Ron Knaack was walking home after playing with his sled in the woods north of 100th Avenue on Thornhill when he realized he had forgotten his gloves, so he doubled back to retrieve them.
It was a cold and rainy day, a typical February drizzle, 66 years ago today.
Above him, a plane suddenly soared overhead, barely above the tree tops. Seconds later, a crash, and a plume of black smoke rose from the dense forest.
Nothing remains of the tragedy that took place there so many years ago, when seven men fell from the sky to their deaths.
The hemlock trees that pierced the wings when the B-24 Liberator plunged to earth were cut down, and a new generation of growth has taken their place.
The wreckage has long since been carried away. What small bits of electronic equipment and wiring that weren’t burned in the fire were expelled by bulldozers when the land was cleared.
“It’s all grown over now,” says Knaack, who still lives a mile from the crash site. “But that’s Mother Nature. I’ve watched those trees grow since I was 10 years old.”
Knaack was the last person to see Liberator EW 134 G in flight, and one of the last people alive to have witnessed the worst airplane crash in Maple Ridge’s history.
The B-24 Liberator and its crew were part of the No. 5 Operational Training Unit in Abbotsford, what is now the Abbotsford International Airport.
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| From Thornhill crash |
The base was built during the Second World War, and was the British Commonwealth’s major training centre for the American-made Liberator.
The plane had been chosen by the Royal Air Force for use in the South East Asian theatre of war against the Japanese because of its long range and heavy payload.
However, the Liberator was also notorious for catching on fire, and was considered an “electrician’s nightmare,” says historian Michael DesMazes.
He’s spent the better part of 20 years researching the Thornhill crash and others as part of his forthcoming book, From Tiger Moths to Liberators, which looks at the role the training units at Boundary Bay and Abbotsford played in the war effort.
More than 4,500 airmen were trained at Boundary Bay and Abbotsford during the 16 months they were in operation, as part of the massive British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. The international effort resulted in hundreds of airports being built across the country, as Canada helped train 130,000 airmen for the war, including close to 50,000 pilots.
A dozen major crashes occurred throughout Southern B.C. involving training air crews, claiming close to 70 lives during war time.
“The Second World War was happening right in our own backyard,” says DesMazes.
After starting out on the two-engine B-25 Mitchell bomber at Boundary Bay, crews graduated to the four-engine B-24 Liberator at Abbotsford.
“These were not rookie pilots,” says DesMazes. “Many of these guys had flown Lancasters and Wellingtons in Europe, but they had to get re-certified [on the Liberator].”
Liberator EW 134 G had just returned to duty after undergoing maintenance at Boundary Bay. The plane was returning from a cross-country training exercise when it began developing engine problems towards the end of its flight, says DesMazes.
The plane came in southbound, down Pitt Lake and turned left, where it followed the Fraser River at low altitude as it made its way towards Abbotsford and home.
Witnesses saw the plane flying just a few hundred feet above the water as it passed by the Hammond Cedar mill and the Maple Ridge Golf Course, with one of its side doors open.
Both the engines on the left side of the air craft had sputtered to a stop.
Unable to make the turn to the right towards Abbotsford, the plane would have to turn nearly a full circle in the opposite direction in order to make its approach to the runway.
But as the plane began the portside turn, northward toward Grant Hill and the Maple Ridge neighbourhood of Thornhill, the plane suddenly lost altitude, and plunged straight down into the forested hillside.
The seven men, all members of the Royal Canadian Air Force, died instantly.
A plume of smoke quickly rose like a beacon from the hilltop. Within minutes, the Whonnock detachment of the Pacific Coast Militia Rangers, which had been conducting target practice near the Whonnock cemetery, spotted the black smoke and sped up the hill in their cars, according to Ed Villiers’ account of the crash, which appears in his 2005 history of Maple Ridge, All Our Yesterdays.
The group established a guard around the crash site and began to hack a trail through the dense bush.
The Rangers beat Knaack to the crash site. He remembers standing on one of the plane’s massive wings, half embedded in the ground, as the heat of the fire ignited bullets from the plane’s ten 50-calibre machine guns, firing them off in every direction.
“It’s amazing no one else was hurt,” says Knaack.
Over the next two weeks, RCAF personnel packed away almost every last piece of the plane wreckage. After a Kittyhawk single-engine trainer plane crashed in the Fraser River three weeks earlier south of Ruskin, killing its pilot, there was talk of sabotage.
The official explanation by the Canadian military was pilot error, but DesMazes doesn’t believe that for a second.
“The two pilots and the instructor had a combined 2,000 hours of experience,” he says. “With all that combined experience, I can’t believe it was pilot error.”
The RCAF conducted only a cursory investigation of the crash, as it was wartime. With pilot error as the cause, no further investigation would be required.
“It was the end of the war, so they pretty much forgot about it,” says DesMazes.
Although the wreckage had been largely removed by RCAF personnel, for many years there remained scattered detritus from the crash in the area east of 264th Street.
Knaack, along with many of his schoolmates, would venture out to the crash site and scavenge for souvenirs.
“There were pieces of Plexiglass everywhere, so we would take them and make rings out of them,” he says. “That was the popular thing to do back then.”
Nature has since reclaimed the hilltop where C.H. Carscadden, W.G. Beveson, W. Schneeberger, H.S. Weiss, J.L Therien, and H.J. Niemi met their end.
Their names grace a rock cairn in downtown Maple Ridge’s Memorial Peace Park, where a plaque recounts their last moments.
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| From Thornhill crash |
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| From Thornhill crash |