Earl William Hicks

Earl's father Hugh William Hicks (b. 1893, Essex, Ontario) was a locomotive engineer for Canadian National. He married Helen “Nellie” Freeman (b. ca. 1895, Toronto) on June 23, 1917 in Toronto and Earl had two older sisters, Alice (b. 1918) and Elizabeth (b. 1920). When Earl was born on January 2, 1924, the family was living in Ottawa but his father transferred back to Toronto by 1929. Their home was at 700 Woodbine Avenue, close enough to the train yard that used to be between Main Street and Victoria Park Avenue.

Earl started at Norway in 1930, finishing either Grade 3 or 4 at the school before his family moved to 69 Chisholm Avenue in 1934 and Earl transferred to Gledhill. He continued at Danforth Tech in 1938, specializing in Machine Shop and graduated with his Junior Matriculation in 1941. He liked to play baseball, basketball and hockey and had a model aircraft hobby. For a year he couldn't find work but in 1942 he became a lathe hand at Kingsley Manufacturing which was at 4 Chisholm Avenue, a short walk from his home.

He enlisted in the RCAF on October 8, 1942, thinking he would like to be ground crew or a mechanic. It appears that Earl was in the trades until March 1943 when he was shipped to the RCAF base at Summerside, P.E.I., where reconnaissance was taught. Earl was a sentry at the base and probably decided that wasn't what he wanted his RCAF career to be. In September he began classes at Guelph to learn to be a wireless operator. By December 12, he was posted to Toronto for initial training and able to visit his family often.

In March 1944 he left Toronto to study bombing and gunnery at RCAF Mont Joli in Quebec and earned his Wireless Air Gunner wings on June 2. He had a two week leave prior to sailing from Halifax on July 20 and he reported for duty at No.3 Personnel Reception Centre in Bournemouth, on England's south coast. Here the men were sorted and dispatched to train on the aircraft they would fight in. After a wait of almost four weeks, Earl was instructed to report to No. 86 Operational Training Unit (OTU) on August 22. It was located in central England and provided night training for Wellington bomber crews. A day or two later, the new arrivals were gathered together to form crews at an informal social event. In the group, Earl teamed up with Wireless Air Gunner Dennis Curzon from Guelph. He was about to have his 20th birthday on the 28th. Two men from Sarnia, Navigator John Ross and Tail Gunner Stanley Teskey and Pilot James “Tupp” Tuplin from Summerside, PEI comprised the core of the crew. Ross was also about to celebrate his 21st birthday on September 1. They began their Wellington training, but Bomber Command was reducing the number of its night raids, consequently cutting the number of training fields. In mid-October, No. 86 OTU closed and the crew transferred to No. 22 OTU at Wellesbourne Mountford, southeast of Birmingham. They continued with their Wellington night training. From December 1944 to March 1945, the crew was stationed at 76 Base in Yorkshire, where it converted to Halifax bombers.

Handley Page Halifax bomber. United Kingdom Government photo.

The crew transferred to RCAF's 426 Squadron, the Thunderbird Squadron, at Linton-on-Ouse, in Yorkshire, northwest of Leeds. (Kenneth Tutton, a Norway Honour Roll member, had served briefly with the squadron in February 1943.) The crew had been given decent marks in their training and by this time had acquired two RAF airmen, bomb aimer Reginald Evans from Plymouth, England and flight engineer Ronald Roberts of Yorkshire. Earl was a middle gunner, in the turret in the centre of the Halifax.

Earl and his crew. Front row: Earl, Pilot James “Tupp” Tuplin, Rear Gunner Stanley Teskey. Back row: Bomb Aimer Reginald Evans, Wireless Air Gunner Dennis Curzon, Navigator John Ross, Flight Engineer Ronald Roberts. From Floyd Williston, Through Footless Halls of Air, Burnstown: General Store Publishing House, 1996, page 256.

By the spring of 1945, the Germans were nearing the end. The Allied bombers relentlessly continued to hit any industrial sites that were involved with the war machine. Earl's first operation was on March 14, to bomb Zweibrücken in western Germany, near the French border. The next night the crew bombed benzol plants near Dortmund. On March 19, the crew took off just after midnight to bomb factories in Witten along with 326 other bombers. At 14,200 feet the Halifax was attacked twice by German night fighters. The flight is recounted in Floyd Williston's book Through Footless Halls of Air (page 252):

During one attack, F/Sgt. Teskey, the rear gunner, ordered his skipper to corkscrew. It was too late; the Halifax had been hit. F/Sgt. Hicks, the middle gunner and Teskey fired back at the EAs, chasing them off. Tuplin got them back to base, at approximately 07:50 hours, but because of hydraulic failure, he was forced to make a crash landing. Fortunately, no one was injured.

On March 20, the crew was given a seven day leave to relax. When the men returned to base, they were sent out the next day, to attack an oil plant near Hamburg. On April 14, they bombed U-Boats in the Kiel docks, on Germany's Baltic coast. They avoided heavy flak and arrived back in England unscathed. They took part in a 767 bomber raid on April 22, but were ordered to return to base before they could drop their bombs.

A daylight attack was planned for April 25 to knock out German coastal defences on Wangerooge, part of the Frisian Islands chain off the German north coast. Twenty Halifaxes from the squadron were involved and Earl's plane took off a few minutes after 1500 hrs The bombers were flying in a stacked formation. At 1530 hrs, over the North Sea, the Halifax above Earl's hit an air pocket and crashed into Earl's plane. Others in the formation watched three parachutes deploy and when they returned from dropping their bombs, some flew low over the crash site, but could see no survivors. Earl was 21 years old. The Wangerooge mission was the last of the war for the Thunderbird Squadron.

Earl is memorialized on the Runnymede Memorial in England and on the Bomber Command wall in Nanton, Alberta. Earl's mother passed away in 1948 and his father moved from Chisholm Avenue to Mimico by the mid-1950s. He passed away in 1979.