Dr. C.M. Johnston's Project

Albert H. Mildon

In the spring of 1943, in the fourth year of World War II, the War Services Committee of the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec lamented "its inability to get into RCAF camps to conduct religious services". It urged that "something . be done" to rectify the situation, seen as an attempt to "keep all religious influence out except for the local chaplain". However praiseworthy that chaplain might have been in other respects the concern was that he may not have been meeting the needs of Baptist servicemen. One of those servicemen, Albert Harry Mildon, who would be killed in action some months after the committee issued its statement, may have had good reason to share its misgivings. A Baptist pastor in civilian life, he had enlisted out of patriotism and a deep conviction that the war was a "righteous" one - shades of Stanley Gaudin's [HR] experience. He had also hoped to share the travails of other servicemen so that he might be better equipped as a pastor to cope with the special problems of the returning veteran. More often than not, however, he had been "terribly saddened by the moral tone" he found at the RCAF's training stations. All the more reason then to supplement whatever a lone chaplain could provide with the regular church services requested by his co-religionists. But to their great disappointment no such arrangement was ever formally put in place.
Albert (dubbed "Son" by his father) was born in Toronto on 29 July 1912, just two years before the outbreak of the Great War that would help to shape or misshape the remainder of the 20 th century. His parents were English born, his father, Albert George Mildon, was a Londoner, his mother, Mary Ann (Hadfield) Mildon, a native of Leicester. Albert joined an older sister, Nora, and would be followed by three brothers, Denis, John, and Douglas. A foretaste of things to come, the senior Albert served in the maelstrom of the Great War but unlike his son and namesake he survived the conflict that ravaged his generation and set up the agenda for the next. The Mildons were outspokenly devout Baptists and worshipped regularly at the Fairbank Baptist Church in the Town of York, north of Toronto, where they had taken up residence. Both were remembered as being " very British" and consequently convinced that "everything of good repute in the universe came from England", including, it would appear, the English variety of billiards, a game in which the father was highly proficient. Obviously, in his view, billiards - ordinarily conjuring up images of the iniquitous pool hall - did not do violence to Baptist principles.

Employed by an oil company as a bookkeeper, the senior Albert was also a firm believer in the work ethic, and he expected no less of his older sons. Thus Albert and Denis were required to help pay their way in the world and in due course became paperboys, a common school time occupation for the youth of that generation. As teenagers they also sold doughnuts door to door for a local bakery on Saturdays, and together with their paper route earnings this often netted them an impressive $20.00 a week. The long summer school vacations were given over to the same pursuits, which in Albert's case were supplemented by fruit-picking in the Niagara peninsula. As a matter of course both boys were expected to buy their own clothes and schoolbooks out of their earnings.

From all accounts Albert and Denis made good use of the schoolbooks. They both excelled scholastically and easily met the requirements at Fairbank Public School that would usher them into the next phase of their education at North Toronto Collegiate Institute (NTCI). There they did well as debaters, each in turn winning the school's senior debating championship. In 1929, Albert matriculated and, to his parents' great gratification, embarked on a prospective career in the pulpit. The family subscribed to so-called fundamentalist views, best personified in the towering figure of Rev. T.T. Shields who presided over Toronto's prestigious Jarvis Street Baptist Church. A vociferous enemy of the supposedly liberal teachings of McMaster University, Shields and others like him did not stop there, indeed repudiating higher academe in general as a morally corrosive force. This view was fully shared by Rev. John F. Holiday, the principal of the Toronto Baptist Seminary, where Albert Mildon received the first installment of his theological training. After spending two years there - 1929 to 1931 -- he gained further spiritual reinforcement at Toronto Bible College, which fellow McMaster students, Stanley Gaudin [HR] and Albert McCreery [HR] would also attend.

