Jack Widdicombe: From combine to Lancaster and back

Lancaster pilot Jack Widdicombe was a wide-eyed Prairie farm boy about to be thrust into the inferno of Second World War Europe when he boarded a double-decker bus and toured London. The 21-year-old Manitoba native and a pal set out to see the sights and instead encountered block after block of rubble. Twenty-three bombing missions over Nazi territory and 1,200 hours of combat  and other wartime flying lay ahead of him. “It was total destruction,” Widdicombe recalled. “I said ‘how in the world can people do that to one another? Then a year later, I was doing it.

Here is the article at Legion Magazine.

The bombing of East Grinstead

On July 9, 1943, a Dornier Do 217E became separated from the rest of its 10-plane Luftwaffe flight as it entered a cloudbank on its way to bomb London. The market town of East Grinstead in West Sussex lay below. Situated about 15 kilometres as the Spitfire flies from my father’s base at RAF Redhill, it had always been a potential target for Germans passing overhead. Until this day, however, it had never been touched.

Here is the article at Legion Magazine.

Winston wets his whistle: Churchill's indulgences

In December 1941, just days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed wife Eleanor company was coming to stay at the White House. “He told me I could not know who was coming, nor how many, but I must be prepared to have them stay over Christmas,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote later. “He added as an afterthought that I must see to it that we had good champagne and brandy in the house and plenty of whiskey.” Make that Pol Roger champagne, vintage Hine brandy and Johnny Walker Red—for the guest, of course, was Winston Churchill, the British bulldog prime minister whose eccentricities and fondness for libation are the stuff of legend.

Here is the article at Legion Magazine.