The Second World War vet was beaten and starved by his captors, but survived three months at the Buchenwald death camp after being shot down over France. He was also witness to German soldiers indiscriminately shooting at prisoners or letting snarling dogs loose to attack.

It was a brutal experience, he said, but it showed why the world had to take up arms during the Second World War.

Out of a sense of duty and despite knowing the risks, Mr. Carter-Edwards walked into a recruiting centre in 1942 at age 19 to help in the battle against the Nazis. Despite being warned of what lay ahead, the young man forged on.

“I thought okay, but these are the risks we take when we are young,” said the former Ancaster resident, who grew up in Hamilton and now resides down the road in Smithville.

In mid-1943 he finished his training and shipped off to Europe.

“It was our job and we did it. We did it without hesitation,” he said.

“When you went out you knew you might not come back, but we went anyway.”

Mr. Carter-Edwards told the 1,900 students gathered in the school’s gymnasium during a special assembly Monday about flying at night, with no lights on, barely able to make out the shadows of other Allied planes in the moonlight.

During one of his many six-hour bombing runs into Germany, his Halifax bomber was struck from below by another bomber as it lurched upward after dropping its load. With 10 feet missing off one wing, Mr. Carter-Edwards, a wireless air gunner, and the rest of the crew had to hobble back to England, where they were shot at by their own side because an identifying transponder was not working.

“Yes, I was scared, but we all had a job to do,” he said of his time overseas.

But it was his final mission that scared him the most.

On what should have been an easy run into France to bomb a major rail yard, his plane was struck from below by a German fighter. The Halifax started to shake “as if it were getting hit by a hammer” and the pilot ordered the crew to bail out.

Mr. Carter-Edwards doesn’t remember putting on his parachute or jumping out — pushed out by the navigator, he later learned, because he froze in the exit — but he remembers hitting the ground while the fighter crew kept searching for the Allies, dropping flares and strafing areas where it thought the downed airmen were.

He eventually found safety in an occupied French village and was being helped out of the country by the French Underground when he was found by the Gestapo.

With a Luger pointed between his eyes, Mr. Carter-Edwards told the German officer he was a Canadian airman and wanted protection under the Geneva Convention.

The officer told him he was a spy and would be executed.

He was taken to a civilian jail outside Paris before he and other prisoners were herded like cattle into a boxcar and shipped to the Buchenwald concentration camp, a sinister place that the world wouldn’t find out about until later.

“We could hear the moans and groans of people being tortured,” said Mr. Carter-Edwards as he told the students about entering the place where he was sentenced to die.

He spoke of the torture, cruelty and inhumane conditions he witnessed and endured himself — “If you didn’t die from starvation or disease they would kill you,” he said — and how his faith in God was shaken by having to literally walk over his fellow man as they cried out for help.

“Even though it tore at your heart, you couldn’t do anything,” he said. “We were in the hands of some of the cruelest people in the world.”

Mr. Carter-Edwards said his faith was restored when members of the German air force snuck him and the other 167 Allied airmen out of Buchenwald and into a regular prisoner-of-war camp.

“Finally God touched the heart of someone in the hierarchy of the German military,” he said, and they were freed from the hell they were in.

The experience of the men was detailed in the National Film Board of Canada’s The Lucky Ones.

As far as serving his country in the most brutal war in history, Mr. Carter-Edwards told the students he had no regrets.

“Nobody had any regrets. We had to shut down that Nazi regime.”

Monday’s event was organized by teacher Laurie Russell, who spent the last year planning the event.

Today’s students are “generations removed” from the horrors of the Second World War and she wanted to make sure everyone understands the sacrifices made by veterans.

“I think a lot of people just don’t know about it. It doesn’t touch their family,” said Ms. Russell, whose father served in the war. “It’s up to us, especially as educators, to make them aware.”

Student Mary Doyle, whose father, Kevin, is currently serving in Afghanistan, said Carter-Edwards’s talk was a good experience for the student body.

“He has a great story and people should pay attention,” she said. “We can learn from the past.”