In one ceremony among hundreds to be held in the Netherlands over the coming days, a Canadian pilot from the Second World War and his lost crew will be honoured Tuesday in the Dutch town of Jisp, where grateful citizens gather annually around a memorial reverently crafted from the propeller of a crashed Lancaster bomber.

The plane, piloted by Ottawa airman Harold Healey, was shot down about 25 kilometres north of Amsterdam during an Allied air raid on April 9, 1943, two years before Nazi-occupied Netherlands was finally liberated in a Canadian-led campaign being marked this week by a host of 65th anniversary events overseas and at home.

But like the propeller plucked from a North Sea canal by a Dutch heritage committee mindful of the nation’s wartime debt to Canada, the story of the Healey monument has been rediscovered and recounted in rich detail by a historian with the Department of National Defence.

"As Canadians learn more of what has been involved in the hundreds of monuments" erected by Dutch citizens, notes DND researcher John MacFarlane in his recently drafted report, "they will better appreciate that this sacrifice in the Netherlands has not been forgotten there."

The liberation of the Netherlands came at great cost to Canada and other Allied forces. Some 7,600 Canadians died in the push to free the country from Germany’s thrall.

The resulting bond between Canada and the Netherlands was deepened by the fact the Dutch royal family spent much of the war in refuge in Ottawa, where the future queen, Princess Juliana, gave birth in January 1943 to Princess Margriet in a hospital room temporarily declared "extraterritorial" by the Canadian government – a gesture that preserved the child’s place in the royal line of succession.

Less than three months after Margriet’s birth, Healey – who had joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 – and his British flight crew took off from a base in Nottinghamshire for a nighttime raid on the German industrial centre of Duisburg.

Healey’s Lancaster, still loaded with bombs, was brought down by a German fighter plane over occupied Netherlands.

MacFarlane quotes a county constable from an official report detailing the thunderous impact of the RAF bomber when it slammed into the Dutch countryside: "I heard a heavy crash and saw at the same time a big light north of the village of Jisp."

Fragments of the exploded plane were scattered in a field and adjacent wood, the bent propeller winding up at the bottom of a canal carved through the farming area westward to the sea.

The remains of 24-year-old Healey and his six British crewmen – aged 22 to 28 – were eventually recovered and buried in an Amsterdam cemetery.

But more than 50 years would pass before the propeller from their downed aircraft was discovered in 1996 and retrieved from the murky waters.

"Justus Kroon led the efforts to turn the discovery into a monument," MacFarlane writes of an area history buff who spearheaded the memorial committee. "He had witnessed much of the fighting as a child, was well aware of what it meant and felt the need to concretely acknowledge his gratitude."

Kroon guided monument plans "through several stages of the not-insignificant process of acquiring various permits, with the generous donations of time and money from about 30 local companies and over 50 volunteers," the historian recounts.

By 1998, a ceremony was held to unveil the finished memorial – the propeller set atop a column dedicated to the crew of the Lancaster and more than a dozen additional Allied airmen lost in two other nearby crashes.

Similar memorials can be seen across the Netherlands, where the country’s Air War Study Group has recorded more than 6,000 crash sites from the 1939 to 1945 war.

One of the group’s officials, Jan Boon, explained that research into each of the crashes – and memorials to commemorate the individual lives lost – has illuminated the sacrifice of Canadians and other Allied airmen in the battle to liberate the Netherlands.

"It is always more private, more intense to know the names of those who fought for you," he said, "and to know what they did while dying for your freedom."

MacFarlane’s research has shed further light on Healey’s life. Born in 1918, he is known to have attended Ottawa Technical High School and studied later to become a draftsman, working with the federal Transport Department before joining the armed forces in 1940.

At the time, according to a military document unearthed for MacFarlane’s report, an officer noted that Healey had a "good appearance" and was a "reliable determined type, ambitious and willing to exert himself, anxious to fly and serve his country."