The Caterpillar Club was founded in 1922 as an informal association of aviators whose lives have been saved by parachuting from disabled aircraft in flight. Membership in this exclusive international group includes presentation of a tiny gold caterpillar lapel pin, which acknowledges the silk-worm’s contribution to the development of the parachute as a life-saving safety device.

In 1977, I had become actively involved with the Canadian Warplane Heritage Foundation, a Hamilton, Ontario–based organization founded earlier in the decade by Dennis Bradley, Allan Ness and a few other local visionaries. Their objective was acquisition, and restoration to flying condition, of aircraft types flown by Canadians during the Second World War.

In those fledgling days, CWH was hot on the trail of a Lancaster, a British-designed World War II four-engine heavy bomber. A restorable “Lanc” had been pylon-mounted after its retirement from RCAF duty in 1963 as a static war monument adjacent to the Canadian Legion Hall at a tiny airfield in Goderich, Ontario. At the time, only a single surviving flyable example of this most famous of WWII aircraft existed in the world: the prized centre-piece of the Royal Air Force “Battle of Britain” memorial flight in the U.K. A proposal had been put forward to move the Goderich “Lanc” to Hamilton for restoration to pristine flying condition. A large, heavy and very complex aircraft, it was a daunting proposition but its successful completion would catapult CWH to international recognition.

Many WWII veterans were attracted to Warplane Heritage in those days, and one of them was Eric Grove. A crusty Brit bomber pilot, in 1943 at age twenty-two, Grove had bailed out of a flaming Lancaster over Germany after repeated attacks by a radar-equipped Luftwaffe night-fighter. He survived the jump and spent the next two years as a prisoner of war in the brutally harsh conditions of Stalag IV-B near Muhlberg. After repatriation to England in 1945, he was awarded membership in the Caterpillar Club.

By Civic Holiday weekend that summer of ’77, sufficient money had been raised to convince the Goderich Legion membership to turn over its airplane to CWH, and the Lancaster project was a “go.” In salute to this most important new acquisition we would fly our existing collection of a dozen-or-so successfully restored warbirds from our base in Hamilton over to Goderich to stage a fund-raising airshow at the old airfield, and an appropriate “handover” ceremony would take place.

Technical staff had been in town for weeks, struggling to get the tatty but intact 36,000 lb. bomber down from its ten-foot-tall display pylons in time for the official proceedings. On a gloomy, overcast Friday afternoon prior to the scheduled weekend airshow, it now sat alone beside the Legion Hall where it had stood sentry for more than a decade, its handlers preoccupied with event preparations elsewhere on the airfield.

Eric Grove arrived in one of our aircraft, appropriately attired in his new khaki CWH flight suit. Above the left breast pocket, beside his RAF pilot’s wings, I noted the glint of his tiny gold Caterpillar pin. His attention was, predictably, directed to the “Lanc” and we immediately set out across the airfield. Now, momentarily unattended,  the bomber stood tall on its landing gear, magnificent and imposing, an old warrior once more poised as if for battle.

Eric had not set foot in a Lancaster since that gut-wrenching night over occupied Europe in 1943. “Wanna look inside?” I asked, awkwardly attempting to grasp what close personal proximity to this airplane might mean to him. He nodded quietly, in the affirmative, but his trepidation was visible.

We climbed through the starboard tail hatch and into the long gloomy fuselage, still cluttered with ancient electrical and hydraulic military equipment. Deftly, as though the intervening thirty-four years had evaporated, Eric moved through the aircraft. He slid easily over the main spar and forward onto the flight deck, and our diminishing conversation trailed off to silence.

Under the Perspex-paned canopy, quietly, reverently, he slid into the pilot’s seat. I dropped onto the adjacent flight engineer’s jump seat, now an observer to a silent reunion. With old familiarity, his left hand grasped the control yoke, his right hand the throttle quadrant and prop-pitch controls. His eyes swept over the multitude of black-faced engine and navigation instruments on the dash, then way out past the two 1280 horsepower Rolls Royce Merlin engines on the port wing; finally past their twins to starboard. I did not know the fate of the other six young men in his wartime crew and perhaps, right now as the past merged with the present, their spirits nudged him.

Still silent, his welling eyes reflected a distant time and place…the repository of old warriors and lost youth, the horror of a flaming bomber and dying comrades and a bail-out into that cold black night in November 1943. It was a place I could only imagine and, perhaps mercifully, never know. Minutes ticked by, Eric immersed in the past, and I a witness to this rare process, struggling to understand the complexity, intensity and soul-searing impact of a pilot’s experience.

He motioned to me, and it was time to exit. We scrambled back over the main spar, through the shadow and clutter of the fuselage and out into daylight.

“How ’bout a beer?” I said, in a failing attempt to break the sombre mood, hoping that he might share his thoughts. We headed into the near-deserted legion hall and, as the lone bartender set up appropriate refreshment, Eric glanced down: “Where’s my Caterpillar? It’s missing!”

More than three decades had passed since that night in 1943. Escaping from his blazing Lancaster by parachute high over Nazi Germany, Eric had won his Caterpillar. Now, in the shadows of that gloomy cluttered fuselage in Goderich, Ontario, Eric Grove’s lapel pin had gone full-circle. We searched, but I knew we would not find it.

Today, the Canadian Warplane Heritage Lancaster Mk. X, fully restored and operational, appears regularly at airshows and Memorial flypasts across Canada and the United States. It is one of only two flying examples in the world of an aircraft widely regarded as the finest bomber of the Second World War — a key contributor to Allied victory over Hitler’s Europe. Lancasters equipped many Canadian and British squadrons, and many young men formed its crews. Eric Grove was one of the survivors, living a long and productive life until his passing in 2008, at age 87.

Lodged somewhere in the Goderich Lancaster’s fuselage, in some small crevasse, behind a stringer, or perhaps under a floorboard, it may be that his Caterpillar still flies.

Richard Pickering is the President of BHG Media Fleet Services, a former curator/producer of the Canadian International Auto Show’s signature annual Classics Collection, and a lifelong car/airplane/motorcycle/boat guy.

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Image courtesy of Revolution Imaging.