Rex Myrick - Course 82

(Jeff Outhit - The Record - Feb. 9, 2018) Betty Russell has a big story to share. She brings out a small silver ring to help tell it. The ring was her brother's. Rex Myrick wore it 73 years ago when he was shot down and killed by the Nazi enemy in an air raid that went disastrously wrong. That was on Feb. 9, 1945. It's remembered as Black Friday. Betty was in high school. Her brother's ring defied death and all odds to find her. But when he died she knew nothing of the ring or the raid. All she knew was that her brother was missing in action, far from home. She wept at a school fountain, consoled by classmates in Tillsonburg. Then she moved on, keeping the past in the past, waiting 50 years to read all the letters he sent home. "Maybe I didn't want to read them," she says. But the past won't always stay past. Today, Betty is 88 and knows a lot more about how her brother died. She's seen where it happened, in the icy waters of a Norwegian fiord. She's asked herself why. Many have asked the same question since. Pilot Rex Myrick, 22, lifted off from northern Scotland on a warm, clear afternoon. Navigator Claude Berges, 27, sat in the seat behind him. Their twin-engine, heavy fighter had loaded cannons, rockets under the wings, and a rare target. A reconnaissance patrol had spotted a German destroyer in a Norwegian fiord north of Bergen. It was supported by at least nine escort vessels. Nazi Germany had little navy left. It was three months from defeat. But it was still a formidable foe, desperate to maintain Norwegian shipping lanes that supplied iron ore for the German war machine. The Allies felt they had to attack. Rex and Berg, as he liked to be called, belonged to 404 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force. Its motto was "Ready to Fight." Both had trained for years, but had yet to face the enemy. They had crewed together for just two months. Pairing them made sense. Both were sons of southern Ontario merchants. Rex's father owned a butter-making creamery in Tillsonburg. Berg's father owned a bakery in downtown Kitchener, at Weber and Frederick streets. You could call them bread and butter. Perhaps that's how Rex felt when he picked Berg to be his navigator. "I think we'll get along fine together," Rex wrote to his parents. Rex wrote to Betty just before she turned 16. It was one of his last letters home, days before he was killed. He teased her as big brothers do, asking her to save him a spot at her next birthday or "let me have a piece of your birthday cake and I might not spank you the whole 16 times." He added: "Sincerely hope by the time you get this, that the Germans have packed in." Home was on his mind. Nazi Germany occupied Norway in 1940. The job of the RCAF squadron was to strike at enemy vessels and shipping along Norway's west coast. On Feb. 9, 1945, an Allied strike force of up to 46 airplanes lifted off from Scotland. It included 32 strike aircraft and up to a dozen fighter escorts. Aircrews came from Canada, Australia, Britain and New Zealand. Attacking a heavily defended destroyer was never going to be easy. It became a disaster. Swooping into the fiord just after 4 p.m., the attackers were surprised to find the enemy vessels had moved. Knowing they had been spotted earlier in the day, the wily Germans had relocated to a better position to defend themselves. The ships were now well protected by steep cliffs, and by anti-aircraft guns placed on ships and shore batteries. The canyon like fiord was too narrow for the striking airplanes to swarm the enemy. So instead they undertook a time-wasting loop above the fiord, before queuing up to dive on the enemy ships one after the other. This exposed each plane to concentrated enemy fire. Suddenly, up to a dozen German fighter planes showed up, scrambled from an airbase nearby. The Allies had flown into a perfect ambush. Battle-hardened Germans threw up intense flak from anti-aircraft guns. There was so much shrapnel in the air that one pilot said he could have taxied on top of it. German planes screamed through their own flak to chase down startled Allied planes. When it was all over in under 15 furious minutes, 10 Allied planes were shot down, killing 14 crewmen including 10 Canadians. The RCAF lost six planes. Most crashed into mountains. Some crashed into the fiord or tried to ditch.

(Photo: Betty Russell, 88, looks at letters her brother Rex Myrick wrote home during the Second World War. - Peter Lee,Record staff) The Germans lost planes, pilots and sailors too. But not a single enemy ship was sunk. Egil Hjelmeland watched the raid go wrong from the ground. He hid in trees while planes roared above, shooting at each other or diving on ships. He saw planes burn and crash. "The noise was very heavy," he recalls from his home overlooking the fiord. "We didn't know why they were coming." He was six. Today at age 79 the raid plays in his head like a movie in slow motion. He hails the Allies who perished. "Our freedom and peace are these brave men's monument," he said. Shocked Norwegian families tried to keep their children away from the smoking wreckage. One young Norwegian man let his curiosity lead him. Out onto the ice he ventured, to check out a crashed plane before the Germans arrived to shoo everyone away. No one was alive for him to help. But amid the wreckage and ruin, he found and pocketed a memento of the fury he'd witnessed. It was a silver ring. Battered Allied planes limped back to Scotland. "They landed like a flight of wounded ducks; a number just pancaking," a witness at the airbase later wrote. "The scene was like a Hollywood film set — but this was real." Rex and Berg died when their plane crashed onto the ice covering part of the fiord. German flak likely brought them down. Their bodies were recovered and buried. Their wrecked plane sank into the fiord. "Today's losses were a staggering blow," Canadian commander Teddy Pierce wrote in squadron records. Stunned by the Black Friday defeat, Allied commanders revised future targets, to attack cargo ships ahead of destroyers and small warships. They added more fighter escorts to protect striking aircraft. This comforts Betty. Learning how the raid went wrong upset her. Did the RCAF waste her brother's life when he was so close to coming home? She's come to accept that in war, battles are lost or won. The sacrifice is the same. Lessons learned are important. "You realize this is all part of what happens in war. And what happens in life," she says. "We make our mistakes and we learn from them." Betty moved past the loss of her brothers. She played basketball. She read. She marched in a cadet corps. She counted war coupons, to help ration butter. Her mother, meticulous about keeping her daily diary, let blank pages pile up after losing her sons. Her father later sold his creamery, with no sons who might have taken over the business. Berg's widowed bride never remarried. Her family learned not to bring up the husband she lost. It was too raw. "They did their duty for their country but they had no idea what they were getting into," says Joan Slover, 60. Joan lives near St. Clements. Berg was her uncle. In Norway, divers later scoured the ocean floor to salvage pieces of airplanes. A Black Friday museum opened nearby. Monuments went up to honour the dead. "They're actually more grateful for what we did than we are," Joan says, warmed by the Norwegian response. Betty went to Norway a decade ago, invited to watch divers hunt for wreckage from her brother's plane. They found it, hauling up a wheel to put on display. A television show was made about it. Norwegians treated her like royalty.

(Photo: Rob Rondeau in Norway with the recovered tailwheel from Rex Myrick's Beaufighter plane, shot down on Black Friday in 1945. Arne Stubhaug) While there, she heard about a ring taken from the ice after a plane crashed on Black Friday. The man who took it had died. Betty was taken to visit his daughter, who had been told about the ring by her father. They found it in a teacup. The ring has a custom engraving that says M. It was unfamiliar to Betty, but there's no mistaking its origin. Reading her brother's wartime diary, she found proof on the back page. Rex had sketched a similar M while doodling his initials. Betty keeps the cherished ring in a box at her home in Delhi. Now and again she takes it out to polish it. Odds are it should have been lost when Rex was lost. Against all odds it willed its way to her, past a furious defeat, through a curious stranger and across a continent, six decades later. It sure feels like destiny.