# Obituaries



## syscom3 (Feb 5, 2006)

Col. Walter Tardy; WWII Commander

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 21, 2006; B06

Walter Earle Tardy, 91, a retired Army colonel who commanded a legendary tank destroyer battalion in World War II, died of chronic heart failure Jan. 7 at the Westminster at Lake Ridge retirement center, where he lived.

During World War II, he was commander of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion, a unit of the 3rd Infantry Division, in North Africa, Sicily and France.

Col. Tardy called the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia one of the unit's worst times and one of only two times that it was on the defensive. He told the Traverse City (Mich.) Record-Eagle in 2002 that 75 German tanks knocked out half of the unit's tanks, and the others were so disabled that battalion members had to hike back over the pass and wait several days for repairs.

The battalion went on to fight at Anzio, Italy, and also fought in the Ardennes campaign in eastern France, Hitler's last major offensive. Col. Tardy's battalion arrived to support Company B, 15th Regiment of the 3rd Infantry, whose officers had been killed except for a young first lieutenant named Audie Murphy.

Murphy, who became the most-decorated U.S. serviceman of World War II, boarded one of Col. Tardy's disabled M10 tank destroyers, using its .50-caliber machine gun to kill or wound 50 German soldiers and prevent his troops from being overrun.

Col. Tardy met Murphy after he had been nominated for the Medal of Honor and was under orders to stay around regimental headquarters and out of danger. Murphy kept trying to sneak back to the front lines, Col. Tardy told the Audie Murphy Research Foundation. "He didn't seem very happy sitting in that regimental headquarters. He was in a lot of places he wasn't supposed to be. He was an outstanding chap."

Col. Tardy was born in Bryan, Tex., and graduated from Texas A&M University in 1936. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve and worked in oil exploration in Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma.

He was called to active duty in 1940 and by October 1942 was deployed to North Africa. He became the executive officer of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion and then elevated to commanding officer, a position he would hold for more than two years. His battalion had a record 546 days in actual combat and destroyed 155 enemy tanks and armored vehicles, believed to be a record in the European theater.

Col. Tardy's duties after World War II included staff assignments in France, the continental United States and Hawaii and attache duty in Baghdad. He was on duty in Baghdad in 1958 when a military coup claimed the lives of the king, several members of the royal family and many senior Iraqi government ministers.

His military decorations included the Legion of Merit, two awards of the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

After his retirement in 1967, Col. Tardy worked for several years in real estate and as a tax consultant in Northern Virginia. He was a member of Outpost 7 of the Society of the 3rd Infantry Division. He served as an elder at Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria. He lived in Annandale for more than 30 years.

His wife of 63 years, Mary Elizabeth Smith Tardy, died in 2002. Two sons also died, Marine Corps Capt. Thomas K. Tardy in 1978 and Rhodes E. Tardy in 1995.

Survivors include two grandchildren.

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## Gnomey (Feb 5, 2006)




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## evangilder (Feb 5, 2006)

At syscom3's suggestion, this new thread is for obituaries of WWII veterans and other heroes that have passed on. Add as you come across them.


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## syscom3 (Feb 15, 2006)

I'm not going to salute the passing of this individual. I'm just posting this obituary for its newsworthyness.

"I only selected the victims" is not a defense.

HAMBURG, Germany - Friedrich Engel, a former Nazi SS officer 
involved in the massacre of Italian prisoners in World War II, has 
died. He was 97. 

Engel died overnight into Feb. 5, said his wife, Else. She did not 
give a cause of death or say where he had died.

In 2002, a German court convicted Engel of 59 counts of murder and 
handed him a suspended seven-year term for the 1944 shootings in a 
mountain pass near the Italian city of Genoa.

A federal appeals court said in 2004 that it believed Engel was 
responsible for the massacre, but it ruled that the lower court had 
failed to legally prove murder and said a retrial was not possible 
because of the Engel's age.

Engel acknowledged helping organize the May 19, 1944, shootings in 
reprisal for an attack on a movie theater in the city four days 
earlier in which five German sailors died. But he insisted that the 
shootings were ordered by Nazi naval officers and that his unit was 
responsible only for selecting the victims.

After the war, Engel worked as a lumber salesman until his 
retirement in the 1970s.

An Italian military court convicted Engel in absentia only in 1999 
and sentenced him to life for war crimes connected to a total of 246 
deaths.

