Guadalajara Mexico.- Several MK-IX spitfires spin through the skies over Normandy. They are whirlpools of steel that herald death and chaos among the shrapnel, stretching the survival instinct like a spring that can only burst. In one of them is Luis Pérez Gómez, a pilot from Guadalajara enlisted in the Canadian Air Force.
With empty cannons and machine guns, followed by Nazi aircraft, the young man tears the horizon in his attempt to escape, just as he imagined many times when playing on the roof of his house with his foil planes.
The origin
Luis’s family originally lived in Atotonilco, on Hacienda Santa Elena, where they farmed the land and raised horses. However, due to the Cristero War, he preferred to move permanently to the City of Guadalajara.
The future pilot was born on October 8, 1922 and lived much of his life on a farm located near Hidalgo and Cruz Verde, in the American Colony.
According to what his relatives told in the documentary “Mexican Eagle… Canadian Wings”, by Miguel Ángel Sánchez de Armas, since he was little Luis dreamed of being an aviator: on the roof he built hangars of cardboard boxes and had several small airplanes. sheet with which he enjoyed his days.
He later enlisted in the Boys Scouts and, since then, his excursions have not stopped.
The hero’s journey
After the death of his mother, Luis is sent to Mérida, Yucatán, and later to Mexico City to be able to study high school.
It is 1939 and the young man is a great athlete: he likes swimming, baseball and even high jumping. In addition to his studies, he persists in the idea of becoming a pilot after the start of World War II, despite his paternal resistance.
He seeks to enlist in the Mexican Air Force, but is rejected. He then goes to the United States thinking of having better luck, but no: he is deported.
It was not until the following year that he undertook the journey from Mexico to Ottawa, Canada.
There he learns English and, with the help of a fellow countryman, manages to settle and enroll at the Ottawa Technical School.
Luis knows that pilots are being trained in Canada through the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, and he knows that it is an opportunity that he cannot miss.
The preparation
The long-awaited training finally came to him on June 30, 1942, when he was able to join the Royal Canadian Air Force as a volunteer and had his training in centers in Ontario and Quebec.
In a second phase of the program, the pilots entered more advanced stages at the Service Flight Training School and, finally, on August 6, 1943, Luis received his wings and appointment as an aviator pilot officer.
In November of that same year he was assigned to a base in Dartmouth, where he was in charge of carrying out patrol missions on the Canadian coast, due to the latent threat of German submarines.
An unforgettable tango
In 1943 Luis had two romances. One of them was with Mary Wallace Wadley, a young woman who was also enlisted in the Canadian Air Force. They allegedly had plans to get married, but she suffered an accident that caused her to lose her memory. When she saw Luis again, she no longer recognized him.
His other love was Dorothy O’Brien, a young woman who was 16 years old at the time. According to a report by The Ottawa Citizen – published on November 3, 2008 – both danced tango at a party held at the Canadian Grill and fell in love. Other couples had to step aside and, amidst applause, they left the entire track to Dorothy and Luis.
And as if the couple were the protagonists of a tango, their love story became bittersweet: he left for Normandy.
War
After D-Day, which occurred on June 6, 1944, Canada had to machine-gun the German forces that were on the beach renamed Juno for the operation.
Luis was in Squadron 443, based in Digby, Lincolnshire, accompanied by 27 other pilots.
According to the documentary “Mexican Eagle…”, 10 days later the squadron had the mission to intercept an enemy force of 20 aircraft, but they only found one and shot it down.
Already at night there was a second patrol by Commander James Hall and the pilots Leslie Foster, SE Scarlett, Donald Walz, Hugh Russell and Luis Pérez Gómez.
While Foster and Scarlett remain under a cloud ceiling, Hall, Walz, Russell and Luis ascend in attack formation, but encounter a Nazi group.
Hall and Russell are immediately shot down and do not survive. Then Walz’s plane is hit by German shrapnel and goes into a tailspin, but manages to jump.
Then a Spitfire MK-IX turns to port, in an evasive maneuver, but was followed by several Nazi aircraft. It was about Luis. He no longer had any more shrapnel and went into a spin, so he had no choice but to abandon his plane.
Walz sees that Luis is ejected from the Spitfire and tries to open his parachute, but it was on fire. Both Luis and the Spitfire fall into a crop field in a small farming town called Sassy, in Normandy.
The anonymous grave
The residents, upon noticing the fall of the aircraft and finding Luis’s remains, decided to take the body and bury it as one of their own, since the Nazis would want to take it. So it was. German agents went to the site, but Luis was already buried as if he were just another resident of Sassy.
At the end of June 1944, Dorothy O’Brien received a telegram. She found out that the pilot from Guadalajara had made her his reference in case of an accident and in her message they informed her that Luis had disappeared in combat.
She had hoped to see him again, to spend the rest of their lives together… until she received a second telegram in July: they gave her the official news of his death.
Already in 1946, after the war, the Canadian Air Force took on the task of exploring the towns of Normandy to find remains of its combatants. It is then that the peasants tell them where they buried Luis Pérez Gómez.
Reunion
Dorothy O’Brien married a naval officer named Denis Pratt and they had three children.
According to The Ottawa Citizen, he was always aware of the brief love story between his wife and Luis and that dance between tangos and applause, which is why he decided to take her to Sassy in 2001.
There they visited the tomb of Luis Pérez Gómez and told the story to the residents.
Three years later, on the 60th anniversary of the death of the pilot from Guadalajara, the people of Sassy invited Dorothy to come and witness the naming of the town square: Place Pérez Gómez. A tribute to the only pilot from Guadalajara who died fighting in the Second World War for the Royal Canadian Air Force.
#pilot #Guadalajara #fought #Nazis
