Dr. C.M. Johnston's Project

Franklin C. Zurbrigg

In the early years of the 20th century the small town of Lucan in southwestern Ontario was the home of the Zurbrigg family, Charles and Selma (Luebke) and their three children, Franklin Charles (Frank), Bert, and Laurene. Charles Zurbrigg, who came from Swiss stock, was an optometrist by profession, conducting his business in Lucan until he moved it to nearby Exeter in the late 1930s. Frank, born on 1 June 1917 - the Great War was still raging overseas -- attended Lucan's public and high schools and early on marked himself out as a conscientious student and resourceful athlete. He particularly fancied track and hockey, ending up as the senior track champion at Lucan High School in 1936, with his name and achievement suitably inscribed on a small cup. It is still in the possession of his sister, Laurene, who was clearly proud of the accomplishments of her supportive older brother. Besides playing high school hockey, the popular Frank was the vital part of a town team - colourfully dubbed the Lucan Irish Six after that strong ethnic component of the community - and helped it win the league championship in the 1935-36 season.

Presumably impressed by his teachers' commitment, he went off to London Normal School after completing his high school requirements. Successful in the course, he then took a teaching position at the public school in Denfield, south of his hometown. As required by the Department of Education, which was keen to enhance teaching credentials, he enrolled in extension courses at both the University of Western Ontario and McMaster University in Hamilton. He attended the 1939 and 1940 summer schools at McMaster and passed his courses, giving him four majors toward a degree.

While a resident of Hamilton Frank also made a point of joining a young men's organization, the Fiat Club at the imposing First United Church. Like many of his generation he had always been active in the church, in his case the United Church in Lucan, his family's place of worship. Almost predictably he had joined the Boy Scout movement - indeed enthusiastically introducing it to Lucan - and eventually achieved the rank of King's Scout and became a scoutmaster. In Hamilton, he was equally active in the Fiat Club and may well have known a fellow member, Murray Bennetto, also a McMaster student whose name, like Frank's, would ultimately be entered on both the club's and the university's honour rolls. Meanwhile, in early July 1941, after finishing his second year of teaching in Denfield, Frank worked briefly as a manual training instructor and director of recreational activities at a vacation school operated by the United Church. It was to be his last peacetime employment.

On 17 July 1941, fully expecting to receive an army call-up at any moment, Frank made the decision to enlist, though not in the army, as it turned out, but in the RCAF instead. As the would-be recruit must have soberly realized, from reading the newspapers and listening to the radio, it was hardly an auspicious time for the Allied cause. For one thing, Britain, though she had survived uninvaded, was dangerously isolated after the speedy German conquest of Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France, and much of the Balkans. The Americans were still officially neutral, though sometimes uneasily so, and the Soviet Union, Britain's reluctant ally on the other side of Europe, was reeling under the blows of German ground and air forces. In the strategic Western Desert, Britain's 8th Army was barely holding its own against General Erwin Rommel's inspired Afrika Korps and its Italian allies. To add to the foreboding, Japan, the Axis partner of Germany and Italy, was making threatening moves in southeast Asia.

In this gloomy setting of July 1941, Frank presented himself at the RCAF's recruiting station in London, Ontario. He was soon dispatched to No. 1 Manning Depot in Toronto where like so many other blue-clad recruits he was indoctrinated in the ways of "airmanship". Actually he was treated to marching and musketry drills, among other land-based exercises that appeared to have little to do with flight. Indeed, at one point he seemed destined for a ground crew role, possibly as a mechanic, for on 21 August his superiors sent him to the Technical Training School at St. Thomas. But his obvious desire to qualify for aircrew apparently prevailed. After spending less than two months at St. Thomas, he was posted to No. 5 Initial Training School (ITS) at Belleville.

The aptitudes and skills he displayed there earmarked him for the navigational and bomb-aimer training program. On 21 December 1941, he began his instruction at No. 9 Air Observer School located near St. Jean, Quebec, one of several facilities operated by private firms for the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP). The requirements he had to satisfy were spelled out in the instructional notebooks that he carefully kept on map and chart reading, one of the basic preoccupations of the budding navigator/observer. He was also expected to master the art of so-called dead reckoning and to cope as well with factors such as wind velocity and other esoteric meteorological phenomena. Much of the instruction was carried out on the twin-engined Avro Anson trainer.