German prosecutors examined the possibility of extraditing Engel to 
Italy under an EU-wide arrest warrant, but received no formal 
application from Italian authorities, said Ruediger Bagger, a 
spokesman for prosecutors in Hamburg. German law previously 
prohibited the extradition of its citizens to stand trial abroad

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## syscom3 (Feb 20, 2006)

William McCaffrey, 91; Fought in Three Wars

Monday, February 20, 2006; B05

William J. McCaffrey, 91, an Army lieutenant general who saw combat in three wars and was a high-ranking commander during the Vietnam War, died of heart disease Feb. 13 at the Jefferson retirement home in Arlington.

Gen. McCaffrey was born in Omaha and was a 1939 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. During World War II, he was a colonel and chief of staff with the 92nd Infantry Division and received the Silver Star for leading a nighttime reconnaissance mission in Italy.

In the Korean War, he commanded the 31st Infantry Regiment and fought at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. He received two additional awards of the Silver Star for his service in Korea.

In the 1960s, when hewas a senior officer in Europe and at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. McCaffrey played a role in strengthening NATO defenses in the Cold War. From 1970 to 1972, he was deputy commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam as military operations were winding down. He retired in 1973.

After his military career, Gen. McCaffrey was director of regional affairs for the Association of the United States Army and was a member of the senior review panel of the Central Intelligence Agency, working in coordination with the offices of three successive CIA directors.

He lived in Alexandria for many years and was a member St. Mary Catholic Church in Alexandria. He later attended the Cathedral of St. Thomas More in Arlington.

He was also a member of the Chosin Few, a Korean War veterans group.

Survivors include his wife of 66 years, Mary V. McCaffrey of Arlington; two children, retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey of Alexandria and Patricia Higgins of Newport News, Va.; six grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

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## Gnomey (Feb 21, 2006)




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## syscom3 (Feb 27, 2006)

Dont have the details as of yet.

Brig. General Robert L. Scott, of the 14th Air Force and author of *God is My Co-Pilot*, passed away this morning in Georgia at the age of 97

What a tremendous loss to the aviation community.

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## FLYBOYJ (Feb 27, 2006)




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## Gnomey (Feb 28, 2006)




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## evangilder (Feb 28, 2006)




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## syscom3 (Feb 28, 2006)

WARNER ROBINS, Ga. - Retired Brig. Gen. Robert L. Scott, the World War II flying ace who told of his exploits in his book "God is My Co-Pilot," died Monday. He was 97. 


His death was announced by Paul Hibbitts, director of the Museum of Aviation at Robins Air Force Base, where Scott worked in recent years.

The Georgia-born Scott rose to nationwide prominence during World War II as a fighter ace in the China-Burma-India theater, then with his best-selling 1943 book, made into a 1945 movie starring Dennis Morgan as Scott.

Among his other books were "The Day I Owned the Sky" and "Flying Tiger: Chennault of China."

Scott, who retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general, won three Distinguished Flying Crosses, two Silver Stars and five Air Medals before he was called home to travel the country giving speeches for the war effort.

He shot down 22 enemy planes with his P-40 Warhawk, though he recalled some were listed as "probable" kills.

"You had to have two witnesses in the formation, or you needed a gun camera to take a picture," he once said. "Only we didn't have gun cameras in China. I actually had 22 aerial victims, but I only had proof of 13."

He worked with the Flying Tigers, Gen. Claire Chennault's famed volunteer force of pilots who fought in China, but he was not one of its original members in mid-1941.

At 33, Scott was considered too old for combat and was still at a training job in California when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered the war in December of that year.

After he got a call to serve in combat, he was assigned to a mission to bomb Tokyo from China. When that plan was scrubbed, he flew gasoline and ammunition over Japanese-held territory to the Flying Tigers. When the Tigers were formally incorporated into the Army as the 23rd Fighter Group of the China Air Task Force, Scott was asked to be its commander.

In the years just after the war, Scott was one of the proponents of making the Air Force into a separate service.

"They just plain couldn't see why we wanted a special service," Scott said in 1997, at the time the Air Force was marking its 50th anniversary as an independent service. "They all wanted their own Air Force. We were fighting against public opinion."

From the mid-1980s onward, Scott was an active staffer at the Robins air base's aviation museum.

"He's been our resident hero, cheerleader and biggest fan," said Pat Bartness, museum foundation president and chief operating officer. "He's been the biggest drawing card we've had."


