Wop May and the Mercy Flight - From the Red Baron's Shadow to the Frozen Bush of Northern Alberta

Wilfrid “Wop” May survived being chased across the Somme valley by Manfred von Richthofen - the Red Baron - on his very first combat mission in 1918. He returned to Canada after the war and spent the rest of his life proving that the airplane could reach places nothing else could. His January 1929 mercy flight to Fort Vermilion, carrying diphtheria antitoxin through temperatures of -40°F across 600 miles of Canadian wilderness, remains one of the defining moments in the history of bush aviation.

Who Was Wop May?

Wilfrid May was born in 1896 in Manitoba and grew up in Edmonton, Alberta - a city on the edge of the northern frontier. To the north stretched hundreds of miles of boreal forest, broken by rivers, lakes, and isolated settlements with no reliable connection to the outside world. Distance in that country was measured in days, not hours.

The nickname “Wop” came from a young cousin who couldn’t quite pronounce Wilfrid. It attached itself permanently to a man too good-natured to correct it.

When World War I broke out, May enlisted and eventually joined No. 209 Squadron, Royal Air Force. His flight commander was Captain Arthur Roy Brown, a fellow Canadian from Ontario - a bond that would prove consequential on April 21, 1918.

May’s First Combat Mission and the Red Baron

On April 21, 1918, May flew his first real combat mission. His orders were clear: observe, stay out of trouble, don’t engage. He was 22 years old.

He got into a fight anyway. Both guns jammed. With no weapons and no good options, he broke from the battle and dove for the Allied lines, flying low and fast along the Somme valley, using speed and terrain to get home.

He didn’t know who had spotted him leaving.

Manfred von Richthofen - holder of 80 official aerial victories, the highest-scoring ace of any nation in the war - saw the lone aircraft separating from the fight and followed. May, skimming the valley near treetop level, looked back to find the blood-red triplane that every Allied pilot on the Western Front had learned to fear on sight.

The chase covered several miles along the river. May dove, weaved, and used every technique a young pilot knows when someone better is on his tail.

Who Killed the Red Baron? The Controversy Endures

Roy Brown, watching from above, dove to help his fellow Canadian and fired a burst at Richthofen’s aircraft. The red triplane descended into a field near the village of Vaux-sur-Somme. When Australian soldiers reached it, Richthofen was already dead - a single bullet wound to the chest.

Brown received official credit at the time. But Australian ground forces had also been firing at the triplane as it came low over their positions chasing May, and those soldiers maintained for decades that it was their fire that brought Richthofen down. Historians who have studied the wound angle and the aircraft’s final trajectory have continued to disagree.

More than 100 years later, no one knows for certain who killed the Red Baron. What is not in dispute is that Wop May landed safely. He later described those few minutes over the Somme as the most frightening experience of his flying life.

From Barnstormer to Bush Pilot

May returned to Edmonton after the war ended in November 1918. Like many pilots of his generation, he barnstormed - charging crowds at county fairs a dollar to experience flight, working the small-town circuits that made up early aviation’s economy.

But he was looking at a map in his head. The boreal north he had grown up near was full of people - trappers, trading posts, mission hospitals, First Nations communities - effectively isolated for most of the year. Dog sleds in winter. Canoes and river barges in summer. If you needed medicine, you sent word and waited days, sometimes weeks, while the situation resolved itself one way or another.

May began building an air service. Commercial Airways took shape through the 1920s: small aircraft, skis in winter, floats in summer, a rotating fleet adapted to the demands of the Canadian north.

What Bush Flying in Northern Alberta Actually Looked Like

Bush flying in the late 1920s operated without weather services, radar, or reliable radio contacts along the route. Aeronautical charts of that territory were incomplete at best. Navigation meant dead reckoning and pilotage - follow the river, match the bend in the treeline to the map, and trust that whoever surveyed it had actually walked the ground.

Radial engines in extreme cold require careful management. Oil thickens as the temperature drops. An engine failure over the bush meant landing in the bush, with the nearest person who could help potentially 40 miles away through timber and snow. Every flight loaded out with survival gear, emergency food, spare oil, and hand tools - every contingency the pilot could think of, knowing he hadn’t thought of everything.

