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On April 25, 1944, shortly after 10:30 a.m. on a rainy Tuesday morning, a four-engine Liberator bomber roared in low over what is now considered downtown Montreal and then crashed into the heart of Griffintown. Fifteen people were killed: the five-man crew and 10 people on the ground.

This photo from our archives provides a sense of the devastation.

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The plane, newly constructed in the United States, had just taken off from Dorval airport and was headed to Britain, via Gander, to join the war effort.

“Thousands of Montrealers had a foreboding of the tragedy as the plane roared low over mid-town, its nose pointing southward. Pedestrians and officeworkers in that section of the city stopped to watch the Liberator swoop down within inches of the St. Antoine Street Post Office building and over old Bonaventure Station, expecting at any moment to see it crash into one or another of several buildings,” we reported the next day. (The building at St-Antoine and Peel Sts. is no longer a post office, but still houses federal offices; the Bonaventure train station, on what is now St-Jacques St., was demolished in 1952.)