Mr. Roger Cornevan This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. CTV.ca | CTV News, Shows and Sports - Canadian Television

   www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/31/2004   Last Visited: 5/31/2004

   Roger Cornevan
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   Roger Cornevan
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   Late in the evening of May 22, 1944 in occupied France, a 16-year-old boy named Roger Cornevan heard nearby German anti-aircraft guns open fire. He ran to the window of his bedroom over his father's barbershop in the town square and saw an aircraft engulfed in flames, falling out of control, narrowly missing the enormous spires of the medieval Sèes cathedral. It then disappeared out of sight. Moments later, Roger heard the sound of an enormous explosion.
   
   At dawn the next morning, he took his bicycle and rode out of the town in the direction of the crash. Along a small country lane, he came face to face with a German sentry who ordered him to go away. Roger turned back but then worked his way around the sentry and came to the edge of a wood. He went in on foot, finally finding the site of the downed bomber. It was burned away to almost nothing, as were the bodies. For the rest of his life, Roger Cornevan would be marked by what he saw.
   
   There was another person at the site. He was Georges Buvron, a French gendarme whom the Germans had ordered to comb through the wreckage. He picked up bits and pieces of the aircrew's possessions including a ring that had been bent and burned almost beyond recognition.
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   And that is how this tragic but utterly usual war-time story would have ended, except for two things; the ring lying in the back of a drawer in the policeman's home, and the insatiable curiosity of young Roger Cornevan, the son of the barber, who 60 years later would tell CTV News, "I found it wrong that we didn't know who it was who died for France."
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   In 1998, the now retired Roger Cornevan returned to the area of his birth and became committed to discovering the largely forgotten details of what he'd seen as a boy. After a series of letters to the British Ministry of Defence, he learned that there had been a Whitley bomber that went missing that May night of 1944. It had been on a pre D-day mission to drop information leaflets over France, warning civilians to stay away from railway junctions, from communication centres, from any buildings or facilities that could become the target of pre-invasion bombing.
   
   Eventually, Mr. Cornevan was able to uncover the names of the six Canadian crewmembers on board.
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   Mr. Cornevan called the local newspaper that then published an article about an old mystery that had been resolved.
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   In the meantime, Roger Cornevan had made contact with a woman in Picton, Ontario. He describes Shirley Stone as an amateur genealogist. Finding her, he said, was a moment of "pure luck."