Then in September, 1938, the family's misgivings about higher education presumably allayed, Albert proceeded to the University of Toronto. He predictably did well - a mixture of firsts and seconds -- in the courses he took, at least half of which were theologically oriented. The following year he decided to finish his academic work at the institution vilified by Shields, McMaster University. By this time the Mildons had broken with the extremist Shields, a move that may have made McMaster, which after all was still very much a Baptist facility, more acceptable in their eyes. Albert, now a mature 27, may have been even more convinced than his parents that there was little to fear and much to gain from an education at McMaster. Besides, in 1930 it had uprooted itself from the clamorous religious environment of Toronto and re-located in the more or less placid and certainly more hospitable setting of Hamilton. Not only that, McMaster was an attractively small and cohesive institution with fewer than 700 students. In any case, Albert enrolled there in the fall of 1939 and entered the final year of the General Arts program. His theological credits combined with his first-year studies at Toronto were deemed the equivalent of two years' university work

By this date, much had occurred in Albert's social life as well, which may help to account for these developments. In June, 1936, in the interval between bible schools and university, he had married his fiancee, Ivy Palmer Gonder, and in due course they had three children, David, Marion, and Nancy. Ivy was the daughter of Baptist missionaries in China where she had been born, her father hailing from Canada's Niagara region and her mother a native of Australia. While attending McMaster, Albert devoted his extracurricular attention to the campus' Christian Union and the Philosophy Club as well as to debating, chess, and soccer. As at high school "Al", as he was known at the University, gave a good account of himself as a debater, especially in the Inter-University Debating League (IUDL). In a contest against McGill University in the wartime fall of 1939 he gave, according to the Silhouette , the student weekly, "one of the ablest speeches delivered at McMaster for some time". The topic, "American Neutrality", was a timely one and Albert eloquently dismantled the affirmative side's notion that America's participation in the burgeoning world war would put her democracy at risk. For his debating prowess he was awarded an engraved "M".

On the soccer field he quickly assumed a leadership role, so much so that the Silhouette' s sports editor was "glad to see him out there . "prepp[ing"] up the forwards". He was also an active member of the Chess Club, showing, in the words of the student weekly, "excellent form and [looking] like future intercollegiate material". He obviously put to good extracurricular use his one and only year at McMaster. Indeed his "Obit" in the Marmor yearbook amicably poked fun at him, wondering how in the light of all he undertook outside the lecture hall he still managed to find "time for the study of Arts". But find time he did and graduated with a respectable standing in the spring of 1940.

Albert was still very much set on a career in the pulpit, having already served the Baptist Home Mission Board in a number of student pastorates. The following September the recently minted degree holder was called to Elgin Street Baptist Church in the Ottawa Valley town of Arnprior and formally ordained there on 10 December 1940. The ordination ceremony, deemed a "memorable" one, had followed Albert's "well prepared" and well received statement "as to his Conversion [and] Christian experience .." The church minutes also recorded that it was commended for the "Sincere, Warm devotional spirit and humble attitude" that its author "clearly" expressed. He was obviously considered an excellent choice and was rewarded with at least one salary raise. Among his contributions were the successful vacation Bible schools that he organized, a preview of the popular prayer meetings and Bible groups he convened later while serving in the RCAF.

It was while carrying out his "very fruitful ministry" in Arnprior that Albert made the decision to enlist in the air force, one his church deeply regretted. The decision had certainly not been an easy one for a family man with three young children to raise. He was well aware that his wife, a working nurse, had sacrificed a good deal already by helping to support him at university. Now she would have to make another sacrifice. Yet much like Stanley Gaudin her husband had convinced himself that he had no other course given the threat posed by Nazi Germany and its allies to Christianity, democracy, and civilization itself. He also harboured the notion, as already stated, that the experience would make him a more sensitive and attuned pastor in the peacetime that would ultimately arrive. His war veteran father, who was pleased that Albert was "not a pacifist", had nonetheless expected his son to serve as a chaplain or in the ambulance corps, not as a conventional front-line warrior - or as his mother baldly put it, a "common or ordinary soldier".

