U.S. recovers bodies of WW2 airmen from Quebec waters

 
Photo Paul Chiasson

By Jonathan Montpetit - The Star

The wind was fierce and the waves were surging on Josephine Vibert’s wedding day, 70 years ago in Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan, a small fishing village on Quebec’s north shore.

In 1942, the village became the site of an emergency airstrip on the U.S. military’s so-called “Crimson Route,” a strategic air corridor to Europe through Maine and Newfoundland.

Late in the afternoon on Nov. 2, 1942, not long before the wedding reception, Vibert and most of the village stopped to watch a U.S. army seaplane taxi from the harbour.

But the plane — a PBY Catalina — struggled to clear the water. Vibert recalls the towering waves of the Gulf lashing at the cockpit during its second takeoff attempt.

“I counted five waves, but there may have been more,” she says from her home, still in Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan. “After the last one, water started entering their plane.”

The town’s fishermen braved the frothing waters to find four crew members clinging to the fuselage.

Just moments after the survivors were hauled aboard the local fishing boats, the plane, along with the five remaining crew members, slipped beneath waves, never to be seen again.

That is until 2009, when underground divers from Parks Canada found the barnacled, upside-down fuselage of the Catalina some 40 meters below the surface.

“We worked from shore until we hit the plane,” said Marc-Andre Bernier, the chief underwater archaeologist for Parks Canada.

“When we actually saw that the fuselage was in one piece, we immediately stopped operations and contacted the American authorities.”

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