several board positions, including chair of the Waterloo County Catholic School Board.
In 1961, Renner returned to Belgium to see Maria in peace time. He saw her three other times. She died in 1977 at the age of seventy-four.
Renner wanted to do something in Fairoul to honour Maria. After consulting her family, he donated a new altar to the village church in her memory.
On a trip to Belgium in 1992, he went to the woods where he had camped with the Resistance. “Thank goodness it’s only once in a lifetime,” he said to himself as he looked around. He also visited the graves of his crewmates.
The pilot of the night fighter that shot JD463 down was Major Wilhelm Herget. He was the commander of Nachtjagdgeschwader 4, a group of Luftwaffe night fighters based at Florennes, Belgium.
Herget went to Belgium after the war to identify himself as the pilot who shot down the bomber at Thy-le-Château. He spoke to a historian, Jean Léotard. He also said that at the end of the war an American tank shot his plane down and he became a prisoner of war.
Wilf Renner still lives in Preston, which is now part of the City of Cambridge, and he still has the rosary he carried with him throughout the war. He will be ninety in 2010.
Wilf Renner in 2008.
Renner’s respect for Maria Dardenne remains as strong today as ever. He has a large picture of her in the living room of his home. Renner requires only a few words to describe the woman who protected him: “Maria was the bravest woman I ever met.”
Flight Sergeant Bob Middlemiss had never taken off from an aircraft carrier before. He was apprehensive.
Middlemiss, a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force who was flying with Britain’s Royal Air Force, usually took off from airfields, but he was eager to help the RAF get Spitfires to Malta, which is in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
Spitfires could not stay in the air long enough to fly directly from England to Malta, which was a British colony during the war. To get the planes to Malta, the RAF decided to disassemble them and put the parts on a freighter sailing from Greenock, Scotland, to Gibraltar, at the western end of the Mediterranean. At Gibraltar, mechanics reassembled the planes and put them on HMS Eagle, an aircraft carrier. Closely guarded by several destroyers, the Eagle and its cargo of thirty-one Spitfires sailed toward Malta.
On June 3, 1942, the Eagle reached a point north of Algiers, from which Middlemiss and the other pilots could fly to Malta in about three hours.
Middlemiss, who was twenty-one, revved his Spitfire’s engine. He pushed the throttle forward to have maximum power. Then the ground crew pulled the wood chocks from in front of the wheels and the Spitfire rolled along the short deck then dipped down when it left the carrier. Middlemiss was just a few metres above the sea, but he pulled up into a bright, sunny sky.
Bob Middlemiss in 1941.
Three other Spitfires flew close by. When the four planes were close to Malta, several Messerschmitt 109s appeared suddenly and started firing. Because a Spitfire could turn quickly, Middlemiss escaped from the German fighters.
One of his colleagues was not so fortunate. The 109s shot him down. The Germans also shot down three other Spitfires flying to Malta that day. Of the thirty-one Spitfires that left the Eagle that day, only twenty-seven landed on the island.
When Middlemiss arrived at the Takali airbase in the middle of Malta, he realized how desperately the RAF needed the Spitfire he had just flown: Another pilot was already waiting to take off in it.
Malta, the largest island in the Maltese archipelago, was under siege. The entire archipelago is only 316 square kilometres, the size of a metropolitan city. During the Second World War, however, Malta had a strategic importance far greater than its size. Located between Italy and North Africa, Malta was a fortress from which a country with a navy and an air force could stop an opponent from dominating the Mediterranean Sea.
The Allies used Malta to attack ships taking supplies to German troops in North Africa that were advancing toward British positions in Egypt. For the Allies, losing Malta would have meant losing the Mediterranean.
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy fully understood the importance of Malta. Planes from both countries bombed the island relentlessly. They also attacked British ships sailing for the island. As a result, the British navy sometimes used submarines to bring in supplies.
The Allied forces were short of food, fuel, guns, and ammunition. On some occasions, the Royal Air Force had no fighter aircraft ready to fly. The island was short of everything needed to win a war, except for spirit and determination.
Middlemiss’s arrival in Malta was part of the RAF’s campaign to build up its forces on the island in order to end the siege. A member of the RAF’s 249 Squadron, Middlemiss quickly learned how the siege could affect even a strong young man such as himself. He normally weighed about 140 pounds, but the shortage of food cut that figure by ten to fifteen pounds. In addition, Middlemiss suffered from what became known as Malta Dog, which was a form of dysentery.
Middlemiss and his squadron were often called on to pursue German aircraft that had left Sicily to attack Malta. On July 7, 1942, just over a month after he arrived on the island, Middlemiss was at his airfield early in the morning, ready for another day of flying. The weather was ideal: the sun shone, the sky was blue.
Later in the morning a radar unit detected enemy aircraft approaching Malta. The controller, who worked in a bombproof shelter in Valletta, Malta’s biggest city, called for eight of the squadron’s Spitfires to take off. He kept two pilots in reserve: Middlemiss and Flight Lieutenant Raoul Daddo-Langlois.
Middlemiss and Daddo-Langlois did not want to be left behind — they wanted to participate in the attack. Daddo-Langlois told officers at the Takali base that he and Middlemiss wanted to get their Spitfires into the air. The officers relayed the information to the control centre. After several minutes, the controller agreed. He let the two pilots take off.
Middlemiss was already wearing his Mae West life preserver. All he had to do was step on the port wing of his Spitfire and climb into the cockpit. He put on his helmet and mask, and snapped on his parachute and uninflated dinghy. He taxied the Spitfire out of the sandbagged enclosure where it was kept when not in use.
Daddo-Langlois
