THE aircrew sat on the grass beside their bomber, idly whiling away the time before they embarked upon their 13th mission together.
One of them casually picked a four-leaf clover. He twirled it between his fingers like a tiny aeroplane propellor before handing it to his closest friend.
"Here, Pat," said Andrew Mynarski to George Patrick Brophy. "You take it."
Hours later, the Canadian crew were shot down over France. Brophy had “a miraculous escape” and survived but Mynarski went down in a blaze of bravery that won him the Victoria Cross – the British Empire’s highest award for valour.
READ MORE: FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE ONLY MAN TO WIN THE VICTORIA CROSS ON D-DAY
This remarkable story unfolded on the night of June 12 to 13, 1944, exactly 80 years ago on Wednesday night, when 671 aircraft took off from airfields across the country to attack the German supply lines in France which were threatening to stop the Allied advances made in the week since D-Day.
One of them was the Royal Canadian Air Force’s Lancaster KB726 VR-A from Middleton St George, now Teesside airport. It was piloted by Canadian-born Flying Officer Art de Breyne, whose mother came from Durham City and whose grandfather was from Winston, near Darlington.
Among de Breyne's six crew members were the mid-upper gunner, Pilot Officer Mynarski, 27, from Winnipeg, and his best friend, the rear gunner, Flying Officer Brophy.
At 2.11am on D-Day itself, the crew in KB726 had left MSG and dropped 15 bombs on the Longues-sur-Mer gun battery directly overlooking Gold and Omaha beaches, and the following night, they’d been deployed to bomb Coutances, a town on the Normandy coast where German infantry and tanks were amassing to halt the Allied invasion.
And then, a couple of hours before midnight on June 12, they were sent on another mission in support of the D-Days landings, this time to hit the important railway junction at Cambrai, in northern France.
As they crossed the French coast they found themselves caught by a searchlight.
Two more lights locked onto them. De Breyne threw the bomber into a dive, desperately trying to escape the deadly glare.
Suddenly the searchlights left the plane, leaving the crew sitting anxiously in the darkness – they knew that the Germans sometimes let a bomber go once their fighters had fixed on to it.
And so it was. De Breyne was continuing towards the target, descending to 2,000ft, when Brophy screamed through the intercom that there was a German fighter at six o’clock.
Again De Breyne threw the Lancaster into a corkscrew, but it was too late. Three shots from the Junkers tore into it: two knocked out the port engines; the third ripped into the fuselage, and set fire to the hydraulic fuel which operated the door to the rear gunner’s glass dome.
The plane immediately caught fire and began to plummet. De Breyne ordered his crew to bail out by turning on a red light in the fuselage. When Brophy saw it flash for the first time, he looked at his watch: in a magazine article he wrote about ten years later he swore it was 13 minutes after midnight on June 13 on the crew’s 13th mission.
De Breyne fought to keep control of the plummeting plane as his crew jumped. At 1,300ft he knew time was running out and he too abandoned ship.
Behind him, Mynarski was about to jump when he glanced through the flames and smoke of the burning fuselage and saw Brophy, his best friend, frantically trying to break out of the glass-domed rear turret. The fire had jammed the gunner’s escape mechanism; the handle for the manual winch-gear had come off in his hand and so he was trapped, doomed to die in the turret...
Mynarski, though, abandoned his own jump to safety and, with the fatally wounded plane lurching drunkenly about, crawled through the flames and burning hydraulic oil to help his friend. He grabbed an axe and tried to smash his way through the toughened glass, but it just bounced off. Then he crazily dived at the dome with his bare hands, as if trying to rip it open.
"By now he was a mass of flames below the waist," recalled Brophy in an article written 10 years later. "Seeing him like that, I forgot everything else. Above the roar of the whine of our engine, I screamed: "Go back, Andy! Get out!'."
Realising the uselessness of the situation, Mynarski slunk back on his hands and knees through the flames, never taking his eyes from his condemned friend. When he reached the escape hatch, he pulled himself up to his full height. In his flaming clothes he came to attention, saluted the stricken Brophy, seemed to say “Good night, sir” – his usual end-of-day sign-off to his friend – and then jumped.
All hope gone, Brophy prepared to die. He curled up into the crash-landing position knowing it was pointless because beneath his feet was five tons of high explosives.
"Suddenly time caught up," wrote Brophy. "Everything came at once: the ground's dark blur, the slam of a thousand sledgehammers, the screech of ripping metal."
READ MORE: HOW HARRY FROM STOCKTON LANDED HIS GLIDER BEHIND ENEMY LINES AT THE START OF D-DAY
Remarkably, the Lancaster slid on its belly along the ground. A wing was ripped off by a tree throwing the plane into a demented spin which, miraculously, released the mechanism in the rear turret and tossed Brophy clear.
As he hit the ground, he blacked out momentarily, only to come round to the earth-juddering explosion as the broken bomber was engulfed by a ball of flame.
Brophy tried first his arms, then his legs, and was amazed to find he had escaped without a scratch. The unimaginable horror had taken its toll, though. When he pulled off his helmet, most of his hair came off with it.
After a night in hiding, Brophy plucked up courage and approached a French farmer who turned out to be a Resistance leader. For 11 weeks he passed from safe house to safe house until on September 13 he made it back to England.
There he learnt the fate of his colleagues. Two had been taken prisoner; three others had been rescued by the underground. Which left one unaccounted for: Andy Mynarski.
Brophy soon met the Lancaster's wireless operator Jim Kelly who had also been smuggled out by the Resistance. Kelly said that after he'd baled out he had been hidden by a French farmer in a barn. That farmer had seen a burning airman fall out of the sky. His parachute in flames, the airman had crashed into a field. He had lived for a short while before dying of severe burns.
The farmer had then held out a flying helmet. Painted across the front of it was “Andy”.
When pilot De Breyne heard the full story, he began to press for recognition for his upper gunner, whose body had been buried in Meharicourt war cemetery, near Amiens, to the north of Paris, and on October 11, 1946, the award of a posthumous Victoria Cross was announced.
The citation concludes: “P/O Mynarski could have left the aircraft in safety and would doubtless have escaped death. Although he must have been aware that he faced almost certain death, P/O Mynarski courageously and willingly accepted the danger. He lost his life by a most conspicuous act of heroism which called for valour of the highest order.”
Mynarski was the first Canadian airman to receive the award, and one of very few to win it on the uncorroborated account of a single witness.
In his homeland, he was revered as a symbol of courage, and on the tenth anniversary of his death a school was dedicated in his honour in his home town of Winnipeg. His bust was added to the Valiants memorial in Ottawa, where he is one of 14 of Canada’s most valiant military heroes to be honoured.
In 2005, after a campaign led by The Northern Echo, a 10ft bronze statue of Mynarski saluting Brophy was erected outside what had been the officers’ mess at the airport.
On Saturday (June 15), the statue is the scene of the annual commemoration of all the airmen from Middleton St George who lost their lives in the conflict, a commemoration all the more poignant this year because of the 80th anniversary of Mynarski’s heroism.
Airmen from across Europe will be attending along with local dignitaries, and the Middleton St George Memorial Association invite all interested members of the public to come along as well. To park, follow signs for “Canadian reunion” which will take you into the grounds of the former St George Hotel – which Mynarski would recognise as the officers’ mess – and then assemble at the statue from 10.15am for the ceremony to start at 10.45am.
READ NEXT: WITH THE DURHAMS AS THEY FIGHT THEIR WAY IN-LAND FROM THE D-DAY BEACHES
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