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## syscom3 (Apr 2, 2006)

Legendary soldier who led Canadian paratroopers on D-Day has died

John Ward
Canadian Press

Thursday, March 30, 2006

OTTAWA (CP) - James Hill, a legendary British soldier who commanded the Canadian paratroopers who dropped into France on D-Day, has died at the age of 95.

Brigadier Hill inspired devotion among his soldiers, especially the rough-hewn young men of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, which was part of Hill's 3rd British parachute brigade.

They were prepared to follow the big, brawny brigadier "down the barrel of a gun," said historian Terry Copp of Wilfrid Laurier University, who knew Hill in his later years.

"He is an icon of all airborne soldiers not only British but Canadian, of course, and he's well known to American airborne forces as well," said 83-year-old Ronald Anderson of Toronto, who was a platoon sergeant in the Canadian battalion under Hill.

"He wrote the book on leadership, as far as I'm concerned."

Hill was one of the last men evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk when the British army was driven from France in 1940 and he was in the vanguard when the allies returned to the continent in 1944.

On D-Day, Hill's brigade was scattered far and wide by contrary winds during the parachute drop, Copp says.

"He landed about 30 miles away from the drop zone where he was supposed to be. He gathered together a number of people, partly his headquarters group but partly just stragglers, and started walking."

The group was strafed by their own aircraft under the illusion that anyone walking toward the landing zones would have been German.

"He was wounded in, as he would say, the right bum cheek," Copp said. "He made it the rest of the way on a bicycle and then commanded the brigade for the next two days, as he said, sitting on his left bum cheek."

The historian once asked Hill why he wasn't evacuated to hospital.

"He said he hadn't trained the brigade for all that time in order to leave it in the midst of the action."

Anderson said Hill led from the front, armed only with a long, carved, ebony walking stick.

"I remember being under fire in Germany as a lead platoon and within four or five minutes the brigadier was at my back with his poke stick," Anderson recalled.

"He used to poke me in the back with a smile on his face when I was cowering in a ditch somewhere. He would poke me and say, "Son we've got to do something about this.'

"Which meant get up off your ass and move ahead."

A graduate of Sandhurst, the British military academy, Hill left the army in the 1930s for a business career, but rejoined with the outbreak of war.

He became a paratroop expert and first fought in North Africa, where he was badly wounded. He was flown home and told he would be pensioned off.

"He said I didn't join the army to get a pension," Anderson remembered.

He was eventually tapped for command of the 3rd brigade, which included the Canadians.

He led the brigade from Normandy in 1944 to the shore of the Baltic Sea in 1945.

He had a paternal regard for the Canadians, whose average age was 22 and who exhibited a sometimes frightening taste for action.

"He always said he had to watch the Canadians carefully because he didn't want a bunch of dead heroes," Copp said. "He thought they were all young and little more anxious to get get at the enemy than the circumstances required."

Hill was twice awarded the Distinguished Service order and the Military Cross for his bravery and leadership.

Copp said Hill was both a superb commander and a great leader.

"Some people are good commanders because they have the technical skills and some are good leaders but you don't always get the two combined.

"James was an exceptionally skilled soldier . . . but at the same time he had the leadership qualities that made men want to follow him down the barrel of a gun."

"That's exactly it," said Anderson.

He said when the Canadians were heading for home after the war, Hill showed up at the rail station and insisted on shaking the hand of every one of the 700 left in the battalion.

"He told the engine driver you aren't going anywhere until I've had the chance to shake hands with every man here and thank him."

After the war, Hill returned to business. He worked in Montreal in the 1950s and was an honoured guest at many paratrooper reunions.

One of his last trips to Canada was a decade ago, when the Canadian Airborne Regiment was disbanded after the Somalia affair. Hill insisted on being at the final parade, Anderson said.

"He said they're not going to hang up our colours without me there."

Hill, who died last week in a nursing home in Chichester, England, will be buried in a full military funeral organized by the Parachute Regiment on April 5. Brig.-Gen. R. R. Romsie, a Canadian officer who spent two years on exchange with the British paras, will represent Canada.

Anderson said Hill planned the details of the funeral, down to the readings and the music.

"He wanted a rousing service. He didn't want anything sombre. No dirges. That's typical."

James Hill was born March 14, 1911 and died March 16, 2006.

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## Nonskimmer (Apr 2, 2006)

To McCaffrey, Scott, and Hill:

  



I missed the one about Hill.


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## FLYBOYJ (Apr 2, 2006)




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## Nonskimmer (Apr 3, 2006)

She wasn't a soldier, but still of interest I thought.