After a good deal of soul-searching, Albert had decided otherwise and friends commended him for it. In late March, 1942, he took the short rail journey to Ottawa and enlisted in the air force. A month later he received orders to proceed to the first stage of his training at No. 5 Manning Depot in Lachine, Quebec. If he entertained any glamorous notions about the service he had joined he was in for a rude shock. One sensitive neophyte arriving at Lachine at about the same time was horrified by the presence of a "motley crowd of head-shaved people . engaged in some dirty clean-up chores", so many "drudges who looked [more] like convicts . than airmen". In any case, it may have been at Lachine that Albert, the pastor cum airman, suffered his own rude shock when he first encountered the moral shortcomings that would so "sadden" him.

After the drill and route marching that was the lot of all the newly enlisted at a manning depot, Albert was dispatched in late June to St. Hubert, Quebec, site of No. 13 Service Flying Training School. There presumably he put in the mandatory guard and tarmac duty (that is, manual labour) that routinely befell all recruits as they awaited their turn to go to the next training stage. For Albert that opportunity came on 13 September when he was posted to No. 6 Initial Training School at Toronto where he spent over two months being tested for an appropriate aircrew role. On 22 November, having been selected as a navigator trainee, he found himself at No. 9 Air Observer School (AOS), located at St. Jean, Quebec. There he took an Air Navigators' Course and was instructed on Avro Ansons, the RCAF's principal twin-engined trainers. In early March, 1943 he told his wife that he had "been working out sextant shots every spare minute" and otherwise preparing for the examinations that would be held in the final days of the course.

Albert also alluded to his first calling. Echoing the concerns of the Baptist War Services Committee, he complained about the station chaplain's condescending ways - "loathed by the boys" --and his unimaginative treatment of the Scriptures. "God help me", he concluded, "if I can't do a little better than that, when my chance comes". The comment is revealing. It so happened that Albert had already been urged to apply for a chaplaincy himself, "his proper element", in the words of his father-in-law. In spite of his oft-stated commitment to regular active service, he tested the waters by applying for the position. Before March came to an end, however, he was officially advised that he "should have a tour of operations [overseas] before being re-mustered into the Chaplain Service". So that was that. He appears, however, to have had no trouble accepting the decision. At least he had explored the option.

Meanwhile, as in his civilian schooling Albert, who had lightheartedly assured Ivy that he had been a "meek and mild and good little student", proved it by scoring high grades in the navigators' course. He emerged with close to an 80 percent standing and, as a result, on 19 March 1943 he was awarded his navigator's wing and appointed Pilot Officer. This rite of passage clearly signified that his time in Canada was drawing to a close. Indeed, just two days after he received his wing and commission he started an embarkation leave, enabling him to pay a last visit to his Arnprior family and his parents in Toronto. On 4 April, after saying his poignant farewells, he took the train to Halifax and the RCAF's Y Depot and awaited his departure for the United Kingdom, scheduled for the 7 th . After a swift Atlantic crossing, possibly on the erstwhile luxury liner, Queen Elizabeth , now a speedy U-boat proof troopship, he arrived at his destination on 12 April 1943. A new stage in his service and training was about to unfold.

Albert spent the better part of two months at the Personnel Reception Centre in Bournemouth, the first stop for every newly arrived airman from overseas. There they were given medical checks, inoculations, physical examinations, talks by veteran RAF personnel, and finally flying kit and battle dress. Until they were posted to a station they were often required to do various jobs about the place. In Albert's case he was assigned to what he called "fire-watch" at an adjacent hotel, that is, he was required to report any fires or other damage caused by enemy air action. As it turned out, the Luftwaffe proved far less troublesome than the "bellowing and obnoxious" RAF officer who peremptorily ordered him about.

