Following the Echoes: Into the Abyss

See also:

• Following the Echoes
• Following the Echoes: The Others

In the latest installment of Following the Echoes, it’s been quite a week of developments related to some of the individuals featured in my earlier post “The Others.” There will be more to follow, but this post is dedicated to the crew members of Wellington HX726, of which Wendell “Del” Drew was the sole survivor when their plane crashed at Luqa, Malta, on February 13, 1943.

Recently, my brother and co-author, Lance Fox, and I were able to connect with Cate Wagstaffe. Just like Del Drew, Cate’s British great-uncle, Warrant Officer John Michael Wagstaffe, served with 458 RAAF Squadron on Malta. And, like Del, he was involved in a crash there. Unlike Del, however, Wagstaffe did not survive: he and four of his crewmates were killed on April 19, 1944.

Cate, who is a Canadian flight correspondent for the 458 RAAF Squadron Association, came across our book, Following the Echoes, while researching the HX726 crew for the squadron’s newsletter, including Harold Ernest Stanley (p. 28), Lawrence Harry Gleason and Maurice McAllister Kempton (p. 14), and Peter Edwyn Brown (p. 26). She has been instrumental in helping us research these latest details and photos.

This past October, Cate and her family were able to make a very special trip to Malta (featured here on CBC: Del’s crewmates appear starting at 2:08; at 4:24 their gravesite is shown) to visit her great-uncle’s grave for the first time and, as Canadian flight correspondents for 458 Squadron, to represent all the Canadian members who died in Malta. There they visited the Aviation Museum and were welcomed by its owner, Ray Polidano, who showed them a chapel that houses a book listing all the names of lost 458 Squadron members.

In Following the Echoes, we shared:

Four days after the crash, on February 17, Del’s crewmates were all buried with full military honours at the Malta Capuccini Naval Cemetery just outside the village of Kalkara, an event that we cannot be certain, but expect, he attended (p. 60).

Thanks to Cate’s trip to Malta and this haunting photo we received from Rhys Nye, the nephew of Del’s crewmate Harry Gleason (who perished in the crash), we now have proof that Del indeed attended the funeral:

In a letter sent to Sgt. Harold Stanley’s family (now in the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum in Brandon, Manitoba), it says that the funeral was held on February 17, 1943, at 3:00 pm—three and a half days after the crash—at Bighi Cemetery in Malta, but it appears that those buried there were later relocated to the current Capuccini Cemetery, possibly in the 1960s.

In addition to the above funeral photo, we received this sharper version of a group photo, believed to be taken at No. 7 OTU in Limavady, Northern Ireland, on either July 18 or 23, 1942. We can now confirm the identities of all the men:

• (1) Sgt. Leonard John “Bus” Laforet – 632 Hall Ave., Windsor, Ontario: Died in 1992 (Source: daughter Laura Labute)
• (2) Sgt. “Tommy” Tomlinson (first name unknown) – England
• Not numbered: P/O Lawrence Harry Gleason – Canora, Saskatchewan: Killed in Wellington HX726 crash at Luqa, Malta, February 13, 1943
• (3) P/O Maurice “Kemp” McAllister Kempton – Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan: Killed in Wellington HX726 crash at Luqa, Malta, February 13, 1943
• (4) Sgt. Wendell “Del” Drew – Radisson, Saskatchewan: Lost on Lancaster JB707 over North Sea on July 29, 1944
• (5) Sgt. Donald “Corny” Munroe – 835 Dawson Rd., Windsor, Ontario: Died in 2013 (Source: obituary)

The Wellington plane in the photo of the crew is HX428. An online search seems to indicate that it failed to return from a training exercise on October 28, 1942, with another entire crew being lost.

Thanks to Cate and Leonard Laforet’s daughter, Laura Labute, we also received this photo we had never seen before, of Leonard and Del standing together, probably sometime between June 1942 and February 1943:

We would also like to share this photo that appeared in Following the Echoes, for which we are now able to provide further identifications. It is from No. 7 (Coastal) OTU in Limavady, Northern Ireland, on June 9, 1942, or shortly thereafter:

Wendell Drew is in the back row, sixth from left. Harry Gleason is in the centre row, second from left. Leonard Laforet is in the centre row, first from left. “Tommy” Tomlinson is in the centre row, third from left. Donald Munroe is in the centre row, last on the right.

Other names remain uncertain, but were labelled as follows:

Back row, left to right: McDougall, Yorke, Courahcane [sic?], Lepalme [sic?], McArthur, Wendell Drew, Drew, Belanger, Duffy, Dunbar, Jamisson [sic?], Dallaire, Louden.

Centre row, left to right: [Leonard] Laforet, [Harry] Gleason, Tomilson [Tomlinson], Grenwold, Kirwin, Harris, Britten, Smith, Adamson, Geddes, [Donald] Munroe.

Front row, left to right: Campbell, Abraham, Lyon, Radford, McLeod, Cook, Mahoney, Brown, Bell, Reynolds.

Note: There are two Drews standing next to each other. The man beside Wendell Drew is also named Drew, but we don’t know his first name. A relative of Wendell Drew recalls an airman of the same last name attending the funerals of Mr. and Mrs. Drew, who passed away within months of each other in 1966. This airman was from Edmonton and a friend of Wendell’s from the war. Maybe someone out there can help us with this mystery?