CARSWELL, Flight Lieutenant Andrew Gordon (17834) - Air Force Cross - No.123 Search and Rescue Unit - Awarded as per Canada Gazette dated 15 March 1958 and AFRO 84/58 (same date). Born 29 May 1923 in Bishop or Inyo, California. Canadian parents returned to Toronto in his youth, to Balmy Beach where his grandparents were neighbours on Balsam Avenue. Trained in wartime as a pilot, starting with No.12 EFTS, Goderich. Proceed overseas. Shot down and taken prisoner with No.9 Squadron, 17 January 1943 (Lancaster W4379). Held at Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf, Silesia. He escaped twice, once making it to Stettin on the Baltic. Discharged September 1945. He studied architecture or accountancy at University of Toronto after the war. Wrote a memoire , Over the Wire (Willey, 2012). He worked as an instructor at Central Airways while a student but was bored and rejoined RCAF. After retirement in 1970 he became a Transport Canada Aviation Inspector. Highly regarded as the Regional Air Safety Officer for Ontario and for his float plane expertise. His lively talks and lectures were very popular and much appreciated by the Ontario aviation community. Retired again in 1988, and moved to Washago, Ontario. On 16 September 2019 a cornerstone was laid in Ottawa for a building named for him. See Ottawa Citizen of 17 September 2019 (reference https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/vets-home-opened). For AFC act see Roundel, Vol.X (1958), Number 3, page 21. Died in Toronto, 25 July 2021. // On 28 June 1956, Flight Lieutenant Carswell took off in a Canso aircraft in an attempt to rescue two fishermen from a sinking vessel near Galiano Island in the Straits of Georgia. Despite strong winds and extremely rough waters, Flight Lieutenant Carswell made a successful landing. Flight Lieutenant Carswell then manoeuvred the aircraft into a position where the two fishermen could be rescued. The takeoff in the rough seas was a particularly hazardous one demanding of the highest skill as the aircraft had been severely damaged by the heavy seas during the landing and was shipping water faster than could be handled by the pumps. He then flew with the survivors to Sea Island without further incident. // On another occasion on 6 September 1956, Flight Lieutenant Carswell under difficult conditions successfully landed a Canso aircraft at sea some 600 miles off the West Coast of Vancouver Island in an attempt to remove a critically ill member of the weather ship St.Catharines. With considerable difficulty the seaman was transferred to the aircraft and with jet assisted takeoff the aircraft became airborne and returned to Victoria where the seaman was transferred to hospital. It was the belief of authoritative medical personnel that had not the patient been evacuated by air, he would not have survived the long sea voyage to Victoria. Flight Lieutenant Carswell's courage, devotion to duty, and skill have served as an inspiration and fine example to fellow aircrew. He is highly recommended as being most worthy of the Air Force Cross. // The following by Josh Rubin was published in the Toronto Star, 28 July 2021. // Andrew Gordon “Andy” Carswell, a WWII flying ace who twice escaped captivity from a German PoW camp, and went on to inspire generations of Canadian pilots, has died at the age of 98. // Carswell died peacefully in his sleep Sunday night at the Sunnybrook Veterans Centre, his son John told the Star. // While he was hailed as a hero for his WWII flying prowess — and for routinely saving the lives of several people during his post-war stint as a search and rescue pilot — his father never let his flying exploits go to his head, John said. Those exploits earned him an Air Force Cross for Bravery from Queen Elizabeth II in 1958. // “He was a uniformed officer in the Air Force, a great pilot, and to me, he was really something. But he was not a man of any artifice. He was a man of the people,” said John, whose father often laughed as he recalled one visit to an Air Force officers mess. // In the lofty environment, the hoi poloi typically didn’t talk to officers much, John Carswell said. Heads turned when a cook walked out of the kitchen and casually said “Hey Andy, we going flying tomorrow?” // His father smiled, nodded and said yes. // “He taught me that everybody mattered,” said John Carswell. // Andy Carswell, was born May 29, 1923 in California to Canadian parents who moved back to Toronto’s Balmy Beach neighbourhood when he was still young. // Like many members of his generation, he unhesitatingly joined up to fight in WWII, enlisting with the Royal Canadian Air Force, where he became a Lancaster bomber pilot at the age of 19. // He was shot down over Silesia — in current-day Poland — in 1943, and spent most of the rest of the war as a prisoner in Stalag VIIIB. Twice, he escaped from the camp, only to be recaptured by German forces. // “I felt it was my duty to escape,” he told the Star in a 2005 interview. “The Germans were putting up signs that said: ‘Notice to Prisoners: Escaping is no Longer a Sport.’ And they told us they’d shoot us,” Andy Carswell said. // After the war, he briefly became a flight instructor at a private airline, then rejoined the RCAF in 1948. While with the RCAF, he joined their search and rescue operation, and several times made headlines for saving lives, including a risky rescue of five sailors who had been hanging on for dear life after capsizing off the Vancouver Island coast. // “Wrecked B.C. Seamen Safe; all five on island,” read the front page headline in the Vancouver Province. // That rescue, with a float plane, was particularly risky, his son John recounted. Float planes are typically not landed in open seas because of the risk of capsizing from waves. // “The plane was bobbing around, but he managed to take off, anyway, with all of the sailors on board. That’s something that not a lot of people could have done,” said John, who himself went on to a career in the Air Force, and today runs Canso Investment Counsel Ltd. // Eventually, Andy Carswell moved on to work at Transport Canada, in their air safety division. While being a civil servant might have seemed less exciting than being a bomber pilot or flying search and rescue missions, it was in that role that Andy Carswell had what was perhaps his longest-lasting impact on Canadian aviation. // As a regional safety inspector for Transport Canada, he was asked to head up a team to look into air safety after several deadly crashes in Northern Ontario. The provincial government at the time had threatened to regulate aviation if nothing was done. // Carswell turned in his