To the map room, Indy!

archaeologicalnews:

The wind was fierce and the waves were surging on Josephine Vibert’s wedding day, 70 years ago in Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan, a small fishing village on Quebec’s north shore.

In 1942, the village became the site of an emergency airstrip on the U.S. military’s so-called “Crimson Route,” a strategic air corridor to Europe through Maine and Newfoundland.

Late in the afternoon on Nov. 2, 1942, not long before the wedding reception, Vibert and most of the village stopped to watch a U.S. Army seaplane taxi from the harbour. But the plane — a PBY Catalina — struggled to clear the water. Vibert recalls the towering waves of the Gulf lashing at the cockpit during its second take-off attempt.

“I counted five waves, but there may have been more,” she says from her home, still in Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan. “After the last one, water started entering their plane.” The town’s fishermen braved the frothing waters to find four crew members clinging to the fuselage. Read more.