After completing the program at St. Jean, Frank was posted in late March 1942 to No. 4 Bombing and Gunnery School at Fingal, Ontario. This would round out the varied requirements he would have to meet before achieving the ultimate in "airmanship". Again he successfully met the challenge and on 10 May 1942 was promoted sergeant and awarded his observer wing at a ceremony on the station. Though now qualified as aircrew, he was obliged, before being posted overseas, to return to the West and take the demanding and newly instituted Astro Navigation Course at the Central Navigation School in Rivers, Manitoba. In late July 1942, after completing the course -- and recovering from a tonsillectomy in the Rivers hospital - Frank began a long train trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia. It would be the last stop before he embarked for the air war overseas.

From that point on, his movements can be tracked in the diary that he regularly kept until the very end. It resembles nothing so much as a long, detailed, continuous letter clearly intended for his family's ultimate consumption. The diary's first entry on 9 August 1942 records that after briefly visiting family and friends along the way he arrived on schedule in Montreal. He was not there long, soon proceeding to New Brunswick and boarding the Princess Helene for a trip across the Bay of Fundy to Digby, N.S. Many of his fellow passengers turned out to be business (or tourist)-as-usual Americans vacationing in the Maritimes even though their holiday spot was also officially at war and the otherwise inoffensive Princess Helene bravely sported a gun on its stern. Not only that, the harbour at St. John, New Brunswick, which they had just left, was home to at least four RCN corvettes, a new type of small escort vessel introduced in 1940 and presumably being readied for convoy duty. Later, on his way to Halifax by train, Frank spotted other signs of how the war was transforming the landscape, including the building of expansive runways for what appeared to be a new military airfield. Coming into Halifax, he also saw what was obviously the formation of Atlantic convoys, carefully counting no fewer than forty merchantmen of varying sizes.

Once arrived at the local RCAF depot Frank was subjected to lectures, fresh medical checks, and a series of unnerving altitude tests in a decompression chamber. After the experience, according to his log, he was recommended for limited flying to 35,000 feet. Following these procedures, plans for his embarkation were soon underway. On 21 August 1942, he and his fellow airmen marched from the RCAF depot to the docks, relieving the monotony of the exercise by singing marching songs and throwing coins to the children who eagerly accompanied them. And then for the thousands of assorted servicemen assembled - soldiers, airmen, and sailors -- it was on board the S.S. Strathmore, the vessel that was to take them to Britain, U-boats and Luftwaffe permitting. Frank noted without comment that when quarters were assigned the soldiers were given hammocks in the hold while the airmen were dispatched to second class accommodations which came complete with spring mattresses, pillows, and blankets (though not sheets).

Savouring the new experience aboard ship, Frank kept his eyes open and soon spotted what he thought was part of their armed escort, a cruiser and possibly a battleship. (He was right about the battleship; one usually shepherded troop convoys.) The cruiser turned out to be the USS Brooklyn, which would accompany them all the way. Before America had entered the war in December 1941, she had already declared a "Security Zone" in the western Atlantic after her own shipping had been attacked by U-boats. On the high seas at least she had become part of the war even before Pearl Harbor.

The day after Frank and his fellow passengers boarded the Strathmore - 22 August - tugs came alongside and pulled her away from the dock, the first step in the long voyage about to unfold. Again, an observant Frank saw that the convoy he was part of consisted of twelve vessels, freighters mixed in with troop ships and included the aforementioned warships "plus" destroyers. Doing instinctively what he must have done as a teacher at the blackboard, he drew a passable sketch of the convoy's configuration -- which a U-boat skipper would have given his eye-teeth to have -- showing his ship more or less in the middle of the pack. Looking skyward, he also sighted Catalinas, the aircraft that Britain had acquired from the United States through the so-called Lend-Lease program legislated by Washington in 1941. The large and distinctive flying boats escorted the convoy until it was well out to sea. Though Frank and his shipmates were unaware of this, the convoy's departure coincided with the start of a new and more deadly phase of the Battle of the Atlantic, which would feature more intensified assaults from a much reinforced U-boat fleet operating in so-called wolf packs. Only a matter of a few score miles from Canada and comparative peace, Frank was thus entering upon a genuine war zone, potentially every bit as dangerous and violent as the land battles in Europe and North Africa.

