What motivated you to write this book?
I have been interested in World War II for many years, inspired by stories written by my great-uncle Douglas Hicks. We are fortunate to have one of only two remaining airworthy Lancasters nearby (‘Vera’ from the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum) and she is a frequent sight in the summer in the skies of Toronto.
After making several visits to see ‘Vera’ at the museum and telling stories about some of Doug’s experiences as a Lancaster rear-gunner, my son decided to read Fly Boy by author Eric Walters. In Fly Boy, a 17-year-old Canadian boy goes off to join the RCAF and a Lancaster crew. Knowing Doug also enlisted at 17, my son began flooding me with questions about his great, great-uncle Doug’s experiences in the war. After telling my son “I don’t know” too many times, I set out to find out more.
My initial goal with this project was simply to create a chronological timeline of my great-uncle’s service in World War II just for my immediate family. As my research continued, my ‘project’ morphed into a profile of the entire crew, growing from ten pages to a hundred to many, many more.
The more I delved into the crew, the more I realized how amazing their story really was… Flying famous Lancasters, a connection to Germany’s top night fighter and the possibility that the pilot may have been a victim of a war crime. After spending many hundreds of hours on this project, it became obvious the story of The Harris Crew was a fascinating one which would be enjoyed by a wider audience.
How did you track down the families of the other crew members?
It probably took a year in all to track down families of each of the crew members. Locating the family of the pilot Robert Harris took the longest. After months of scouring the internet, surfing Ancestry and calling Harris listings in the Winnipeg phone directory, I finally located his daughter. It turned out she and I were both members of the same 550 Squadron Association Facebook group, but as I’m not a big Facebook user, I hadn’t seen her there before.
Disappointingly, I was not able to find a direct descendant of the crew’s wireless operator, Gerard Kelleher. Similarly, I was unable to find much information about three RAF crew members who stood in for the crew as mid-upper air gunner.
What was the most difficult part about writing the book?
One of the common threads for the time at the end of the war in Europe, was the lack of documentation. At the beginning of the war, records about air missions were very detailed and it was easy to cross-check Allied losses against records of Luftwaffe successes. Towards the end of the war, records became more sparse. In some cases, there may have been a lack of motivation to document every detail when the war was winding down, bases were being closed and POW records were being seized by liberating US troops. Records which may earlier in the war have been meticulously archived, were either no longer available or never properly recorded.
Another challenge was collecting personal photos, mementos and documents for each of the crew members. For some of the families, these boxes of memories may not have been opened in many years and it was an emotional journey for many of them digging through their fathers’ photos and documents.
What was your most memorable moment when writing this book?
I had a long list of stock footage clips of several Stalag Lufts – the prisoner of war camps for Allied airmen. I planned to go through all eventually, but to be methodical, had not planned to start until I had a better idea of which camps the surviving crew members had ended up in. That way I would at least have some idea who to look for in the footage and what camps to research more thoroughly.
One day while eating my lunch at work, I decided to go through some of it to pass the time. On one of the first clips I clicked on, my heart nearly stopped… there was a clip of my great-uncle, head in bandages, smiling and chatting with his fellow liberated POWs at the Dulag Luft transit camp in Wetzlar. With all the many hours of POW camp footage available, I couldn’t believe my luck at finding the one reel where Doug had made an appearance. I went out and bought a lottery ticket that day. Every time I think back to that moment, I get goosebumps.
How did the families of the crew members feel about the book?
I was honored to be given so much information by the families of the crew members. Robert Harris wrote home to his wife Margaret several times a week while overseas and she kept all of her husband’s letters. Harris’ daughter Betty was so kind to share transcripts of these letters with me. Other families shared their photos, log books, letters and other treasures. I received hundreds of pages of documents my great-uncle Doug Hicks kept from his daughters Kathy and Janet.
I have received many kind notes from family members of the other crew. In many instances, they knew little of their fathers’ experiences, so much of the information they were learning for the first time. Most of the families have already seen an early version of the work. For the book, I’ve updated some details and added some newly acquired material, so I hope they will all love it.
The crew took part in the bombing of Dresden and other controversial raids. Did that present any challenges for you?
Even the seemingly simple task of explaining why Bomber Command chose to target the cities for the operations the crew participated in was fraught with difficulty since there is still so much controversy around the bombing of German cities.
I made the decision early on to set these debates aside for the purpose of this book. I really wanted this book to be a tribute and snapshot of The Harris Crew and felt that inserting the controversies into the narrative of the crew’s stories would be a distraction.
The fact is each member of The Harris Crew volunteered to serve with Bomber Command. Despite the horrendous danger, the crew climbed aboard their Lancaster for each operation and bravely carried out each mission. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for these young men, after months of training, being sent to Dresden for their first operation. It was the epitome of trial by fire.
The Harris Crew 