SaltWire E-Edition

Demont: Answering a 77-year-old mystery

JOHN DEMONT jdemont@herald.ca @Ch_coalblackhrt John Demont is a columnist for The Chronicle Herald.

His nieces and nephews had never watched him walk into a family gathering, heard his voice or stared into his eyes. Mostly what they knew about Uncle Maurice O’neill was that he grew up at what is now 1756 Cambridge St., which used to be 100 before the houses on the south-end Halifax street were renumbered.

They knew that, consequently, he attended St. Thomas Aquinas School, like his five siblings, and worshipped at the church of the same name at the corner of Oxford Street and Jubilee Road.

They also understood that when he got a little older Uncle Maurice liked to hunt and fish like his brothers, who can be seen in old black and white photographs with their dad out at the family camp in Ship Harbour, where, in the way things are in these parts, I have also overnighted.

As far as the rest of Maurice O’neill’s life goes, the intel is a bit sketchy: he worked for awhile in the family stationary business and planned to work there again after leaving the Royal Canadian Air Force in which he enlisted in the mid1930s.

For all his descendants know, he would have done so had he not been deployed to Nassau, Bahamas, where, while practising landings on Oct. 17, 1944, his plane crashed in the nearby waters.

“Our dad told us that the body was never found,” his nephew Tom O’neill, who is 66, and retired in Ontario where he was a long-time director of a fruit grower’s association, told me the other day. “That was pretty much all we knew.”

Until, that is, he recently received an email from a man named Eric Wiberg saying that he had some information on his late uncle’s fate “which I trust will interest you.”

Wiberg describes himself as a writer, author and historian, which could apply to a lot of people. Few though can claim, as he does to be “a sleuth for the voiceless” an evocative phrase spoken with justification.

Wiberg, who has done stints studying English literature at Boston College, marine law at Roger Williams University, Shakespeare at Oxford, and scriptwriting at New York Film Academy, has enough enthusiasms to fill his 45 self-published books.

Two of those interests directly connect him to Tom O’neill and his kin.

First, there is Wiberg’s abiding fascination in the role that the Bahamas played in the Second World War.

Then there is what he calls his “desire to do what he can to connect people with their dead relatives” — a need that he told me is in keeping with a longestablished tradition of service in a family, which boasts two Swedish honorary counsel generals in their adopted Bahamas home.

Though born in Boston, Wiberg grew up there. For decades, the Wiberg familyowned Cable Beach Manor in Nassau, which, the internet tells us, was built by the Mauritian Count de Marigny, and was later owned by Lord Brownlow, aide-de-camp to the Duke of Windsor, when he became King Edward Vlll, and Sir Victor Sassoon, a fabled Shanghai-based businessman and hotelier.

As a youth, Wiberg, a champion swimmer and experienced sailor and sea captain, used to snorkel in the waters off that beach.

When he was 15, he found something unexpected: debris from an airplane, even though he had never heard of one going down in the area.

Wiberg held onto that memory for 40 years, while researching and writing his books including his 1,000page encyclopedia Bahamas in World War Two, in which he documented 75 planes that crashed in the waters around the archipelago.

One of them was a Marauder B26 Bomber which at 10:21 on the morning of Oct. 17, 1944, flew into the cloudy skies over an allied air force base outside Nassau.

The American-built planes, designed as medium range attack aircraft, were known as “widow makers” due to the high accident rate during takeoffs and landings.

“Most planes land gradually. Marauders went down like a Stuka, 155 miles an hour before it had to quickly level out,” said Wiberg. “It was very scary for rookie pilots.”

These were no rookies. Maurice O’neill by then was an experienced flyer. He and Toronto-born Jack Wood, had trained together in Quebec, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia before becoming officers in August 1943, based in the Bahamas.

We now know that in the summer of 1944, the two men had separately transported aircraft from there to Africa. Wood’s niece Joanne Green discovered that after returning to the Bahamas her uncle headed home that August to visit his wife and their son, then seven months old.

That October day their aircraft lived up to its nickname. Plumes of black smoke quickly billowed from its starboard engine. It managed to gain an altitude of 95 feet, just clearing the highest ground, before being lost by the control tower and crashing into a heavy swell about 400 yards from shore, four minutes after it took off.

The rescue launch that arrived 13 minutes later said that the plane was completely submerged and resting on the bottom. All that was recovered was an adrift dinghy and some oxygen bottles floating in the water. Though a memorial service was held for the two flyers, and distinguished service crosses were sent to the families of both airmen, the crash site was kept a secret,

There the story might have ended. Except some 40 years later Wiberg worried that in his Bahamas at war book he had inadvertently alerted “amateurs and charlatans” to the existence of the wreck which looked to be in waters just off the old family manor.

So, this man who describes himself as “obsessive, determined, stubborn and fixated” set out to find it before the looters did.

The search, including academic research, took two years. Last November the breakthrough came.

“I was in the throws of a bad mid-life crisis,” he said. “I was divorced, my mother had died. COVID didn’t help.”

Wearing just swim trunks, and equipped with only a mask, snorkel, fins, and a $40 inflatable raft, he took to the waters just off the old family manor, near where he found his first airplane wreckage all those years ago.

It helped that the ocean floor there is shallow, full of kelp and without reefs, giving the area little allure for divers on the hunt for submerged artifacts.

Wiberg was mostly alone for three straight weeks, swimming for long hours at a time, searching for something that had been hidden in those waters for 77 years.

On Dec. 1, Wiberg — “just a scared guy in a storm with a scuba mask” — had his eureka moment: three fathoms — 18 feet down — a fuselage with four props, machine guns and other remnants.

“I suffered spasms physically of emotion, which locked my body – I screamed the loudest I ever had, I cried,” he said.

Then Wiberg got to work, recovering what he had found over one square mile of ocean floor: 45 pieces in total including such moving objects as the dial one of them would have been looking at when they crashed, an unopened bottle, a seat, the hatch they would perhaps have tried to open during those last terrible minutes.

Every one of them has been donated to a museum in the Bahamas. That gave Wiberg a feeling of immense satisfaction. So did contacting Joanne Green, an amateur genealogist living in Guelph, Ont., to tell her that her uncle’s plane had finally been found.

She , in turn, helped him find Tom O’neill, to whom one day Wiberg sent an email, finally, in a way, bringing Maurice O'neill's body home.

FRONT PAGE

en-ca

2022-04-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-04-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://saltwire.pressreader.com/article/281556589363691

SaltWire Network