On Dec 16, 12:09*pm, Dave Smith > wrote:
> I had an interesting package arrive in the mail today. It was not
> totally out of the blue because the sender had contacted me by email
> last week because he had come across some of my father's things while
> cleaning out his late aunt's home.
>
> He was vaguely aware that his aunt's brother had been killed in the war
> but she never spoke much about it until the last few months of her life
> and she told him that there were some paper's about her brother in a
> drawer upstairs. *It turned out that the brother had been the tail
> gunner in my father's plane. They were shot down over Denmark in April,
> 1943. My father was the only one who got out of the plane before it
> crashed and the rest of the crew were killed. *Dad managed to escape to
> neutral Sweden and eventually back to England and then home to Canada
> for awhile before returning to England. He had written the family a
> letter telling them how their son had been unable to escape from the
> rear turret and had fired at the night fighter all the way down.
>
> Some of Dad's things had been sent to Jack's family in error. Among them
> were Dad's diary and a bunch of family photos.
>
> This stuff had been sitting in a drawer in a spare room in this woman's
> house for 66 years, and this fellow, after reading Dad's letter to the
> family, was kind enough to track me down and send it to me.

See....there are good people out there!