There is an old saying that for every casualty in a war, it’s the loss of some mother’s child.
Wesley Brown was Irish-born in 1922, to his beautiful mother Sarah, and father Ernest. Young Wes had auburn hair, and striking brown eyes.
He and his family, which would grow to five children, moved to Canada in 1924, settling on Cadorna Avenue, in the East York suburb of Toronto.
As he grew along with his brothers William and Jack, sisters Marjorie and Edith, Wes attended Plains Road School, and East York Collegiate, graduating just as the war was starting.
EYCI sent a large number of its sons into the air force, and young Brown was one of them, joining the RCAF, going through the British Commonwealth Air Training Program, and coming out the other end as a bomb aimer.
wound up at No. 432 (Leaside) Squadron, No. 6 Group, Bomber Command, in a first-class crew that included pilot Ed Clarke, Ernie Bishop, navigator, Harvey Lewis, on the wireless, Engineer George Bradshaw, gunners Fred Burgess and Jimmy Cook.
They were an excellent team, making it right to the edge of a completed tour by the time they took off from East Moor, Yorkshire, in Halifax VII NP 702 (QO-B), for a flight to Hamburg.
It was July 28-29, 1944 … 307 aircraft (Halifax, Lancaster, Mosquito) were scheduled for Hamburg on the first major raid on that city for a year. Somewhere along the way, likely over the North Sea, the aircraft carrying Wes’s crew disappeared.
Every man was within one or two trips of finishing the tour. We can never know what those striking brown eyes saw at the end, but we can know Wes Brown and his crew were brave men doing one of the most dangerous jobs of the war. They are remembered on the Runnymede Air Forces War Memorial, west of London.
Per Ardua ad Astra to them.
