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‘Dearest Mother’: Wartime letters return home NewWestminster soldiers’ letters are part of a national campaign to connect residents with war histories died on Aug. 27, 1944. He was buried with the rest of the crew in Denmark.
Julie MacLellan
jmaclellan@newwestrecord.ca
“And if you ever see Bill around tell him to write to me, and another thing if he doesn’t write soon I will beat his brains out with a teaspoon and play the ‘Warsaw Concerto’ on his teeth with a sledge hammer, that had better scare him into writing.”
PERSONAL HISTORIES ow, Jack’s letter from Feb. 19, 1944, is making its way back home one more time as part of a national Letters Home campaign. The Legion National Foundation and Royal Canadian Legion have partnered with HomeEquity Bank on the campaign, which is designed to connect Canadians more closely to the stories of those who fought in the First and SecondWorldWars. Replicas of real letters from Canadian soldiers are being mailed out to their originally intended addresses across the country in the lead-up to Remembrance Day. Jack Fitzgerald’s correspondence is one of two letters making its way to NewWestminster this year. The other is from Pte. Harold Dean, who wrote to his mother from German East Africa, where he served with the British Expeditionary Force in the FirstWorldWar. Harold was more fortunate than Jack; in the end, he made it home, after bouts of malaria saw him sent back to England to convalesce before his return to Canada in 1919. Continued on page 3
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t’s not hard to imagine a little grin on the face of 19-year-old Jack Fitzgerald as he penned those words to his mother, Effie, and kid sister, Ruth, at home in NewWestminster. It was February 1944. Jack had left school two years previously, during his final year at Hugh M. Fraser High School (as Burnaby South Secondary School was known for a short time). He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, shipped off overseas in December of 1942 and served as an air gunner in RAF 166 Squadron. As fate would have it, he never got a chance to beat Bill’s brains out with a teaspoon. Jack would live for another six months and eight days after he wrote that letter home. He had been on a minelaying mission over Danzig Bay, Poland, with his crew.They were on the return flight when a German night fighter shot their Lancaster down over
Ties to home: Jack Fitzgerald’s Feb. 19, 1944, letter to his mother and sister is part of the Letters Home campaign. PHOTO CANADIAN
LETTERS & IMAGES PROJECT/VIU
Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. On Aug. 30, Effie Fitzgerald got word by telegram that her son had been reported missing in action. “The Government and people of Canada join me in expressing the hope that more favourable news will be forthcoming in the near future,” wrote Minister of National Defence Charles Power in a letter to NewWestminster soon after. It was not to be. Flight Sgt. John Ernest Fitzgerald, recipient of the Distinguished Flying Medal for vigilant service and for shooting down an enemy fighter, had
VALOUR: Flight Sgt. John Ernest Fitzgerald of New Westminster was killed in
action on Aug. 27, 1944 at age 19. PHOTO CANADIAN LETTERS & IMAGES PROJECT/VIU
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