Little of the urgency of this actually crept into his diary entries but the understated nature of his observations make his account all the more compelling. For instance, he almost casually mentions that he and other servicemen were expected to take their daily part in "submarine watch" on the bridge and to report immediately any untoward events. Once, he remembers, the Strathmore's captain appeared highly agitated, presumably fearing an imminent U-boat attack, and cautioned Frank and his fellow sentries to be extra alert at their posts. If they shared the captain's agitation it was thinned out in the diary. In any event, the feared attack did not materialize though at one point Frank saw a destroyer firing at an unknown object in the water. At about the same time the Brooklyn twice launched its catapult planes, which circled the convoy before returning to land alongside their mother ship to be craned back aboard. He never learned nor was he ever told what all this surface and air activity had been about.

When he was not occupied with submarine watch and with recurring anti-submarine, anti-aircraft, and life boat drills, Frank could momentarily relax and enjoy the voyage, at least when the "pea soup fogs" occasionally rolled away. For one thing, he could indulge his interest in nature study and was rewarded by the sighting of long range sea birds and the sudden appearance one day of his first whale. For others on board there was more decadent entertainment, gambling, with cards and dice, which Frank, the small town boy, could only marvel at. To pass the time less boisterously he sometimes "attempted" poetry. As is the way with poetry perhaps, he came up with lines that more sharply betrayed his preoccupations and anxieties than his diary prose did:

"5000 men steal through the night / Silent and swift / All is ghostlike, howling wind and rain / And who steer? And who watch? / Dozens of eyes / Soldiers, sailors and seamen peer / Is the line straight? Are submarines near? / Alone on a haunted bridge seem I / But other heads are there".

As the convoy neared the Irish coast there was another spasm of concern on the bridge of the Strathmore. Frank overheard the captain urging his gunnery officer to prepare for the arrival of "foche Wolfes [Focke-Wulf 200] and heinkles" [Heinkel 111], respectively the dreaded four-engined Kondor, the "bane of Allied shipping", and the bomber workhorse of the Luftwaffe. The Brooklyn, as if on cue, launched its patrol aircraft to meet a possible threat. But once again it did not materialize. Even so, on the last night out, on 30 August, which even Frank described as "dangerous", the convoy stood out clearly in bright moonlight, a tempting target. Alarm whistles blew on the escorting warships and signal messages were briskly exchanged but thankfully, he reported, "nothing happened". Instead, to the convoy's relief, it was soon greeted with the arrival overhead not of German aircraft but of Sunderland flying boats, which like the Catalinas at the outset, would provide an aerial escort. Ten days after leaving Halifax, and after constantly zig-zagging defensively all the way over, the convoy had made its way safely through the "danger zone". On 31 August, it entered and docked on the Clyde.

Frank's next diary entry was fully a week later, part of the interval having been taken up with disembarking, collecting baggage, undergoing fresh medical checks, and attending lectures. When he did put pen to paper on 8 September he was temporarily billeted at a personnel reception centre in Bournemouth, customary for newly arrived airmen. Like most North Americans he experienced a minor culture shock as he encountered the strangeness of double-decker buses and the "small, wagon-like freight cars", not to mention the anti-aircraft barrage balloons he saw floating over London on his way by train to the Channel coast. At Bournemouth he was issued flying kit and battle dress and subjected to a night vision test, which he passed but only with some difficulty.

After several days on the coast it was then north to "lovely" St. Anne's-by-the-sea, near the resort town of Blackpool, for an intensive training course. Frank was part of a group of observers bound for the course, a mixture of pilot officers and sergeants, of "Aussies", Britons, and Canadians like himself. They travelled to St. Anne's by way of Southampton and London, and Frank duly noted the many "bomb scars" in both places. "But the [London] buildings", he acutely remarked, "did not seem to suffer from bombs so much as they did from neglect, lack of paint and general drab appearance". After stopping briefly at storied places like Rugby, he and his fellow observers arrived punctually at their destination, St. Anne's, where they were promptly lodged in a hotel overlooking the sea.

As soon as duties permitted, Frank was quick to wander over the sand dunes, watch the coming and going of the tide, and walk the wide beach whose "hard-packed" sand reminded him of Grand Bend on Lake Huron, which he had visited and enjoyed as a boy. Away from the beach, again on his free time, he frequented the local cinemas. In keeping with the spirit of the times, they offered such popular films as "The First Of the Few", about those pioneering airmen who had fought in the Great War. Others showed the exploits of their sons and successors in the Battle of Britain, which had been fought and won just two years before. Appropriately, he also attended a "drumhead service" commemorating that landmark air battle, particularly the day when the RAF had supposedly downed "185 German aircraft" (sharply reduced to fewer than 60 by later and less impassioned researchers).

