The Long Life of “Shorty” Moyes
February 11, 1926 to January 4, 2025 — A hundred years of Humility, Duty, Honour, Courage and Sacrifice
VINTAGE WINGS MOURNS THE PASSING OF RONALD T. MOYES — FRIEND, HERO, GENTLEMAN
Ron “Shorty” Moyes, a rear gunner on Lancaster snd Halifax bombers who survived a full tour with 405 Squadron, Pathfiinders, was a generous man — with his time, his memories and his humour. In his honour and to get a sense of this wonderful man, we’d like to share this short story by renowned Canadian military historian Ted Barris, OC.
It happened kind of like choosing a partner at a high school dance, where the girls all lined up on one side of the dance floor and the boys on the other.
Only in this case, during the Second World War, the Commonwealth airmen gathered in a hangar in England – pilots in one group, navigators in another, gunners in another, etc. As RCAF gunner Ron Moyes told me the other night, bomber pilot Don Walkey first picked a navigator, Hugh Ferguson.
“Then, Fergy picked the rest of us,” said Moyes, just shy of his 97th birthday (Feb. 11). In other words, the haphazard instincts of Ferguson, a 20-year-old former miner from Manitoba (by 1944 a trained RCAF navigator) chose bomb aimer Stu Farmer from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., radio operator Jake Redinger from Bashaw, Alta., and gunners Alvin Kuhl and Ron Moyes from Tara, Ont., and Coquitlam, B.C. respectively – all men he’d never met before – to form a bomber crew.
All six survived a full tour – 29 combat operations over Germany – and came home safely to Canada in 1945.
Last Friday, I travelled to the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa for the screening of Above and Beyond, a documentary about the famous Lancaster bomber in WWII. The Vintage Wings museum in Gatineau, Que., sponsored the event, and asked if I would interview a Lancaster rear gunner they’d invited to the screening – Warrant Officer (Retired) Ron Moyes. I jumped at the chance.
Over many years of contact with Canadian veterans – interviewing thousands of them – I’ve almost always asked how it was they survived. Most say, fate or chance or just plain luck.
Just so you know, the odds did not favour volunteers such as Ron Moyes making it home. Between 1939 and 1945, 125,000 Allied airmen served in those nighttime raids over Europe. Of every 100 airmen in Bomber Command, 52 were killed on operations, nine were killed in accidents, 12 became prisoners of war, three were wounded, and one POW would manage to escape and make it back to England.
Of all wartime services, Bomber Command suffered the highest attrition rate – 44 per cent – meaning that 55,573 were killed, 10,500 of them being Canadian. So, how did Moyes dodge the bullet?“
We engaged in a lot of horseplay,” he told me in front of that Ottawa audience. “But on operations it was all extremely professional.”
As a rear gunner in a Lancaster, Moyes had no heat in his turret; in addition, so that he could see enemy fighters clearly at night, the Perspex (glass windshield) was also removed exposing him at 20,000 feet to an outside temperature of -40 to -60 degrees Fahrenheit. Moyes described how he dressed against the cold:
“First, I put on wool stockings up over my knees and a long turtleneck sweater. Then, my battle dress uniform and an electrically heated suit with slippers and gloves. Then, my teddy-bear suit of one-inch thick padding. Next, my Mae West life preserver, my parachute harness, flying boots, helmet, mask, goggles and three pairs of gloves.”
He couldn’t wear his parachute because the turret was too cramped, so he sat on it for the full trip (seven hours) to the target and back.
Most often, their bombing targets were weapons-production plants at Munster, Essen, Duisburg and other industrial sites along the Ruhr River, a.k.a. “Happy Valley,” deep in Germany.
On Dec. 31, 1944, Moyes’ crew was sent to drop mines at low level up the fjord leading to (Nazi-occupied) Oslo, Norway. “There was a full moon, no clouds … Stu (Farmer) dropped the mines. Then, all hell broke loose. A couple of barges were loaded with guns and (the Germans) opened up on us.
Don (Walkey) immediately put the aircraft in a dive, while we fired back. My guns were white-hot when Stu called out, ‘Skipper, pull up! I can’t swim!’ Don pulled the bomber out of the dive and we were only 75 feet above the water.”
Because it was New Year’s Eve, cooks had prepared a special meal for everybody back at RCAF 429 Squadron air base. But Ron and his crew were so exhausted when they returned, that they slept right through the turkey dinner.
“So, at 2 p.m., we (got up), had a few beers; then, feeling pretty good, we tried playing some basketball on roller skates. But we quit before we killed ourselves.”
When the wartime crew reunited in 1984, pilot Don Walkey remembered, the day they’d crewed up in 1944, that he’d had an inoculation and wasn’t feeling well. That’s why he left the job of picking a crew to navigator Hugh Ferguson.
“He did a good job,” Ron Moyes said. “We all survived.”
Vintage Wings of Canada is a not-for-profit, charitable organization with a collection of historically significant aircraft and is run entirely by volunteers. It is our mission to acquire, restore, maintain and fly classic aircraft significant to the early history of powered flight in Canada, focussing largely on the aircraft of the Second World War. We run education and flying programs with our own aircraft and in concert with the aircraft collection of our founder, Michael Potter. It is our goal to inspire and educate future generations about the historical significance of our aviation heritage and to demonstrate that these aircraft are more than just metal, fabric, and wood artifacts. We seek to keep the souls of these aircraft alive through the thundering sound of engines, the smell of leather, glycol, oil and sweat, as well as the laughter of their pilots as they dance with them in their natural element in the skies over Canada.
What’s new at VWC
THE AIRCRAFT
Vintage Wings of Canada and the Michael U. Potter Collection
Michael Potter, Founder of Vintage Wings of Canada Foundation has been collecting and flying vintage aircraft since the mid-1990s. A lifelong pilot, Potter began flying high performance gliders in the 1970s and graduated to power soon thereafter. The aircraft of his collection are maintained in flying condition and flown annually throughout the summer to support air show events, commemorative military flypast and other special events. Several aircraft of the collection are owned directly by the charitable foundation as well as by other individual operators.
Potter has put together a collection of the finest examples of Canada’s, and indeed the world’s, most historically significant aircraft. The collection is housed in a 24,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art hangar at the Gatineau-Ottawa Executive Airport near Ottawa, Canada. The facilities include workshops, paint booth and facilities operated by Vintech Aero Inc, an Approved Maintenance Organization can strip a wreck or barely flyable aircraft down to nothing but unconnected parts and bring it back, not just to flyable condition, but to a world-class level not surpassed by anyone.
North American P-51 Mustang
Fairchild Cornell
North American Harvard 4
Fleet Finch
de Havilland Canada Beaver
de Havilland DH-83 Fox Moth
Supermarine Spitfire Mk.IX
Hawker Hurricane Mk XII
DHC-1 Chipmunk 18028
Goodyear FG-1D Corsair
DHC-1 Chipmunk 18025
Fleet Canuck
Westland Lysander III
Hawker Fury II
Cessna L-19A Bird Dog