSNL) divers accompanied by a documentary film-crew. Only the wings, forward fuselage and landing gear could be located, and later one propeller.
Neil Burgess, president of the society, took part in both the initial and the recent dives, which he described to CBC as the “spookiest diving I’ve ever done” because of the scale of the plane and the ultra-low visibility.
The bombardier box, otherwise known as the bomb release interval control box, was attached to the plane’s nose only by wires. It fell away when Burgess cut it free, reducing the visibility even further as he was forced to grope in the silt to locate it – which he eventually did.
But he emphasised that the wreck had been treated with “the utmost respect”, with no other attempt made to disturb it.
The Memorial University of Newfoundland’s archaeology department was cleaning and conserving the box for display at Gander’s North Atlantic Aviation Museum.
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