Bringing back the Typhoon

By Dan Hilborn
Published May 11, 2005


When 1st Lieut. Harry James Hardy, DFC, CD, travelled to the grand opening of Canada's Juno Beach Centre in Normandy two years ago, he was pleasantly surprised by his nation's tribute to the men and women who served in the Second World War.

Among its seven spacious rooms were tributes to virtually every aspect of the final push to victory. There were hundreds of awe-inspiring photos of the fighting men and women, grand displays of the gear and equipment that helped keep them alive, and the stories of the heroes, related both in the written word and in audio tapes of the soldiers' own words.

Even the ceiling was festooned with lifelike models of the airdraft that flew in the Allied effort - Spitfires and Lightnings, Mosquitoes and Swordfish, and Hurricanes and Hudsons.

But as hard as he might look, Hardy could not find the one airplane he most wanted to see - the Hawker Typhoon, which he flew as part of the Canadian Typhoon Wing that helped clear the beaches for the ground troops that stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

And so, for the past two years, Hardy and a small group of the surviving Typhoon pilots went through the painstaking process of finding, building and customizing their own model to donate to the museum.

Last month, Hardy was the guest of honour at a special ceremony at the South Burnaby Legion to dedicate the finished model before it was packed into a crate to be shipped to the Juno Beach Centre in Normandy, France.

"When I found out the Juno Beach Centre didn't have a Typhoon model, I took them to task," Hardy said recently. "That's when they said, 'If you supply the model, we'll hang it.'"

Hardy flew four different Typhoons during the war and each one was named Pulverizer. The Canadian version of the 9.7-metre airplane was equipped with four 20-mm cannons for strafing and carried two 455-kg bombs.

His first plane ran out of gas and was put down in the mud in Bohain, France. The second Pulverizer flew 60 combat sorties but was badly damaged by tank fire on Christmas Day 1944, forcing Hardy to bail out over the village of Heeze, Holland. (That particular incident, flown in support of the American army fighting the Battle of the Bulge, resulted in Hardy being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.)

The third Pulverizer was also badly damaged but made it back to England where it was repaired, its identification was changed and and a new pilot was found before it was shot down on April 23, 1945. Hardy's final Pulverizer flew until the end of the war.

When D-Day arrived, a total of 450 Typhoon pilots took part in the invasion. One third of those pilots, 151 men, were killed during the battle, including 41 Canadians. Over the course of the entire war, a total of 666 Typhoon pilots and 19 ground crew were killed, including 159 pilots and three round crew from Canada. Their average age was 22-years-old.

Four of those survivors worked on the model - Hardy, Philip Eisner from Nova Scotia, Gordon McDonald from Richmond and Ted Tunstall of Powell River.

The model, complete with a plaque recognizing the efforts of canadian Typhoon pilots and support staff who died in the war and the four veterans who worked on the project, will be dedicated at the Juno Beach Centre on May 8, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.