Gordon Brassett Stevens

Flight Sergeant Gordon Stevens died in a horrifying accident at his airbase in England. Upon returning from a training exercise he exited his bomber and walked into one of its moving propellers.

As difficult as it might be to imagine making such a fatal mistake, it is important to remember a few things about wartime flying. Stevens had just returned from a flight in an aircraft far louder, rougher and cramped than we would fly in today. Anyone who has stepped onto solid ground after time on a train or boat, or even on a children’s carnival ride knows that momentary disorientation before you get your “land legs”. Also, when Stevens hopped from his aircraft there would have been any number of other airplanes on the tarmac with their engines roaring, so noise and propeller wash would not necessarily be the obvious clues they seem. Finally, Stevens was a crewman aboard the bomber, not one of the pilots who would know the engines were still running.

Missing from the records the Times and Transcript found in its research are the time of day and the weather at the time of the accident. Just because the bomber crew was on a training exercise rather than a combat mission does not necessarily mean it had to be daylight and clear weather. Training in wartime meant training for anything. Stevens died April 14, 1945 in England. It may have been night or rainy or foggy or there could have even been flakes of snow falling at that last moment of Stevens’s life, in that last month of the war in Europe, when a hero’s hazardous duty punished a split second of inattention.

Gordon Brassett Stevens was the 23-year-old son of Harold Gordon and Florence Mary Stevens of Moncton. He is buried in England at Stratford-on-Avon Cemetery in Warwickshire.