Frank and his mates also received first-hand reports of what Bomber Command was doing and how it was doing it when they were formally lectured by a veteran navigator who had completed more than fifty missions over enemy territory. Other "interesting" survivors of the air wars reinforced their Canadian instruction in the fine points of map reading and meteorology and updated them on the vital matter of aircraft recognition. Beginning in early September Frank and his group started a five-week "G.R. (General Reconnaissance) course", designed to prepare trainees for aerial surveillance at sea. On 20 September, as part of the course, Frank served as "Recco Observer" in the station's operations room, telling his diary that "in case of an accident a plane would be sent from here with myself as duty observer". Apparently no accident occurred on his watch. The day before, he experienced his first flight in Britain, which took him over the Irish Sea.

Although the G.R. course ended on schedule, Frank was held back in late October 1942 for "three weeks more training in Dead Reckoning Plotting, Coding and Signals", all very much a part of the navigator/observer's stock in trade. Then in November, having satisfied these requirements, he was promoted Flight Sergeant. He then went on a short leave to London. The Canadian Legion's Cartwright Gardens Club, where he stayed, was abuzz with the highly welcome news of recent British and American military successes in Egypt and North Africa. This was a far cry from the dismal situation that had stalked his enlistment a little over a year before.

In short order Frank and his friends plunged into the intricacies of the London Underground and began to explore the varied "mysteries" of the city when they emerged at traditional tourist points. Frank's initial and less than enthusiastic response to London soon evaporated when he beheld the "grandeur" and the "greatness" of its monuments and institutions. Like so many other visitors he also waxed lyrical on the city's wartime spirit and its "gaiety" and resoluteness under fire. In effect, to quote a history of the blitzed city, he was witnessing its ability to fashion a "real community" in which there was no "feeling of defeat … only a stern … determination to hold on to the end …." An impressed Frank soon paid a ritualistic visit to Canada House, whose roof bristled with anti-aircraft guns. He also frequented the nearby servicemen's centre, the Beaver Club, for news of home and the chance of meeting up with old friends from BCATP days.

Following his leave, Frank was posted to Coastal Command's No. 1 Operational Training Unit based at Silloth on Solway Firth, where he arrived on 23 November 1942. There his principal training would be undertaken in twin-engined Lockheed Hudson aircraft, many of which had been shrewdly purchased in the United States before the war. Among other things, they were also used as patrol bombers in the never-ending battle against the U-boat and for raids against targets in occupied Europe. Not long after Frank's arrival at Silloth, an Irish girl at a station dance told him a story that had become legend in the area. So many Hudsons either flew over or, as so often happened, unluckily plunged into Solway Firth that airmen and some locals had taken to calling it Hudson Bay. Unquestionably, the Hudson was for many a novice pilot a difficult aircraft to come to grips with and for that reason was deemed a "hot ship" prone to accidents. At any rate, Frank's reaction to the "Hudson Bay" story did not find its way into his diary.

When he shortly took a preliminary flight himself, not in a Hudson but in a twin-engined Airspeed Oxford trainer, he marveled at the "russet brown" and hilly countryside that spread out below him. He was also struck by how "long stone walls" divided the farms "into the craziest and quaintest shaped fields you could imagine". His subsequent entries are punctuated with such glowing accounts of the scenery and landmarks he observed. The one of 3 December, for example, noted that on his "maiden voyage" in a Hudson he was fortunate enough to get a panoramic view of the Lake District, which he considered the ideal holiday retreat should he ever have the peacetime opportunity. One can also imagine him storing these images away for future classroom use. The following days were devoted to less aesthetic exercises, principally "war games", defensive strategies, the use of various deadly weapons, and arduous training flights which left little scope for sight-seeing.

