We Are The Dead: Flying Officer Arthur Reid died on a secret mission to occupied France

Late on the evening of Feb. 7, 1944, Flying Officer Arthur Reid was on board one of seven Halifax bombers that took to the sky above RAF Tempsford bound for occupied France on a secret mission.

The seven airplanes were attached to the Royal Air Force’s 138 Squadron, a special duties squadron that flew clandestine missions over Nazi-occupied Europe.

On this night, they were bound for southeast France, on a mission to drop supplies and an important agent to aid the French resistance.

The weather was grim: windy and cold with low cloud. Two of the seven Halifax bombers would be lost during the mission. Another three would be forced into emergency landings at other air bases in England.

Reid’s plane crashed in the French Alps, not far from the town of Grenoble, near the Swiss border. Members of the French resistance heard the plane struggling to maintain altitude, then shortly afterward, “a dull thump.”

There was a blizzard at the time, and the resistance fighters had to wait for it to subside before climbing to the crash site. They would eventually retrieve seven bodies, including that of the navigator, Flying Officer Reid.

Reid, a grocery clerk from Windsor, Ont., was buried alongside his fellow crewmen in the small, mountain village of Autrans, France.

He was 22.

In an interview Monday, Reid’s nephew, Bill Matalik, 60, of Windsor, said the story of his Uncle Art’s sacrifice has been kept alive in the family. He has passed on those memories to his children and grandchildren.

“We would always talk of it every Remembrance Day,” Matalik said. “My children love history and I try to tell them the stories as I remember then so that they can carry them on.”

On Remembrance Day, Arthur Reid’s name was issued by @WeAretheDead, an account on the social media site X.

Former Ottawa Citizen reporter Glen McGregor established the @WeAretheDead account 13 years ago to honour Canada’s war dead. It publishes one name at 11 minutes past each hour from the list of more than 119,000 Canadians who have lost their lives in uniform.

Each year, the Citizen has taken the name randomly published at 11:11 a.m. on Remembrance Day, and launched a one-day reporting effort—conducted with the help of readers and researchers online—to tell the story of that fallen soldier.

This year, it was Reid.

Arthur Edward Reid was born on July 17, 1921 in Debert, Nova Scotia. One of 11 siblings, Reid moved with his family to Windsor, Ont. while still a boy.

His father, Robert, worked as a plant supervisor in the city’s Chrysler car factory. Reid went to Roseland Public School and Windsor-Walkerville Technical School, where he studied commerce while competing in hockey, baseball, and track and field. He liked to play the guitar and to read.

After graduating from high school in 1938, he worked as a clerk in a hardware and grocery store before the Second World War interrupted his life.

In August 1940, with Nazi Germany occupying most of continental Europe, Reid enlisted in the army. He spent a year training in the tank corp before having a change of heart and enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Like many young men, Reid yearned to be an RCAF pilot.

His attestation papers describe him as standing 5’6 with brown eyes, fair hair and bad teeth. The medical officer who examined him found Reid to be “mild and modest in manner,” of “average intelligence and stability,” and with few mechanical interests.

He was deemed to be suited for an RCAF career as a wireless operator, air gunner or navigator.

Reid was sent to No. 7 Air Observer School near Portage la Prairie, where his chief instructor reported that he was pleasant, popular and commanded respect. “He has proved that he can keep his head and do good navigation in an emergency,” the instructor said. “He works very hard and does everything thoroughly.”

He went through more training in Trenton, Toronto and Halifax before being sent overseas in February 1943. After more operational training in England, Reid was assigned to 138 Squadron in Britain’s Royal Air Force in mid-December 1943.

An RAF webpage describes the squadron’s secretive missions: “For more than three and a half years, the squadron ranged Europe from Norway in the north to Yugoslavia in the south and at times far into Poland. First with Whitleys and Lysanders, then with Halifaxes and later with Stirlings, it flew out from Newmarket, Stradishall and Tempsford with, agents, arms, explosives, radio sets and all the other equipment of the saboteur, parachuting them down at rendezvous points where reception committees of local underground members waited.”

As navigator, Reid was responsible for keeping his aircraft on course, reaching its target, and guiding it home. He had flown precious few operational missions when he was assigned to join the night flight to occupied France.

The Handley Page Halifax bombers flown by 138 Squadron were specially modified for their clandestine missions. The engine exhaust was shrouded to hide their telltale flames from enemy fighters, while the gun turret in the plane’s belly was removed and folding doors installed over a “Joe hole”—the hatch from which agents could parachute.

The nose gun was also removed, giving the bomb aimer a clearer view of the landing zone, often a field dimly lit by Resistance fighters waiting to receive the drop.

It’s believed that Reid’s aircraft was delivering supplies to the resistance as well as dropping canisters of propaganda leaflets that fateful night of Feb. 7.

Another plane among the seven that lifted off from RAF Tempsford carried a British agent, Francis Cammaerts, of the famed Special Operations Executive.

SOE agents were highly trained irregular soldiers, some of them commandos, some of them women, who worked with underground resistance units waging guerrilla warfare and sabotage attacks in enemy territory. In the words of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, it was the SOE’s job “to set Europe ablaze.”

SOE operatives wore civilian clothing and, if captured, were subject to torture and execution. Their average life expectancy was just six weeks, according to Britain’s National Army Museum.

On the night of Feb. 7-8, the Halifax carrying Cammaerts iced up as it flew over France, and lost an engine, but continued to the target. The plane made it to the drop site, delivered its human cargo, and crash landed. (The crew all survived and managed to avoid capture.)

Reid’s plane may have been similarly been victimized by the weather, or damaged by a German nightfighter, the scourge of all Allied bomber pilots.

Reid was reported missing after his plane failed to return on Feb. 8, 1944, and “presumed dead” by December.

In June 1945, Reid’s parents received a letter from the RCAF’s casualty officer, confirming that he had died in the February 1944 crash. They later received a letter from the mayor of Autrans, Henri Barnier, who told them the crash happened on a cold night, during a “raging snowstorm.”

A group of resistance fighters, hiding in a forest hut, saw the plane issue distress signals and then heard “the dull sound” of a crash, he said. When the storm finished, they searched the forest and found the plane crumpled among some fir trees.

The bodies were removed in April, Barnier said, and buried in the Autrans Communal Cemetery. “In the grief of this cruel loss, be at least in peace, madame, as to the last sleep of your son and his young comrades,” he told Reid’s mother.

In November 1946, RCAF Wing Commander W.A. Dicks sent Reid’s parents their son’s operational wings. “I realize there is little which may be said or done to lesson your sorrow,” he wrote, “but it is my hope that these wings, indicative of operations against the enemy, will be a treasured momento of a young life offered on the altar of freedom.”

Matalik said his mother, Jean, told him his grandmother could not handle news of her son’s death.

“She got very ill and was bedridden for months,” he said. “And my mother, basically at 10 years old, was trying to run the household. She had to take care of the younger ones. It took my grandmother probably three or four months to to get out of bed.”

For years, Reid’s parents would remember their lost son on the anniversary of his death by publishing a memorial notice in the newspaper.

On the first anniversary of his death, in 1945, they wrote: “We think of you often as we sit alone, hoping and praying that yet you will come home.”

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