Andrew Carswell

by Whiskey Thu 29 Jul 2021, 12:06 pm

Dead at 98: The decorated rescue pilot and Bomber Command veteran who brought safety to Canadian air travel

Carswell’s death not only marks the passing of one of Canada’s last WWII bomber pilots, but caps off a life that would feature many more daring feats of aviation

Tristin Hopper
Publishing date: Jul 29, 2021

On January 17, 1943, the 19-year-old Carswell was piloting a four-engine Lancaster bomber on a raid to Berlin when it was crippled by anti-aircraft fire roughly 150 km west of Berlin. Carswell not only managed to bail out of the burning, spinning aircraft, but survived POW camps, death marches and even friendly fire from British fighters.

When his column of starving prisoners was liberated by advancing British troops, Carswell would remember only a sleepless night where he vowed “to enjoy every minute of my new found freedom.” As he would conclude in a biography penned decades later, “and I did.”

Carswell’s death on July 25 at the age of 98 not only marks the passing of one of Canada’s last Second World War bomber pilots, but caps off a life that would feature many more daring feats of Canadian aviation – and would have the retired RCAF officer doing much to shape the current state of Canadian passenger aviation.
“There was no sensation of falling,” Carswell would write later of his escape from the tumbling Lancaster. “I seemed to be floating motionless in space as I heard the high-pitched scream of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines rapidly fading away into the cold blackness of the night.”

Given the season and the altitude, the air around the floating Carswell was roughly -30 degree Celsius. “Here I was, a nineteen-year-old boy, not long out of high school, thousands of feet up in the air, swinging from a parachute not far from Berlin, floating down into the middle of enemy territory,” he said.

Carswell had enlisted in the RCAF on his 18th birthday, and at the time of his final bomber mission he was one of the few people in an Allied uniform able to strike directly at the heart of Nazi Germany. But it also meant he was one of the least likely to return home.

An incredible 44 per cent of Bomber Command crew members would not survive the war – the highest fatality rate of any other Commonwealth service.

Carswell would have known the sight of bunks left empty from fellow aviators who never returned from missions, but it wouldn’t be until after the war that he would fully appreciate the dangers he had been expected to assume as a Lancaster pilot. “I suppose I might have joined the Navy had I known,” he told the Toronto Star in a 2011 interview.

Carswell’s autobiography Over the Wire would detail his war as a POW in the Stalag VIII-B camp in what is now Poland. The Canadian was involved in two daring escape attempts, both of which had Carswell absconding from work details outside the camp. Equipped with forged papers and civilian dress, both attempts got miles into Nazi Germany before being foiled – one by a railway worker and the other by a Stettin police officer.

But Carswell’s most noted feats as an airman would come after his 1945 liberation. Re-enlisting in the RCAF as a pilot in 1949, he was soon posted to the Vancouver area where he would fly PBY Canso flying boats in search and rescue operations on the West Coast.

It was one such mission in 1956 that would have Queen Elizabeth pinning him with the Air Force Cross. Carswell had been responding to a report of a fishing boat foundering near B.C.’s Galiano Island.

He arrived on the scene just in time to see the boat sink beneath the waves, tossing its two crew members into the frigid waters. While prior patrol aircraft had refused to land due to the rough conditions, Carswell was able to pull off a landing, allowing the two men to be pulled to safety.

“Another 10 minutes or so and the end of the story might have been much different,” one of the survivors would later tell reporters. The PBY Canso had a leak that was filling the fuselage with seawater throughout the rescue, and amid the sounds of warning sirens Carswell was only narrowly able to take off again due to the added weight.

The same year as the Galiano rescue, Carswell’s Canso would also rescue five crew members of a government survey vessel who had become marooned on a remote Sunshine Coast island in the middle of a blizzard. “Thank God for the RCAF,” was the crew’s summation of their rescue to the Vancouver Sun.

For someone whose aviation career had been defined by close calls, it’s notable that one of Carswell’s most lasting contributions was in the realm of air safety. In 1977, as a federal transport ministry investigator, Carswell went incognito on an 1,800 mile tour of Northern Ontario by air charter, revealing commercial aviation practices that were negligent to the point of recklessness.

“The timid approach to enforcement which Transport Canada is perceived to have adopted is an ineffectual deterrent that has nurtured unsatisfactory aviation safety standards,” was the understated conclusion of Carswell and fellow investigator William Slaughter following a journey that had included inexperienced pilots flying without proper instruments in planes with dubious maintenance records and falsified log books.

Leaked to the press, the report would inspire the Royal Commission on Air Safety, eventually leading to the inauguration of the Transportation Safety Board.

Carswell is survived by his wife of 74 years, Dot, 100. The couple met at a dance in Toronto after the war, married in 1947 and had five children.

NATIONAL POST