This article appeared in the National Post on
     November 11th, 2000. By Richard Foot.

Today, as Dale joins Canada’s diminishing corps of veterans at Rememberance Day services across the country, he believes that what saved his life throughout the war was sharp discipline in the air, and also a heavy dose of good fortune.
“It has to be luck, a lot of luck,” he says. After all Dale’s unit, the 150 Squadron of the RAF, suffered daily losses among its crews.
“The death of our friends was hard to take” he says. “And we had replacements coming up all the time.”

“It was certainly a young man’s game,” says Dale “One had to have the unbridled optimism of the young, and the absolute conviction that although the possibilty of being shot down was always there, it was not likely to happen to you. It would always be the other guy.”
Dale cheated death on countless occasions. After graduating from Canada’s famous British Commonwealth Air Training Program, he sailed for England in December 1940. on board a small Caribbean cruise liner called the Nerissa. The ship arrived safely in Scotland despite making the crossing without a convoy. But in 1941, on its very next voyage from Canada with another group of new airmen, the Nerissa was sunk by U-boats. More than 200 died.
In June 1941, Dale had been flying Wellingtons for less than two months when his squadron was ordered to attack the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, two large and elusive German battleships, that had been dicovered sitting in dry dock in the French port of Brest. The RAF decided to send a group of bombers at high altitude over the port to draw the attention of the searchlights and the ani-aircraft batteries. Behind this group a solitary bomber would fly in low, droppint its payload on the deck of the battleships.
Dale’s crew was chosen for the low-level flight. Dale and his airmates had only flown four missions before, “and it was quite obvious to us” he says, “that being one of the least experienced crews, we were the most expendable.”
With their hearts in their mouths, Dale and his crew swept in quietly over the harbour on a moonlit night, dropping delayed action bombs over the dry dock. High above, the main bomber group was indeed attracting the full weight of the port’s anti-aircraft defences. In spite of the great danger to Dale’s aircraft flying in low, it drew not a single shot from the ground. Dale and his crew escaped in their Wellington out over the sea, not knowing if their bombs had hit the target. While they survived the mission unscathed, the raid was not a success. It turned out that the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau would sail again.
 CONTINUED IN “NEWSPAPER 3.”

Surviving crewmen swallowed their fear and returned to the moonlit sky each night bolstered by camaradie, and by the rare resiliency of youth.