In spite of his busy round, however, there were brief interludes in which homesickness poignantly and relentlessly took over, especially when touching gifts arrived from his former Denfield pupils or welcome letters and treats from his family back in Exeter. All this may have influenced the nature of his closing diary entries. With very few exceptions they avoid the subject of war and training for war, as if he understandably wished to shut it out. Rather he seemed more concerned with activities and reflections that went beyond his day-to-day military schedule. This was particularly the case when he wrote about his Christmastime visits to the friends he had made in St. Anne's or the area house parties he attended in the company of his close mates. On one occasion he even ventured into a brightly lit and seasonally decorated Catholic church - a Protestant one presumably not available - and came away impressed by the service even if he wryly noted that the only thing he understood about it was "the collection". The Christmas interlude made him particularly reflective as he contemplated the extent to which this wartime holiday season in Britain had become an intense family affair that also warmly embraced outsiders like himself. This amounted to an important bonding exercise in a time of crisis, as a later generation might have put it.

One of the rare exceptions to Frank's recitation of his social activities and musings on life is the last stark entry in his diary, dated early in the New Year. Its very starkness seems to reflect the serious and advanced stage his training had now reached:

No 1 O.T.U. Silloth, Jan. 10, 1943

Splash exercise using VGO side gun and turret. In all probability he was on a practice flight that involved dropping a depth charge and using the Hudson's dorsal turret to fire on a target playing the role of U-boat. Then three days later, disaster struck. Hudson T 9322, manned by Frank, fellow Canadian, Warrant Officer1 J.G.L. Belanger, and two RAF pilots, stalled, crashed, and burst into flames while taking off on a local night flight. Suffering multiple injuries, all four crew members died before they could be taken to the station hospital. A local resident, who as a youngster had lived near the scene of the tragedy, recalled that his anxious parents had understandably "not allowed him out of the house" on that fateful night of 13 January 1943. In any event Frank Zurbrigg's long passage to war - so faithfully recorded in his diary -- by way of the embattled Atlantic and the equally embattled "Mother Country" had reached its final destination.

Franklin Charles Zurbrigg is buried alongside F.L. Belanger in the Causewayhead Cemetery, Silloth, Holme Low, Cumberland, England.

C.M. Johnston


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: William Allan, Lawrence Marshall, Kenneth Morgan, Laurene (Zurbrigg) Shapton, Winston Shapton, Norman Shrive, Marion Webb, Robert Webb, Bert Zurbrigg, and Carl Zurbrigg provided vital help and information. Besides producing valuable documentary material (marked LS below), Laurene Shapton granted an informative interview. Wm. Allan of Silloth, England, supplied the station's accident report and was instrumental in furnishing Lawrence Marshall's "Childhood Memories".

SOURCES: Canadian Baptist Archives / McMaster Divinity College: McMaster University Student File 7299, Franklin C. Zurbrigg; National Archives of Canada: Wartime Personnel Records / Service Record of Flight Sergeant Franklin C. Zurbrigg; wartime diary of F/Sergeant Franklin Zurbrigg (in the possession of Laurene Shapton); Frank Zurbrigg's RCAF instructional booklets, training notebooks, and newspaper obituaries (donated by Mrs. Shapton to the W. Ready Archives, McMaster University Library); LS: Bob Gibson, Silloth Airfield; A Condensed History of the R.A.F. at Silloth (1939-1960) (Silloth, n.d.); Jack Watts, Nickels and Nightingales (Burnstown ON: General Store Publishing House, 1995), a fellow navigator's memoir, particularly chap. V; Spencer Dunmore, Wings For Victory: The Remarkable Story of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994), 185, 187, and chap. 5; W.A.B. Douglas, Brereton Greenhous et al, The RCAF Overseas, III: The Crucible of War, 1939-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986); Forest Garner & Emmanuel Gustin, "Lockheed Hudson Patrol Bomber", Fighting the U-boats, uboat.net, 1-4; John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare (New York & London: Viking, 1988), chap. 4 ("The Battle of the Atlantic"); Philip Ziegler, London at War, 1939-1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), chap. 9 ('A Real Community'); Les Allison and Harry Hayward, They Shall Grow Not Old: A Book of Remembrance (Brandon, MA: Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum Inc., 2nd printing, 1996), 843; Charles M. Johnston, McMaster University, II: The Early Years in Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 41; LS: The Fiat Club Honour Roll, March 7, 1943, The Fiat Club: In honour of its members killed or reported missing while on active service, World War II, 1939-1945, May 19th, 1946, First United Church, Hamilton, Ont.

[ For a related biography, see Stanley David Gaudin ]