May learned to read river ice the way a ship captain reads a channel - which frozen surfaces would hold a loaded aircraft on skis, and which looked solid while water moved silently beneath. He learned from his own close calls and from the ones around him.

The 1929 Fort Vermilion Mercy Flight

In January 1929, Dr. Harold Hamman was stationed at Fort Vermilion, a remote settlement in the Peace River country of northern Alberta, roughly 600 miles north of Edmonton by air. He was watching a diphtheria outbreak move through his community.

Diphtheria - a bacterial infection of the upper respiratory tract - produces a thick, gray membrane that can close the airway from the inside. Children suffocate. Even when the airway holds, the disease attacks the heart muscle and the nervous system. Before effective treatment, it killed a significant share of those it infected, particularly the young.

Dr. Hamman sent word to Edmonton: he needed antitoxin, urgently. Temperatures were running -40°F, sometimes colder. There were no roads worth speaking of. The river routes were frozen solid. Dog sleds could make the trip - but in many days, and Dr. Hamman wasn’t confident his patients had many days.

The request went to Commercial Airways. May said yes.

The Problem Nobody Thinks About: Keeping the Medicine Alive

The challenge wasn’t primarily the distance or the weather. It was the antitoxin itself.

Biological antitoxin in 1929 could be destroyed by freezing. May could fly 600 miles through that cold, land at Fort Vermilion, and hand over something completely useless - an inert vial of frozen liquid indistinguishable from the life-saving medicine it had been. That one variable the flight could not afford to get wrong.

May and his partner Vic Horner wrapped the vials, packed insulation around them, and kept the package against their bodies throughout the flight - maintaining a small bubble of survivable temperature inside an aircraft embedded in air cold enough to freeze exposed skin in minutes.

Then they pointed north.

Flying the Route

Rivers are everything in bush flying. They are your navigation backbone, your landmarks, and your emergency landing strips. May knew these routes - the bends in the Peace River, the way the character of the treeline changed moving north, the visual cues that placed you on the map without anyone in a tower to confirm it.

The weather was what January in northern Alberta is. Cold that found every gap in the airframe and every seam in the clothing. Ceilings that pushed the aircraft down until they were threading the corridor of the river itself, treeline rising on either side. Wind that made trim a constant negotiation with the airplane.

They landed at Fort Vermilion on the river ice. They handed Dr. Hamman a package of medicine that had, against the cold and the distance and the odds, remained intact.

The antitoxin worked. The outbreak was stopped.

Why This Flight Mattered Beyond Fort Vermilion

The lives saved at Fort Vermilion matter on their own terms. But what May and Horner demonstrated that January went beyond a single community and a single outbreak.

They made an argument - practical, undeniable, impossible to dismiss with skepticism or budget concerns - that the airplane could go where nothing else could go, faster than anything else could, in conditions that made every other option either impossible or too slow. That flight became a benchmark for building air services throughout the Canadian north: not as a curiosity or a sporting enterprise, but as essential infrastructure.

Within a few years, bush flying networks were the backbone of the northern economy. Mail reaching isolated communities in hours instead of weeks. Medical supplies arriving at remote nursing stations before patients ran out of time. Prospectors entering territory that had never been mapped from the ground. The model May helped pioneer scaled into the system that opened the Canadian north to the modern world.

Recognition and Legacy

May received the Order of the British Empire and the McKee Trophy - Canada’s highest aviation honor. An airfield in Edmonton bears his name.

Wop May died on June 21, 1952, of a heart attack while hiking in Utah. He was 56 years old.

What outlasted the awards was the system - the generations of bush pilots who came after him and built on what he had worked out in the cold, by actually doing it.

Key Takeaways

Wop May survived being chased by the Red Baron on his very first combat mission at age 22, on April 21, 1918 - the day Manfred von Richthofen was killed
Who fired the fatal shot remains genuinely disputed more than a century later - Roy Brown received official credit, but Australian ground forces claimed the kill for decades and historians still disagree
After the war, May built Commercial Airways, one of Canada’s foundational bush aviation operations, adapting aircraft with skis and floats for year-round northern flying
His January 1929 mercy flight carried diphtheria antitoxin 600 miles through -40°F temperatures to Fort Vermilion, keeping the medicine alive against his body during the entire flight
That flight helped establish the airplane as essential infrastructure in the Canadian north - a precedent that shaped the entire bush aviation network that followed