Albert's fire-watching duties and sojourn in Bournemouth finally came to an end in mid-June 1943 when he was re-assigned to the Air Observer School at Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire. There he undertook more intensive navigational training before moving on in early September to No. 22 Operational Training Unit (O T U), then based at Gaydon, Warwickshire. In a letter to Ivy dated 30 October he said nothing about his duties on the station. Normally they could have involved simulated bombing raids or actual operational flights, a means of acquainting untried crews with the facts of battle life, but that did not appear to happen in Albert's case. Whatever he did at Gaydon he had time left over to reflect on family matters and the varied sacrifices his wife had made on his behalf and the burdens she had to bear, a recurring theme in all his wartime correspondence.

Albert was bemused, however, to learn that his parents appeared very reserved, almost disapproving, in her presence. He had to admit that he had experienced much the same while growing up and had never known any real affection, feeling sometimes that he was not really part of his parents' life at all. Still, he was convinced, on the basis of what they had recently written, that they were pleased with the way she managed the household and cared for the children, especially at a time when no father was on the scene to help out. The bulk of his letters, however was taken up with warm endearments and hearty praise for his wife's virtues. At one point he even attempted to wax philosophical about their relationship but soon gave up, after asking himself, "How can a guy get philosophical about anything so irrational and passionate as Love. Guess I'm nuts". In another letter, only too conscious that their intimate correspondence was officially scrutinized, he wryly asked if Ivy thought that "all Censors [would] go to Hell".

On a less emotional level, he informed her that he was preparing an invited talk for fellow airmen on the prospects of a "Post-War League of Nations", a "Federal Union". A good many such lecturing opportunities came his way. They could well have taken him back to those McMaster times when he had enthusiastically debated international issues in the IUDL. Older and more mature than the average serviceman and equipped with substantial academic and pastoral credentials, he was also frequently sought out by those who needed counsel and advice. Ironically, even if he had been denied the chance of the real thing, he was invariably called upon to act as an unofficial chaplain, much like Albert McCreery. To this end, in his off-duty time he organized and led prayer groups and gave guest sermons at English churches, including eventually the West Ham Mission, the British Baptists' flagship institution in the metropolis. He would also discover that for all the moral shortcomings he had noted at some of the training stations there was still a gratifying number of the "spiritually" motivated whom he could reach in his prayer meetings.

By the end of 1943 Albert had departed Warwickshire and No. 22 O T U for a posting at what he called a "Battle School", located at Dalton Thirsk in Yorkshire (in the heart of what would later become the television country of "All Creatures Great and Small"). With tongue partly in cheek, he told an English cousin, a fellow serviceman, that the "school" was "chiefly designed to toughen us physically, so we play tag all day and night on the Moors". He added much less jokingly that "food, quarters, weather etc are all miserable". Not only that, in spite of the fact that he had been promoted Flying Officer while at No. 22 O T U, he was still being treated "as if [he] were A[ir]C[raftsman] 2 (a rookie in fact)". He then put tongue back in cheek and promised that "one of these days I'm going to get to not liking [the] Air Force and quit on them". Albert's sagging morale was given a much needed lift when he was treated to a Leicester Christmas - albeit a "quiet one" -- and the warm hospitality of his English relatives. Even so, he told Ivy that he could hardly wait to attend the next Christmas at home, when he would be "so keyed up folks will think I'm off my head". If that ever happened he would not be seeing his father. The senior Albert died in the fall of 1943, an otherwise unhappy event that appeared to have little impact on "Son"..

Early in January, 1944, with his Christmas leave behind him, Albert reported to Ivy that he would soon be leaving for what he called a Conversion Unit (actually the Heavy Conversion Unit based at Topcliffe, Yorkshire). There on a pre-operational course he would be instructed in the workings of the four-engined Handley Page Halifax, a heavy bomber. He was obviously coming closer to the front line and reckoned that within a month or so he could "start checking off the Op[eration]s trips, one after the other - each one", he wistfully added, "a step toward Ivy and Home" . His timetable proved reasonably correct. On 21 February 1944, after his introduction to the multi-engined bomber at the Conversion Unit, he was assigned to the Halifax-equipped 427 ("Lion") Squadron, RCAF, based at Leeming in North Yorkshire. Formed in 1942, it now constituted part of 6 Group, Bomber Command, the first all-Canadian group, organized in early 1943.

