This is a photo of RCAF airman Jack Forrest, taken around 1943-1944. Jack was born in Montreal on April 5, 1921. He would have been 99 years old in a week if World War 2 hadn't intervened. Jack joined up when he was 18, joining the RCAF in Toronto for "general duties." For the next few years he served in various places in Canada and learned to love the skies. He was shipped over to Northern Ireland, to an RAF Base, RAF Archdale, near the border with the Republic of Ireland. He and his fellow crewmen flew Sunderland seaplanes and Catalinas up what was known as "The Donegal Corridor" into the Atlantic, hunting for German submarines that would surface overnight to charge their batteries. They carried depth charges.
(photo courtesy of Chuck Singer, by email)
The Donegal Corridor was named such because, during World War 2, the Republic of Ireland was neutral while Northern Ireland, as a part of the UK, was at war. The RAF needed a way to fly west to the Atlantic but all the counties to the west were part of the Republic. For a deeper understanding of why the Corridor was so important, this website, http://www.donegaldiaspora.ie/place/donegal-corridor, is very good.
So Jack was one of the Canadian, British and American flyers who were posted to Northern Ireland. And in August of 1944, while the crew of the 422 Squadron was flying out to the Atlantic, they developed engine trouble. The gunner on the mission, Chuck Singer, recounted what happened to the Belfast Journal in 2011 (http://tihp.torontoisland.org/chuck-singer-back-rcaf-base-lough-erne/) :
"On August 12, 1944, Chuck and 11 other crew mates from the 422 Squadron — two more
than usual — were returning to the Lough Erne base in a Sunderland seaplane when the
engine froze and the aircraft crashed. The plane had flipped upside-down, but the pilot
managed to right it seconds before it smashed into a peat bog near Belleek. “Everything
explosive on board blew up,” recalled Chuck. “It was just a horrible mess. “I couldn’t see
because there was blood in my eyes, but I knew where the opening was. When I got out of
the portion of the plane I heard a guy screaming and I knew it was my second gunner and
he needed help. “My first instinct was to go and save my life, but I went in anyhow and the
tail section of the plane, the whole end, was laying across his legs. Because it was in peat moss
the ground was soft, and instead of breaking his legs off, it just broke his legs. “I managed
to get him out and safe before we both passed out.” Most of the crew had also managed to
get out safely but, for three, the crash had proved fatal. The others spent months recovering
in hospital."
One of those three was Jack. He lived for a very short time after being pulled out of the plane but died and, after a funeral that was attended by most of the folk in the small town of Irvinestown, was buried in Irvinestown's Roman Catholic Cemetery, Sacred Heart. He was 23 years old. His parents were dead but he left his three siblings and a grandmother with a broken heart. A few weeks after she received the telegram notifying her of his death, she received his last letter, telling her that he had met an Irish girl and was hoping to marry her when the war was over.
A week ago, I didn't know anything about Jack. The circumstances of how I came to know of him, and to know so much about his time in Ireland is a testimony to the wonders of modern genealogy. The story goes like this:
Two days ago my sister's sister-in-law texted me. We were chitchatting as so many of us are during this time of self-isolation and she mentioned that she had heard from a cousin about her cousin Jack's death and that he was buried in a town in Fermanagh. My ears immediately pricked up because, as some of you reading this know, (1) I do a lot of cemetery research in Ireland and (2) County Fermanagh is my great grandmother's county and I have traveled it quite a bit. I also belong to a Facebook genealogy group for Fermanagh. So I immediately set about looking to see if there was a photograph of the headstone. And, yes, not only was there a photograph of the headstone but there was also a photo of Jack, his fellow crew members and a summary of how the crash occurred. This is the link: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/145439661/john-reginald-forrest?fbclid=IwAR1FkoaQJ8CZLtUFzNwqowRX1Es5j5r2FU-sQeOP3i9uygpI85oJJfurbVg
Next I put a query on my Facebook Fermanagh group page and, within an hour, I got a reply from a historian in Fermanagh who pointed me to another Fermanagh historian, an octogenarian named Joe O'Loughlin. He had actually written about the crash on his own blog page: http://www.joeoloughlin.co.uk/sunderland-nj175/
I wrote Joe but by then it was afternoon, close to midnight Irish time. Still, by the time I woke up the next morning Joe had email'd a reply that, yes, indeed he remembered the crash and the crew members and by all means ask any question I'd like and, oh by the way, please ask Anne to send him an email and her snail mail and he would send her the book he's written on the RAF bases in Fermanagh. Not only that but there was still one living crew member, Chuck Singer, who at the age of 98 is still answering email. (I am amazed that he even DOES email at 98!) I email'd Chuck and, the following morning I had received replies plus he had appended the above photo of the seaplane and the crew members.
The story is still unfolding but in two short days we have learned so much about Jack. His siblings are dead and Anne was just a small girl when he died so all she remembered was the letter Jack's grandmother received. Now, though, she knows where he lived and died in his last year, she has photos of him and his buddies, she even has seen a photo of the mascot dog for the squadron! Even more happily, she/we have acquired a friend in Joe O'Loughlin in Fermanagh. My trip to Ireland was postponed but in the interim I have found a new reason to go there and a place to visit--Jack's grave and the old RAF base as well as having a pint with Joe.
This couldn't have been done, or at least certainly not as easily, in pre-Facebook, pre Internet days. In my first genealogy visit to Ireland, in 2007, I knew so little about my Irish family except that they came from Cavan and Fermanagh. I had snail mail'd a letter to the Irish priest who was over the parish where my great aunt was born--had her birth certificate thanks to a cousin but not my grandma's birth certificate--and he had told me the siblings' names. But when I actually got to Ireland and went to the town and the library, resources for information were scarce and I learned almost nothing about them except I saw the house they had lived in. Now, 13 years later, so much more is available and it's online! I love physically going to Ireland but it's amazing that I spent two and a half days tracking a long-dead airman and ended up knowing more about his life and death in Ireland than I had learned about my own family's whilst physically being there in 2007.
I feel as if Jack is my own relative now. And I am looking forward to this current horrible episode being over so I can go over and lay some flowers on his grave and see the museum. I guess in a way I feel toward this current "virus war" a little like Jack did about the war he was in. Except his was far more lethal and for far longer.
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