report. His gobsmacked boss, fearing political blowback, chided him. // “Andy, you can’t just say there’s no air safety in Northern Ontario,” his boss yelled. // Carswell stood his ground, and the report was eventually published. It led to the Dubin Commission on Aviation Safety, which found that Transport Canada managed its air safety division ineffectively, and recommended more independence for safety inspectors. // “Professionally, if you asked him, that report was probably the thing he was most proud of. If he thought something was wrong, he wanted it done right,” said John Carswell. “He spoke up when he saw something was wrong, and sometimes that hurt his career.” // Andy Carswell is survived by Dorothy, his wife of 74 years, four children, 10 grandchildren, 12 great grandchildren and several nieces and nephews. // He was predeceased by his daughter Marg in 2017. // See also https://www.pressreader.com/canada/ottawa-citizen/20210729/281874416442808, article by Tristin Hopper, “Former POW Vowed to Enjoy Every Minute of Freedom”, Ottawa Citizen, 29 July 2021 (from National Post). Text as follows: // By all statistical measures, Andrew Carswell’s life should not have ended peacefully in his sleep at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Veterans Centre last Sunday. Rather, it should have ended violently in a farmer’s field outside Zerbst, Germany 78 years ago. // On January 17, 1943, the 19-year-old Carswell was piloting a four-engine Lancaster bomber on a raid to Berlin when it was crippled by anti-aircraft fire roughly 150 km west of Berlin. Carswell not only managed to bail out of the burning, spinning aircraft, but survived POW camps, death marches and even friendly fire from British fighters. // When his column of starving prisoners was liberated by advancing British troops, Carswell would remember only a sleepless night where he vowed “to enjoy every minute of my new found freedom.” As he would conclude in a biography penned decades later, “and I did.” // Carswell’s death on July 25 at the age of 98 not only marks the passing of one of Canada’s last Second World War bomber pilots, but caps off a life that would feature many more daring feats of Canadian aviation – and would have the retired RCAF officer doing much to shape the current state of Canadian passenger aviation. // “There was no sensation of falling,” Carswell would write later of his escape from the tumbling Lancaster. “I seemed to be floating motionless in space as I heard the high-pitched scream of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines rapidly fading away into the cold blackness of the night.” // Given the season and the altitude, the air around the floating Carswell was roughly -30 degree Celsius. “Here I was, a nineteen-year-old boy, not long out of high school, thousands of feet up in the air, swinging from a parachute not far from Berlin, floating down into the middle of enemy territory,” he said. // Carswell had enlisted in the RCAF on his 18th birthday, and at the time of his final bomber mission he was one of the few people in an Allied uniform able to strike directly at the heart of Nazi Germany. But it also meant he was one of the least likely to return home. // An incredible 44 per cent of Bomber Command crew members would not survive the war – the highest fatality rate of any other Commonwealth service. // Carswell would have known the sight of bunks left empty from fellow aviators who never returned from missions, but it wouldn’t be until after the war that he would fully appreciate the dangers he had been expected to assume as a Lancaster pilot. “I suppose I might have joined the Navy had I known,” he told the Toronto Star in a 2011 interview. // Carswell’s autobiography Over the Wire would detail his war as a POW in the Stalag VIII-B camp in what is now Poland. The Canadian was involved in two daring escape attempts, both of which had Carswell absconding from work details outside the camp. Equipped with forged papers and civilian dress, both attempts got miles into Nazi Germany before being foiled – one by a railway worker and the other by a Stettin police officer. // But Carswell’s most noted feats as an airman would come after his 1945 liberation. Re-enlisting in the RCAF as a pilot in 1949, he was soon posted to the Vancouver area where he would fly PBY Canso flying boats in search and rescue operations on the West Coast. // It was one such mission in 1956 that would have Queen Elizabeth pinning him with the Air Force Cross. Carswell had been responding to a report of a fishing boat foundering near B.C.’s Galiano Island. // He arrived on the scene just in time to see the boat sink beneath the waves, tossing its two crew members into the frigid waters. While prior patrol aircraft had refused to land due to the rough conditions, Carswell was able to pull off a landing, allowing the two men to be pulled to safety. // “Another 10 minutes or so and the end of the story might have been much different,” one of the survivors would later tell reporters. The PBY Canso had a leak that was filling the fuselage with seawater throughout the rescue, and amid the sounds of warning sirens Carswell was only narrowly able to take off again due to the added weight. // The same year as the Galiano rescue, Carswell’s Canso would also rescue five crew members of a government survey vessel who had become marooned on a remote Sunshine Coast island in the middle of a blizzard. “Thank God for the RCAF,” was the crew’s summation of their rescue to the Vancouver Sun. // For someone whose aviation career had been defined by close calls, it’s notable that one of Carswell’s most lasting contributions was in the realm of air safety. In 1977, as a federal transport ministry investigator, Carswell went incognito on an 1,800 mile tour of Northern Ontario by air charter, revealing commercial aviation practices that were negligent to the point of recklessness. // “The timid approach to enforcement which Transport Canada is perceived to have adopted is an ineffectual deterrent that has nurtured unsatisfactory aviation safety standards,” was the understated conclusion of Carswell and fellow investigator William Slaughter following a journey that had included inexperienced pilots flying without proper instruments in planes with dubious maintenance records and falsified log books. // Leaked to the press, the report would inspire the Royal Commission on Air Safety, eventually leading to the inauguration of the Transportation Safety Board. // Carswell is survived by his wife of 74 years, Dot, 100. The couple met at a dance in Toronto after the war, married in 1947 and had five children.