In the beginning this "unique formation" had some teething problems as it sought to bring together and co-ordinate the hitherto scattered units manned by Canadians. For a while it also suffered from inadequate leadership, supposed disciplinary problems, and recurring maintenance deficiencies. From time to time it had to contend as well with the condescending and arrogant attitude of some RAF personnel and a certain type of English civilian who seldom hesitated to remind the Canadian "colonials" that they were now in a "civilized country". If Albert encountered any of these difficulties he made no mention of them in his letters home. Eventually the varied problems, with the possible exception of the "colonial" slur, were sorted out and the group ended up making a signal contribution to Bomber Command's mounting offensive against Germany.

In the spring of 1943, 427 Squadron was the focus of much publicity when it was adopted by the Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) film studios and permitted to display the likenesses of Hollywood stars on its Halifaxes. The company also presented the squadron with an impressive bronze lion, hence the name by which it was subsequently known. The versatile Halifax Mark III that the 427 flew was used in a multitude of roles, mine-laying, glider-towing, dropping supplies and agents on the Continent, and not least, bombing ground and sea targets. Yet in spite of MGM's best efforts, it was less well known than its larger cousin, the Avro Lancaster, which became a kind of "poster aircraft". Nevertheless the Halifax's Canadian crews, including Albert's, invariably swore by it, lauding its durability and capacity to take heavy punishment. Indeed in a letter home Albert reported that he and a friend who flew in Lancasters had a good-natured debate about the respective merits of their favourite aircraft. (All the same, toward the end of the war the Halifax was replaced in 6 group by the iconic Lancaster.)

Within days of his arrival in Leeming Albert and the crew he joined were put on an intensive training course that "makes us", he proudly told a Canadian friend, "among the best trained and best equipped crews in Bomber Command". It was doubtless much the same regimen that former McMaster undergraduate Hank Novak [HR] underwent later with the RCAF's 405 Squadron. In all likelihood it involved, among other things, instruction in the use of the "blind bombing aids" recently perfected for the air force. But in spite of all this training in high technology, Albert reported on 4 th March that he had yet to go on "ops" though he did anticipate action shortly. He said much the same to Ivy a few days later, adding the sombre message that "lots of fellows write a letter to be sent by the padre if they don't come back. Some day I might write such a letter, though I doubt it .." "I have a firm confidence", he concluded, "that the Lord has yet much for me to do". His faith never seemed to waver nor his belief that the war was a "righteous" one.

Then on 14 March 1944, after spending several days wondering when he and his crew would see action, Albert excitedly reported:

. at long last we are truly operational - last night [13 th , after so many practice missions] we bombed a real target -- a great railway centre of western France. That is our first as a crew .. Of course [it] . was an easy target in the sense that there was little flak and almost no fighters -- so there was little to be afraid of .. Just to give you an idea of how precise navigators have to be we got there 20 seconds too early and so were not allowed to bomb until we had circled round and come in again. That's all right on an easy place but mustn't happen on any thing tough.
The "easy target" was Le Mans, a major rail centre, and it was attacked by over 200 Halifaxes, only one of which was lost, thus bearing out Albert's perception of the raid. He had no way of knowing this at the time but according to The Bomber Command War Diaries the main railway station and two nearby factories were badly damaged, many rail lines cut, and a considerable number of Germans killed along with some French civilians.

Characteristically, in the midst of his account of the raid, Albert also dwelt on his pre-war avocation, informing Ivy that he had been invited to preach at a Methodist Church in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Clearly he intended to do better than the local pastors who supposedly put too little "Blood" into their sermons. Then trying to strike a lighter note, he added that people from the adoptive MGM, "were here to take pictures for publicity, as this was our squadron's 1000 th raid - i.e. one thousand planes have bombed their targets". He told her to look for him in the newspapers.

