What Happened to Andy MacKenzie?

Hello and welcome back to another weekly blog post, in my last post I talked about our latest project and how it was all about continuity and change. Well, we continued with that topic, but instead of looking at immigration, we looked at the economy. You may be wondering what that has to do with Andy Mackenzie, but don’t worry, I’ll get to him soon.

Back to the economy, we did a cool activity called “Iron Chef”, which is kind of like Hell’s Kitchen and all those other cooking shows where the contestants get put under stress to cook things under a time limit. Except, in Iron Chef, you get to learn under stress instead! We basically had 10 minutes in our groups of 3-4 to fill out the slides on a keynote document with all the information we could find. The topic of the keynote was “How did the end of the war affect the economy?”, and the slide I ended up doing was “veterans coming home”. You can see the whole keynote down below.

If you looked at the document, you may notice something in the bottom right corner there is something called the “secret sauce”. That was bonus research we could do if we had extra time. And the secret sauce for my slide was “what happened to Squadron Leader Andy MacKenzie?”. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I could finish researching, so the only thing I found was that he was shot down twice by friendly fire. But I decided to find out the full story of what happened to him, and this is what I found.

Andy MacKenzie was born in 1920 in Montreal. When WW2 started, he enlisted in the Air Force, but didn’t see combat until 1943. He shot down three German planes before he was shot down himself by friendly fire from American forces in 1944. He survived the crash and left the military when the war ended, but rejoined in 1946. In 1951 he fought in the Korean War, where he was once again shot down by American forces. He ejected, but was caught by Chinese soldiers when he landed. He was imprisoned and suffered intense interrogation, but was released in 1954 after he issued a “confession”. He retired in 1967, and died of cancer in 2009.

So there you have it, the fate of Andy MacKenzie, shot down by his allies not once, but twice. However, strange things happen in war, so I’m sure there are other stories similar to his. That’s about it for this blog post, and remember to stay tuned for more.