Little Christopher Clarkson loved breaking into the airbase to watch the warplanes. On May 22nd, 1919, he snuck onto Shoreham Airdrome in England and watched as a Canadian ace took off in a captured German plane to fly a race against a Swedish nobleman in a British plane. Mere minutes after takeoff, the wings fell off the Canadian’s plane.
The little boy was shocked that none of the pilot’s fellow Canadians on the ground called for help. He watched in horror as one raised a camera towards the dead body of their ranking officer, the greatest flying ace ever to come from The Maritimes, and snapped a photo.
Albert Desbrisay Carter was the dead ace pilot’s name, but everyone called him “Nick.”
He came from the tiny village of Point de Bute, a speck on the map between Sackville and Amherst, straddling the New Brunswick–Nova Scotia border.
Carter was an only child from a well-off family. He’d always dreamed of becoming a lawyer and was well on his way in 1914. He was 22 years old and studying law at Mount Allison University when the First World War broke out.
Nick promptly dropped out of law school to enlist. He’d long been drawn to military life and had already spent years in the local militia. Having actual military experience made him a rarity in Canada at the outbreak of the war. He was promptly commissioned as an officer.
He fought in the trenches as a machine gunner, but only lasted three weeks. His war wound was not a dignified one — while relieving himself with his pants down, a German sniper shot him in the bum.
Nick was sent to England to recuperate. He watched planes from his hospital window and vowed to become a pilot. His transfer was denied — at 24, he was thought to be too old to fly. He used his rank and his ability to charm and schmooze to get in anyway.
Nick turned out to be a spectacular pilot, one of the very best. He quickly achieved the status of ace pilot and the fame and glory that came with it.
According to historian Stewart K. Taylor, as Nick’s reputation grew, so did his demands: “Major Carter’s disposition went into a much higher gear — pity the poor mechanics who could not accommodate his rash of requests for all those little accommodations that only an uncompromising, often belligerent … man like Carter was certain to demand.”
As he shot down more and more German planes, the phrase “unchecked ego” was used to describe him. Nick Carter was undeniably brave. Undeniably skilled. And, according to many who met him, undeniably difficult.
Nick’s wartime heroics came to an end after he lost a dogfight with ace German pilot Paul Bilik.
As Carter and Bilik’s planes chased each other through the skies, Nick’s gun malfunctioned, blowing off his own propeller. He made an emergency landing behind enemy lines and was captured.
The Germans respected him as an ace pilot and a high-ranking officer. They treated him equally to captured British officers. British officers themselves had never done that before. To them, Carter had always been lesser than. A mere colonial. A Canadian.
Taylor interviewed other Canadian prisoners from that camp, who claimed Nick refused to acknowledge them. Instead, he associated exclusively with the elite British officers who finally embraced him as their equal.
After the war ended, Nick was sent back to England and placed in command of a squadron in the newly formed, all-Canadian Air Force. But, much as he’d once been treated as inferior by the British elites, now that they accepted him, he treated his fellow Canadians as beneath him.
Historian Stewart K. Taylor tried for decades to sort out what really happened to Carter the morning of the crash. One bright and sunny afternoon in 1975 in a Calgary park he finally got his answer. Taylor wrote that a man who had been a member of the ground crew 56 years earlier “looked at me straight in the eye and under oath that I would not write about what he was going to tell me until after his death, without showing the slightest hint of emotion, began:”
“He was a strict disciplinarian and this was resented by the ground crew who had had enough military discipline in the war and were anxious to return home … Carter had them virtually locked in their quarters.” And so, the unnamed member of Carter’s ground crew continued: “The bolts connecting the inter-plane cabane struts with the upper wing had been partially sawn off.”
The inquiry into Carter’s death took place the same afternoon he was killed. It lasted only one hour. The ground crew all told the same story; they’d thoroughly inspected the plane the night before. The struts had not been sabotaged. No, the crew said, they had not done a final pre-flight inspection the next morning; that was the pilot’s job. Carter had not done a pre-flight check. He never did.
The inquiry found that Carter’s plane had been unguarded that night.
The ground crew had an iron-clad alibi: Nick had locked them in their barracks that night.
The pilots also had an alibi; they’d been out drinking with Nick the night before. Plenty of witnesses remembered a loud argument after Carter had claimed German airplanes were superior to those of the Allies. He had pulled rank to get a hold of a brand new, high-tech Fokker DVII German airplane that had been surrendered to the Allies as part of the Versailles peace treaty. He drove it as his personal plane. He never had it repainted in Canadian colours for reasons that were never explained.
It was tensions over his beloved German plane, and his claims it was superior to anything the Allies had, that led to the mock dogfight competition that morning between Carter in his German plane and Swede-turned-Ontarian Captain Carl Frederick Falkenburg, who flew a British airplane.
Just before he took off, a photo was taken of Carter looking confident behind the stick of a captured German Fokker DVII, the Iron Cross still painted on the side. Minutes later, he was dead.
Falkenburg, the rival pilot in the mock dogfight that morning, described to the inquiry the moment the wing fell off Carter’s plane: “When at about 7000 feet, I heard a noise behind me and on looking around … the Fokker was just pulling out of a dive. … I saw the wings of the Fokker break away from the machine.”
Suddenly, without warning, the top wing of The Maritimer’s twin-winged Fokker tore away.
“I watched the machine go down in a vertical nose dive until it hit the ground.”
Fifty-six years later, the veteran who had once been part of the ground crew confessed to historian Stewart K. Taylor:
“Considering the attitude of the ground crew at the time, it was impossible to bring the culprit, or culprits, to trial and the actual participants were never identified.”
The veteran claimed the three Canadian officers running the inquiry had figured out what had really happened that morning, but had “hushed it up” to protect the reputation of Canada’s fledgling air force.
The inquiry’s official ruling on the death of Albert Desbrisay “Nick” Carter reads: “The Cause of the Accident was, in our opinion, that the machine collapsed in coming out of a dive.”