Albert wrote again two days later, announcing matter-of-factly that on the previous night --15 th March -- he and his crew had flown their second mission, the target Stuttgart in southwestern Germany. Unlike Le Mans this was a "tough" one. Albert chillingly reported that a fellow navigator saw "12 of our planes go down" and that one of the crews he had trained with failed to make it back. In his own case, Albert "got off track a little . so we were late going in to bomb but fellows who were there exactly on time had to make a circle because the target-markers (laid by Pathfinders) were not there". Apparently high winds may have been responsible, causing the Pathfinders to mark "well short of the target".

Meanwhile, after his Halifax made its own harrowing bomb run unscathed it headed for home. As it left enemy air space, Albert, to use the parlance of 2003, suffered the predictable let down after the adrenalin rush that had accompanied the attack:

[With] all the excitement gone - one is dreadfully weary. We were airborne eight hours and forty minutes working under an awful tension. When I got out of the kite I could scarcely stand.. I find it impossible to sleep after a trip like that.
It was later learned that the raid had fallen well short of expectations. Though the centre of Stuttgart and some suburbs were struck many of the bombs fell in open country. And of the armada of 863 aircraft that took part, a total of 27 Lancasters and 10 Halifaxes were lost, mostly to German night fighters eager for "fierce combat". The loss was over 4 per cent of the raiding force - a barely acceptable one and disproportionate to the thin damage inflicted on the enemy. Again Albert had no way of knowing these results before he undertook his next mission. (Over the next several months Stuttgart's defenses continued to take a heavy toll of RAF bombers.)

The strain of recent days clearly stalked the last letters Albert and Ivy exchanged. He thought he detected a "tiredness" in her and a concern that they might be drawing apart. He had the wisdom to concede that the war was bound to have an enervating impact on the home front as well as on the battle line but he trusted that they could both overcome the problem once he returned. In his last known letter to his wife, dated 17 March 1944, he wrote that he was not flying that day and therefore would spend the time doing what he liked best, visiting fellow crewmen anxious to get his advice on personal or spiritual matters. In effect, he was still serving as an unofficial chaplain. He was also looking forward to a station prayer meeting and Bible study and, as well, busily preparing the sermon he planned to give in Harrogate.

The following night - 18 March -- would be violently different. Once again Albert had to wrench himself away from the spiritual realm (and the comforts of the station) to the harsh reality of aerial combat. This time the raiding force was made up of 846 aircraft, mainly Lancasters and Halifaxes, the latter including elements of Albert's Lion Squadron. He and his crew took off in Halifax HX 279 and with the others headed off for Frankfurt, that night's target. The raid was more devastating than the Stuttgart one, causing extensive destruction to industrial plant, residential housing, and public buildings, both military and civic. As well, the attacking force on this occasion suffered fewer losses, a total of 12 Halifaxes and 10 Lancasters.

Unfortunately one of the Halifaxes was HX 279, navigated by Flying Officer Albert Mildon. It appears to have been attacked by enemy fighters and shot down near Trier, Germany. Two of the crew managed to escape the disaster and were taken prisoner, Flight Sergeant W. C. Miller, the pilot (RCAF), and Sergeant E. Sawyer (RAF), the mid upper gunner. Initially reported missing, the five remaining crew members, Albert included, were later declared killed in action. Like him, three were Canadians: Pilot Officer R.A. Dumas, the co-pilot, Flying Officer R.E. O'Hearne, the wireless operator, and Sergeant R.C. Gallaugher, the rear gunner. The fifth casualty was a Scot serving in the RAF, Sergeant G.A. Ritchie, the flight engineer.

