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Wartime Christmas card from Gander
contributed by R. Pelley
This is a Christmas card from about 1942-45. It was
probably an official card rather than something that could be bought
at the base shopping facility because the name was printed in the
card in the same characters as the main text.
R. Pelley
Addendum
I noticed that the
Lancaster on the cover of the Christmas card had the
identification number “VN-N”. In the
Royal Air Force and Commonwealth
countries, the first two letters identified the Squadron which flew the
airplane while the last number identified
the aircraft itself. I wanted to
discover more about this airplane, hoping in particular to find out why
it had been selected for the cover of a Christmas card representing
Gander.
The manufacturer¹s serial number of the
airplane was R5689. It was one of
200 originally ordered as ³Manchesters² (a 2-engine airplane) from the
AVRoe factories in
Manchester England but was finally built as a 4-engine
Lancaster, model B1. These were delivered during the period February to
July 1942 with Merlin 20 engines (as on
the famous Spitfire fighter).
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Lancaster R5689 (VN-N) was sent to 50
Squadron of the RAF on
22
June 1942.
It took part in many key operations,
bombing places such as Saarbrucken,
Dussldorf,
Le
Havre, Essen and Wilhelmshaven. On its last run, it left
Swinderby, England, at 19h15 on 18 September 1942 on a mine-laying
operation. It crash landed at Thurlby,
Lincolnshire, when both port engines
conked out as the airplane was coming in
to land. One of the seven member
British, Australian and Canadian crew who lost his life was Sgt JR
Gibbons of the RCAF, a fellow from
the area of
Brantford, Ont.
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I don¹t know if VN-N was used for the
cover because of Sgt Gibbons. But that
appears unlikely because he didn¹t seem
to have any personal connection with
Gander. The Lancaster itself was not one of those built in Canada and
ferried overseas. However, for some
reason, this particular aircraft comes
up often in research on Lancasters, both
in actual wartime photos, in
sketches and in post war paintings. In one online chat group, some
thought that VN-N was the most
photographed Lancaster of WWII !
R. Pelley
(Bob Pelley would like to say thanks to
Robert (Bob) Evans, Volunteer
Curator at the
Nanton
Lancaster Air Museum in Nanton Alberta for his help on
this.)
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