WWII pilot disappeared on fateful flight

Details

Published on Friday, March 23, 2018

Photo by Erik Wieman
Nels Andersen was raised at Woodside, Manitoba and his RCAF identification card is shown above.

Ken Waddell
Neepawa Banner & Press

Thousands of families across Canada have a story of an ancestor who marched, sailed or flew off to war between 1939 and 1945. Many families lost a loved one and some never did find out what actually happened to their family member. That was the case for the family of Nels Andersen of Woodside, Manitoba. Andersen was an airman who trained at Brandon air base. He was a crew member of a Halifax bomber. In 1945 he and his crew flew into German territory on a bombing run. Their plane disappeared and there was little if any record  of what happened. The whole crew was lost in the crash.

Crash site discovered

According to a CTV report a man in Germany named Erik Wieman was out metal detecting and came across the wreckage of Andersen’s plane. He is making it his mission to contact the family of the plane’s crew members.

Nels Andersen’s niece, Helen Kopp of Morris, Manitoba said. “We were quite excited to hear the news. The family just knew that he flew off one night and never returned. When we were young, we maybe didn’t think about it but when you get older you start to wonder about it. I think the people in Germany are planning to put up a plaque where the plane disappeared.”

Nels Andersen’s older brother, Hans lives with his wife at Maple Ridge, BC. In a telephone interview with the Neepawa Banner and Press Hans re-told the family’s story. Nels flew off on a bombing run one night “and we knew he was gone because we got a letter from the government.” Like thousands of families across Canada, the much dreaded letters arrived advising of the deaths of loved ones. With resignation in his voice, Hans said, “it can’t be helped.” Mrs. Andersen said. “The family members now know what happened even though they were born long afterward, it’s still good to know.”

On a brighter note Mrs. Andersen did what most BC residents do when talking to people “back home”, she informed us that it was “sunny and 18 degrees in Maple Ridge” on March 16.

Angus Sneesby who married Nels’ sister said in a phone interview. “I have been doing a lot of research and there are a lot of people involved in this. Whenever they find a crash site or find something in a construction excavation, they try to identify who was killed. They will identify the casualties by the (uniform) buttons and then they sometimes do DNA testing.” In the case of Nels plane, he said they believed the fuel tanks exploded due to battle damage.

Sneesby, who was raised at Arden and Woodside, now lives at Brandon and is active in the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum. Sneesby extended an invitation to people to come to the CATP museum to see the memory wall with 17,000 names on it and to see the many aircraft and artifacts including the seven air worthy planes. The names on the memory wall are of the men and women of the CATP who lost their lives during WWII.

file photo

A Halifax bomber similar to the one that Nels Andersen flew on the night he crashed in 1945.