The Frankfurt raid had been Albert's third mission, a daunting 25 short of the complete tour that would have enabled him, had he so wished, to apply for a chaplaincy. Late in 1944 his death was appropriately noted in the report of the Baptist Chaplaincy Committee, the body that would have authorized such an appointment. Ironically, Albert in an unofficial way and on a part-time basis had in fact been conducting the very "religious services" that a concerned Baptist War Services Committee had long been seeking at air force training stations and overseas bases. To all this there was a poignant epilogue. The sermon that Albert had been painstakingly preparing for the church in Harrogate did not languish on the shelf. It was delivered instead by the grieving station chaplain, and to a packed house made up in part of the crews of 427 Squadron.

Initially buried in Germany, the remains of Albert Harry Mildon and his fellow crew members were disinterred and re-buried with full military honours in a collective grave in the British Commonwealth Section of the Choloy War Cemetery, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France.

C.M. Johnston

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: By rights the name of David Mildon should appear as the co-author of this biography. Not only did he readily supply much of the documentation on which it was based but as well his own helpful biographical account of his father, Albert Harry Mildon, along with information on the entire Mildon family. His diligently researched documentary collection contains his father's service record and related documents (pilot's flying log, air force training course results, and casualty investigation reports, for example) together with assorted college curricula vitae and an indispensable cache of prewar and wartime correspondence, notably that carried on between Albert and his wife, Ivy Palmer Mildon.

James Walker kindly provided the vital lead to David Mildon.

SOURCES: In addition to the Mildon family collection, the following sources were consulted: Canadian Baptist Archives / McMaster Divinity College: Elgin Street Baptist Church Records: Ordination Council, Mr. Albert H. Mildon, 10 Dec. [1940], 2 pp., Correspondence, letters of transfer etc. [from] Minute Book, Historical File: Notes recorded from . minute books, (28) (29) (30), "Historical Sketch of Elgin Street Baptist Church, 1874-1964", 3-4; War Services Committee, Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec: meeting, 9 Apr. 1943, Baptist Chaplaincy Committee: Correspondence, Section B: Report of Chaplains Service Committee (1944), 2, McMaster University Student Biographical File, Albert H. Mildon; McMaster University Library / W. Ready Archives: Marmor, 1939, 67, 72, 79, 103, 1940 , 29, 69, 71, 74, 99, 110, Silhouette , 27 Oct. 1939, 3, 17 Nov. 1939, 2, 24 Nov. 1939, 1, 1 Dec. 1939, 1, 4, McMaster Alumni News, 18 Oct. 1945, 1, 15 Dec. 1945, 1.

National Archives of Canada / Wartime Personnel Records: Service Record of Flying Officer Albert H. Mildon; Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Commemorative Information, F/O Albert H. Mildon; Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book, 1939-1945 (London: Penguin ed., 1990), 447, 480, 481, 482, 767; Bill Hockney and Moe Gates, eds., Nadir to Zenith: An Almanac of Stories by Canadian Military Navigators (Trenton ON: the editors, 2002), 193, 212, 215 [R. J. Thompson, "Sea Level for a Whole Flying Career", Thomas Ritchie, "Navigator Training and Bomber Ops"]; Spencer Dunmore and William Carter, Reap the Whirlwind: The Untold Story of 6 Group, Canada's Bomber Force of World War II (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), 194-98, 364; William Carter, "Comrades in Arms or Bloody Colonials?: RAF Bomber Command and the No. 6 RCAF Group", Part Two, Flightlines (fall 1992) [a publication of the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum], 26-30; Spencer Dunmore, Wings for Victory: The Remarkable Story of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994), 73, 352, 354, 360; Les Allison and Harry Hayward, They Shall Grow Not Old: A Book of Remembrance (Brandon MA: Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum Inc., 1996, 2 nd printing), 520.

Internet:
www.rcaf.com/database/ai r craft/halifax.htm: "The Handley Page Halifax";
www.rafcommands.com / Bomber/22otuB.html: "No. 22 Operational Training Unit",
www.raf.mod.uk/bombercommand/stations/

Html: "Topcliffe".

[ For related biographies, see Stanley David Gaudin , Albert Edmund McCreery , Henry Eugene Novak ]