For a year, everyone thought Allan Spear was dead.
“The young Bathurst airman was … most popular and well known in the town,” mourned the Moncton Daily Times in 1942. “He was an employee of the Woodlands Division of the Bathurst Power and Paper Co. for a number of years before enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force.”
Soon after, Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner claimed it had “obtained additional facts through roundabout sources” about Spear’s death. The paper interviewed American pilot T.C. “Rusty” Gates, who clearly had not gotten the memo that service members weren’t supposed to chatter about ongoing operations during the Second World War.
Gates told a reporter that Allan Spear had been killed over Libya, along with two other New Brunswick pilots: Campbelltonians Kenneth Bisset and Bert Miller. The three men were longtime friends who had enlisted in the RCAF together. They’d been on a desert reconnaissance mission when they’d been shot down by Italians.
“They have paid the supreme sacrifice,” Gates said. “The Canucks from Bathurst were friends of mine. We were in there doing our part.”
As tragic as it was, the news felt all too familiar. Practically every edition of Bathurst’s weekly Northern Light ran a photo of a man in uniform on the front page with the caption: “Local Boy Killed In Action.”
But the story took an unexpected twist the next spring, when newspapers across Canada published a photograph showing a dozen Canadian prisoners of war in an Italian camp. Nobody knew who the prisoners were; editors ran the picture hoping their identification might bring relief to worried families.
When Jane (Nelson) Spear saw the photo, she was stunned. “There is no doubt to … [Jane] Spear that one of the twelve is Pilot Officer Allan Spear of Bathurst … her only son,” announced the Northern Light.
Though the Italians confirmed Spear was a prisoner, they were strangely evasive and wouldn’t allow the Red Cross to see him.
“Months of anxiety for his relatives and loved ones,” followed, wrote the Northern Light, as Jane endured “several months of anxiety … in suspense.”
Then, only two weeks before Christmas, Jane Spear heard a knock on the door. She opened it and found the most dreaded of all visitors for a parent with a child off fighting in the war: the RCAF’s Casualty Officer — a man whose job it was to deliver the worst of news.
But this time the Casualty Officer carried good news: “Allan Spear is now reported safe.”
Jane Spear told the Northern Light, “The happy news amounts to the most wonderful Christmas present I could ever hope to get!”
Days later, the Casualty Officer returned. He explained, with regret, that there had been a grave mistake. Allan Spear was not safe in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp after all.
He was in New Brunswick. He had just disembarked from a ship in Saint John.
Allan Spear had escaped — and was home for Christmas.
“Another hero of World War II arrived in Bathurst, in the person of Allan Spear,” exulted the gleeful Northern Light, “and a proud mother was finally able to welcome home her son after weeks of anxious waiting.”
Contrary to what “Rusty” Gates had told the press, Spear had not been shot down. While he had indeed been on the fateful flight in which his two friends from Campbellton were killed, his engine had overheated before the Italians had intercepted the flight.
“The intense heat was the problem,” Spear recalled. “The engine got too hot … Suddenly, I noticed my engine had seized. The propeller was just sitting there, looking at me. The throttle was wide open, the switches were on, but there was nothing I could do.”
He made an emergency belly landing in his Spitfire far behind enemy lines. Mere minutes later, German troops arrived. He was taken prisoner.
The Germans left him in an open prison in the desert heat for days. “We were so thirsty we drank from the radiator of an abandoned truck,” Spear remembered.
Next, he and some 3,000 Allied prisoners were packed into an overcrowded ship and eventually moved to an Italian prisoner-of-war camp on the outskirts of Rome.
Not long after the prison camp photograph was taken, Allan Spear — along with fellow prisoners Rod Hughes and Bob Firth — escaped.
With characteristic modesty, Spear claimed the escape hadn’t been difficult: they’d posed as Red Cross workers, picked up cases of food and blankets, and confidently walked out as if it were their job.
The three men made their way south towards where the Canadian Army was fighting. As they travelled, Italian civilians fed and sheltered the three Canadians.
“We had no fear of being turned in by the Italians,” Spear said, although the German troops prowling the region were a different story: “The Germans wouldn’t hesitate to recapture us — or shoot us.”
The trio fled to the foothills and hid. “We found a cave for shelter and ate raw potatoes to survive,” remembered Spear.
As autumn wore on, the nights in their cave grew colder.
The men left the safety of their cave, slipping past German patrols until, at last, they stumbled into the path of the rapidly advancing Canadians. As Spear put it, they hadn’t found the army; the army had found them.
He was sent home, arriving days before Christmas.
Decades later Allan Spear sat down with author A.J. McCarthy for the book The Bay of Chaleur at War and reflected:
“Right after the war, we were still glorifying it. But now, when I think about war, it isn’t anything to do with glory. One time, I used to wish I had shot a lot of Germans down, but now I’m glad I didn’t.”
Spear was keenly aware not every story ended as his had. For countless other Canadians, there was no Christmas reunion, no knock at the door with good news — only the quiet absence of the friends and neighbours who had gone overseas and never came back.
At the age of 77, Allan Spear said:
“When we reminisce about the war years, the only thing I regret now is the friends I lost.”
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