Jeannette Letourneau will represent the Silver Cross Motherhood of Canada at this year’s Remembrance Day ceremony in St. Paul, in memory of her brother Alfred Arthur Joseph Tremblay, warrant officer second class, who died in World War II.
“It is quite an honour,” said Letourneau, who was genuinely moved by the request from Russ Whitford to be this year’s Silver Cross Mother. A memorial plaque dedicated to Tremblay will be proudly displayed at Coldwell Banker Realty.
Letourneau was only 11-years-old when her family received word that her 21-year-old brother had disappeared during a nighttime mission at Aachen, Germany. She remembers the impact of the news on her family.
“We were 12 kids and it was quite the shock. Families don’t expect it. We all think it will never happen to us,” said Letourneau.
Because her brother’s body and nametags were never found, her mother kept hoping for years that her son would return.
“We lived across a park and people would have to get off this bus and cross the park to get to our area,” recalled Letourneau. “Whenever an airman come off that bus or across that park, my mother would be right there in the window waiting for him to turn into our yard, but he never did. Eventually she came to peace with it, but my God, it was devastating.”
Tremblay was a navigator on an Avro Lancaster, a British four-engine Second World War heavy bomber. There were six men on board the plane when it was shot down. It exploded in mid-air and was completely destroyed on impact. The remains of two people were identified, the pilot and the rear gunner, but the other four were missing and it is thought that they were either torn to pieces when the aircraft exploded or that they parachuted out of the plane and were later killed.
Letourneau said that her mother continued to write the Red Cross for many years and communicated with the mother of the pilot of the plane, but there was never any further information about Tremblay’s fate. His name is now listed at the Runnymede Memorial in Surry U.K.
“When you have bullets flying though your aircraft, you can’t always depend on the instruments,” said Whitford, explaining that navigators had challenging jobs and had to be able to read landmarks sometimes in the dark to guide the plane. He said that many Commonwealth airmen were trained in Alberta and Saskatchewan in those days.
It was one of the last missions that Tremblay was expected to fly, only six months before the end of the war.
Tremblay was born on March 4, 1923 in Lamoureux, a French parish close to Edmonton. However, when he was only a few months old, he moved to St. Paul with his parents, where he spent the next 18 years.
At age five, he had a bad fall that fractured his spinal column and he was transported to the Red Cross Hospital. He remained there for 13 months, completely immobilized and then was brought back home for six months, still in his body cast.
“How was he healed?” said Letourneau as she read from some biographical notes collected by her nephew. “Mom, dad, younger brothers and sisters multiplied their prayers and offered novena upon novena to saint Joseph, joined by brother Andre.”
Letourneau stopped reading to clarify, that it is the same brother Andre that has recently been declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
Soon Tremblay’s body cast was removed and he learned to walk again and continued on his education until graduation, following which he enrolled in aviation.
In 1942, he became a navigator and soon entered into the Second World War. He was promoted to sergeant, which meant an increase in pay to help his family. On the night of May 24, 1944 he left on the dangerous mission from which he never returned.
Although he died young, his story lives on in the hearts of his sister and in generations of his family.