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

Later that year Dale and his mates were returning from a bombing raid on Manheim, deep inside Germany. Once again, the Wellington was torn with anti-aircraft fire and the radio was broken. Without wireless contact, Dale was forced to navigate through the night using only a map and compass and his best estimated return course between the target and home base. After seven hours of flying the crew dipped below the clouds expecting to see the open fields of the English midlands, instead there was nothing but water.

D By the time Dale figured out where they were and located the nearest airfield, however, the Wellington had run out of gas. They were forced to crash-land in a field. Amazingly no one was hurt.
In 1942, despite surviving a full tour with Bomber Command, Dale volunteered to fight on as a member of Pathfinder Force, a new group of elite Allied airmen whose task was to fly reconnaisance missions across Europe in fast high altitude, Mosquito bombers. The Pathfinders criss-crossed the continent on long flights over enemy turf, searching out bomb targets, checking cloud cover prior to raids and also flying ahead of the main bomber group dropping flares on the targets to improve the accuracy of the attack. Although the Mosquito trips were less dangerous than those in Wellingtons, Dale says, “There was no doubt that the Germans followed our Mosquito reconnaissance flights, as we usually had to run the gauntlet of patrolling enemy fighters along the coast of France and Holland as we returned to base. Dale flew his most important Pathfinder mission in 1944, when he and his pilot were ordered to fly several hundred kilometres west-wards  over the Atlantic in search of a low pressure weather system moving towards Europe. Without satellite weather maps to guide them, the Allied commanders wanted to know if their secret D-day invasion plans would be hampered by bad weather. Dale discovered the location of the low pressure front and recalls being debriefed by a cadre of senior commanders. “We could tell by the number of high ranking officers that something big was about to happen,” he says. Thanks to his warnings of poor weather, the D-day invasion was postponed by several days.
Dale volunteered for a second tour with Pathfinders Force - in spite of the risks he had survived and the ones that were sure to come - participating in the historic battles that followed D-day and ultimately led to Germany’s defeat. His relentless wartime efforts are a testament to the ideals of commitment and duty.
Back in Canada, he returned to university and the life that awaited him before war interrupted his ambitions. He became chairman and CEO of Maple Leaf Mills, director of numerous other companies and honorary aide-de-camp to the lieutenant - governor of Ontario.
Like Dale, 72,834 other Canadians were trained by the British Commonwealth Air Training Program for the air war in Europe. Unlike Dale, thousands never returned home to pick up their lives again in Canada.
“Their valour and sacrifice” he says, “must never be forgotten.”

Dale believed they were either south of England or had overshot their base and were flying west over the Atlantic - a horrible thought considering the little feul left on board. In fact the Wellington was on course and flying over The Wash a wide ocean bay on England’s east coast.