A Lockheed Ventura bomber, like the one Donald Cormack and his crew trained in, circa 1943.
[U.S. Navy/Wikimedia]

Unknown airmen graves: One family’s search for traces of a beloved pilot lost during the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan

STORY BY RICHARD FOOT

Donald Cormack joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1941, one of hundreds of thousands of Australians wanting to serve their country in the Second World War.

He left the small, rural community of Esk, Queensland, and came to Canada to learn how to fly bombers with the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP). Fifteen months later, in the winter of 1943, Cormack was dead. The 22-year-old was lost along with two other airmen when their Ventura bomber crashed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence during a training exercise.

The bodies of Cormack and his crew—co-pilot Stanley James, 27, a fellow Australian, and wireless air gunner Thomas Hunter, 21, of New Zealand—have never been found.

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A new exhibit at the Canadian War Museum explores the Canadian connections to the U.S. Civil War. [CWM2026-0021-0050-Dm/Courtesy Canadian War Museum]

Canadian War Museum unveils exhibition on the country’s involvement in the U.S. Civil War

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

On Oct. 18, 1864—a mere six months before assassinating U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in what would be the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War—John Wilkes Booth checked in to the St. Lawrence Hall Hotel in Montreal. Renowned for its high-end luxuries, the lodge had likewise earned a reputation for hosting Confederate officials, spies and sympathizers amid hostilities south of the border. Booth was simply the latest such guest to support the rebel cause.

But might the killer’s nine-day visit have been of far greater consequence? Could it have been there—on British North American soil—that Booth plotted the death of the U.S. commander-in-chief?

“Speculation persists to this day,” said Canadian War Museum historian Tim Foran of that mystery, citing Booth’s signature on a torn page of the hotel’s register as “pretty damning evidence.” That same signature is now one of some 100 artifacts featured in a new exhibition dedicated to Canadian connections to the American Civil War.

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