Halifax 57 Rescue (Canada)
isbn 1-894263-94-4
$19.95 (plus shipping and handling)
The Caterpillar Club. Ever heard of it?
It's very exclusive. To belong, you must jump out of a doomed airplane and save
your life by parachute.
Writes John Neal, “Thousands of airmen, and a few airwomen, number among the
most highly treasured souvenirs of their service a tiny caterpillar badge. . . .
Today the walls of an office of the Irvin Industries factory at Letchworth,
Hartfordshire, England, and Belleville, Ontario, are lined with steel filing
cabinets containing the records of tens of thousands of airmen of all nations
who have escaped death by jumping with an IRVIN parachute.” Switlik Parachute
Company was another supplier of parachutes during earlier periods, and the
company still has many Caterpillar stories in their archives.
Neal has compiled the stories of some of these survivors. Starting with Dolly
Shepherd, a pioneer Caterpillar who bailed out in 1906, we read accounts of men
and women who made daring, astonishing, and even bizarre escapes from burning
airplanes and hot air balloons. Some of them ended up as prisoners of war;
others escaped capture, but were injured; still others were saddened when their
mates did not survive. There are even stories of free fall from great
heights—and men such as Alan Magee and Nicholas Alkemade who lived to tell us
about it.
Bless You, Brother Irvin is a big Thank You to Leslie Irvin, who
developed the parachute system, and to all those unknown men and women who
packed the parachutes that have saved so many lives.
And this thank you is also expressed in the way that the majority of revenue
from this book will be donated to the Halifax Project of "Halifax 57 Rescue
(Canada)". An organization with a successful history of wartime Halifax bomber
recoveries, "Halifax 57 Rescue (Canada)" is planning to raise RCAF Halifax
LW170 from the deep sea west of the Hebrides Islands in 2006, and bring it to
the Nanton, Alberta bomber museum for restoration and display. The story can be
read at www.57rescuecanada.com.
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