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ARTICLE: Love Shines Out From D-Day's Shadow Once he flew bombers over the land where she sought cover. Years later, the two found shelter together, writes NATHALIE BIBEAU Friday, June 4, 2004 - Page A19 On the second floor of a drab, overlit nursing home, I found the last chapter of one of the most famous military stories in Canadian history. I was working on a CBC documentary commemorating the 60th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944. It was a drizzly morning in February, the nurse at the desk was impassive, and Jim Kelly was in a room at the end of a wide, barren hallway. He sat in an oversized wheelchair, and with his long legs crossed at the knee, he was so thin and narrow, the space around him looked swollen. Dressed neatly in a plaid shirt and suspenders, he was leaning back, holding the newspaper close to his chest. His wife, on one of her long visits, was sitting closer to the window, staring out. Sixty years ago, Jim flew Lancaster bombers over Nazi-occupied France. In the spring and early summer of 1944, he was the wireless radio operator on a crew whose last mission would become one of the legends of the Second World War. On the night of June 13, 1944, while on their 13th mission, they were shot down. In the few minutes it took for their burning bomber to fall out of the sky, as most of the crew at the front bailed out, a grim drama unfolded in the rear. The tail gunner, Pat Brophy, was trapped in the turret, plummeting to certain death. His friend, mid-upper gunner Andrew Mynarski, had safely reached the escape hatch and was about to jump when he turned around and saw Brophy. He crawled over to him, through a wall of flame, and tried to pry him free. Clawing at the door with his bare hands, he was on fire from the waist down. What transpired in those few moments, at 13 minutes past midnight, is one of the most selfless acts of valour in the history of the war and it would earn Mynarski a posthumous Victoria Cross. Jim Kelly, sitting before me that February morning, was the last man left alive from that mission, which is why I was there. But there was one last story waiting for me in this little room. While Jim talked of D-Day and his excitement over crushing the Nazi advance, he noticed his wife leaning over his tray, quietly mashing a banana in a bowl for him. He stopped, and he said to her: "That time was different for you, wasn't it?" Regine -- bold and charming -- is Jim's second wife. She's German. She spent the war married to a German naval officer, and living with her mother in Aurich, a town 30 kilometres from the North Sea coast -- directly under the flight path of Allied bombing raids. "At eight months pregnant, I was riding my bicycle begging the neighbours for food, jumping into ditches every time I thought the planes were getting too close," she said. Her village was never the target, but the bombers flew overhead day and night on their way to the industrial heartland of the Reich. The quaking sound of those bombers haunts her to this day. "The air drummed, the houses trembled -- first with the sound of the engines, then alarms. It happened so often, I kept my baby in a laundry basket to be able to run down to the cellar." In the spring of 1944, while Regine's husband was away fighting, she and her daughter fled farther inland to the Harz Mountains to get out from under the air war. Jim, meanwhile, was miles up in the sky, and just as fear-stricken. He was a kid who had enlisted at 17 to fight the Nazis, and left his young wife in Winnipeg. Within months, he was part of the greatest air armada in history. On big raids, there could be a thousand Lancs in the air at once in a bomber stream one mile high, one mile wide and 10 miles long. It was cold, the flights were long, and he was usually sitting on at least 8,000 pounds of bombs. "I could hear and smell the flak exploding around me, and when I looked outside, I saw airplanes blowing up," he said, never knowing if it was a friend until he got back to the squadron base. All he could do was count down the time that was left: "I only have this many hours to live through -- just this many." After they were hit the night of the 13th, Jim parachuted out of the flaming plane and landed safely in a field. He was taken in by a family and spent three months as a fugitive with the French resistance. By the time Jim made it home, the Nazi empire was unravelling, and Regine was fleeing back to the coast to escape the Russians who were squeezing from the East. It was sheer anarchy. "The years after the war were almost worse than the war itself, once we learned what Hitler had done," she said. In 1953, Regine, her husband, Ernst, and their daughter were accepted into Canada as immigrants. For more than half a century, Jim lived happily with his wife, Lee, and their two children. Regine worked in restaurants and chocolate factories, her husband was a barber, and they raised their daughter, Anke, as a Canadian. Four years ago, there was a Christmas party in the basement of a condo building where Regine and Jim were introduced. Both had by then lost their spouses; they were alone. When the party ended, they took the elevator and realized they lived on the same floor. It started with him taking home leftovers from Regine's; it progressed to Sunday dinners. One impulsive morning, two years later, a 78-year-old Jim and an 80-year-old Regine walked into City Hall, yanked two witnesses off the street and said their vows. Parkinson's disease had devitalized Jim's voice and hand gestures, but all the life was concentrated in his eyes, so that when he spoke, I could see the kid in him waging an insurrection. He was playful, sharp-witted, and kind. Regine was indomitable, warm and loyal. I admit I was totally charmed. Sixty years ago, these two people were bobbing corks in a ferocious tidal wave, but on that February morning, they were just in love. When Regine finished mashing the banana, she lathered on the whipped cream. Jim flashed her a beaming grin, and she was radiant. This is how the last chapter closes. Two polarized war experiences converged in this quiet, unremarkable room. And no one in the North York nursing home seemed to have any idea. Jim Kelly, last survivor of a mission that would enter Canadian school books, died five days after I saw him. On May 17, Regine joined him. Nathalie Bibeau is a senior researcher at the CBC Documentary Production Unit. The 13th Mission will air on the CBC, Sunday, June 6, at 7 p.m. SOURCE: The Globe and Mail, Canada http://tinyurl.com/2dcjt * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn