When last we saw Lambie in Donald Lambie’s War — Episode Two, he was on his way to Bellaria from a Personnel Transit Centre in the south of Italy after having finished a short refresher Spitfire flying course at Guado, Italy.

On Saturday, May 14, 2022, Canadian fighter pilot legend Wing Commander James Francis Edwards of Nakomis, Saskatchewan passed away a month short of his 101st birthday. In the argot of aircrew from the Second World War, Stocky has “gone west.”

The weather was overcast and cool, but the wind was steady down the runway and it was time.

When last we saw our intrepid aviator, in Episode One of Donald Lambie’s War, he had boarded His Majesty’s Troopship Andes in Halifax for a crossing of the Atlantic. …

Don Lambie died before he even knew that his album was found. What right did we have to even have it in our possession, let alone pore over it with the intent of publishing it. It was, after all, his personal story not ours. What compelled us to tell his story, the story of a man we never met?

While most students of aviation history, and indeed North American history, are aware of the famed Tuskegee Airmen and their determined struggle just to be allowed to fly combat missions alongside white combat pilots …

Author, artist, historian and researcher Terry Higgins has been writing, illustrating and assembling a comprehensive historical compendium of the exploits of the famous 404 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force…

If you want to be part of one of the most exciting things to happen to Ottawa/Gatineau in decades, but can only devote a couple of days each summer, have we got a job for you! …

Suddenly however a plane came down circling around with its engine heavy smoking. We noticed at once when it came out of the damp that it was a British fighter. The lower it came the more scared we got because we didn’t know where it should come down, because of its circling around. ..

It’s Christmas Eve and though just early evening, the dim light of winter is long receded, replaced by the orange vapour darkness of an urban night. Outside my house a Canadian hibernal front descends

Of my five Christmas celebrations in wartime RCAF units, 1943 was the most memorable. The earlier years had not been without their unusual features. The first, 1940, when I was at…

Recently, we lost that great British dramatic actor Richard Attenborough, whose role in The Great Escape set the tone for the great laconic and stoic British war heroes depicted thereafter. In 1963, Attenborough appeared in…

In the early hours of 6 June 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, which had been in the planning for years, took the Germans by complete surprise, despite the massive buildup on the littoral of southern Great Britain…

Along the sunny Gulf Coast of Mississippi runs a VLA route (very low-level, high-speed flying) frequented by American military fliers for decades. Back in the early nineties, on a dock on Davis Bayou, with a cold St. Pauli Girl beer in my hand…

The privileged spectators draw close. Conversations stop. All eyes are on the old contraption as it creeps up gently to the beautiful old biplane. Is it going to work? Is it going to turn the propeller…

It is our tradition at Vintage Wings of Canada to offer up a story of an American aviator on the occasion of Thanksgiving, that most important of American holidays. Of course, we have Thanksgiving in Canada as well, but it is a full month and…

War, for any nation caught in its misfortunate grip, can be a fiery forge of national identity. Victory or humiliation in conflict can serve to shape the national consciousness and international …

Two Royal Canadian Air Force airmen would become the first to die in Canada in the Second World War, but they would not be found until 1958. Canada is a very, very large country. Most of it is unpopulated. In 1939, it seemed a lot bigger…