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/04/03/Germany.death.ap/index.html


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## syscom3 (Apr 3, 2006)

A former RAF pilot who cheated death much more than most of us ever 
will finally passed away at the ripe old age of 102. Sqn. Leader Eric 
Foster died peacefully at his home in England, outliving Steve 
McQueen, the actor that played him in The Great Escape, by more than 
50 years. McQueen died of lung cancer in 1980 at the age of 50. 
Foster's never-say-die attitude when it came to his distaste for 
German prisoner of war camps prompted his legendary status and was an 
influence in the creation of the movie. After surviving the crash of 
his Wellington bomber in Germany in 1940, Foster escaped from various 
enemy prison camps a total of seven times. Of course, the fact that 
he was a repeat escaper means he was better at the escaping part than 
he was at avoiding capture but it all made for a fascinating tale. 
After escaping by masquerading as German officer, a member of Hitler 
Youth, and shimmying down a fire escape, to name a few, he ended up 
in Stalag Luft III where his exploits formed the basis for the movie. 
It is perhaps fitting that it was Foster's acting ability that 
finally won him release. In 1945, he managed to convince his captors 
that he was insane and they sent him home. He was promoted to Sqn. 
Leader shortly after.

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## Vassili Zaitzev (May 1, 2006)

I salute all except for the Nazi SS officer responsible for killing italians.


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## Erich (May 8, 2006)

Ace pilot of the US ETO 355th fighter group passed away, he was 83 years of age. Living in central California, Stan was a great guy . . .


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## Wildcat (May 27, 2006)

Only found out today but Flt Lt Colin Parkinson DFC passed away on the 31st of March. 
Parkinson joined the RAAF in 1940 and after EATS training was posted to the UK as a Sergeant, here he served for a short time with 56 and 19 sqn's RAF.
Parkinson served in Malta for 6 months with 603 sqn (and later 229 and 249) after flying off HMS Eagle. On Aug 14. he flew to Gibratar with others to lead another delivery of Spitfires from HMS Furious. During the siege of 1942, Parkinson was credited with 11 enemy aircraft destroyed, 2 probable and 7 damaged. 
Parkinson ended his tour in Malta in November and was awarded his DFC by Air Vice Marshall Sir Keith Park, when he returned to Australia he served with 457 sqn RAAF before commanding the RAAF Chemical Research Unit during 1944.
Flt Lt Colin Parkinson died after a short illness in Sydney and was buried with full military honours on the 5th of April. Colin Parkinson was 89.

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## Gnomey (May 27, 2006)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (May 29, 2006)




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## syscom3 (Jun 8, 2006)

June 4, 2006
General von Kielmansegg, a NATO Leader, Dies at 99 

By DENNIS HEVESI

Gen. Johann-Adolf Count von Kielmansegg, a German panzer division
officer during World War II who became commander in chief of NATO forces
in Central Europe during the height of the cold war, died on May 26 in
Bonn. He was 99.

His son Hanno von Kielmansegg of Celle, Germany, confirmed the death. 

General von Kielmansegg's posting to the highest military command of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1966, a time of constant tension
with the Soviet Union, was viewed as a benchmark in the rehabilitation
of West Germany from the infamy of the Nazi era.

In the NATO post, General von Kielmansegg took command of Western
Europe's first line of defense against the Communist bloc: 500,000
American, British and West German troops posted from Switzerland to the
Baltic.

The general, then 59, seemed an appropriate choice. He had been close to
the group of German officers who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate
Hitler in 1944. He had insisted that Germany's postwar military be
subject to civilian control. He had rebuked revisionist claims that the
Holocaust was an act of war.

General von Kielmansegg, scion of a long line of landowners, scholars,
Lutheran prelates and soldiers, was born on Dec. 30, 1906. He was 20
when he entered officer training. As a lieutenant, he first served in
the cavalry, as had his father.

By the start of World War II, he was commander of a panzer, or armored,
division. In 1940, he took part in the German invasion of France,
sweeping around the Maginot line's obsolete fortifications in eastern
France and rushing to the English Channel. After fighting on the Russian
front, he joined the General Staff in Berlin. 

By then he was a friend of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, leader of the
officers' plot to kill Hitler. The plan was to detonate a bomb in a
briefcase placed under a conference table near Hitler's seat. The
attempt, on July 20, 1944, failed when a Hitler aide moved the
briefcase. The bomb went off, but Hitler was only superficially wounded.

General von Kielmansegg, then a colonel, was jailed by the Gestapo and
kept in handcuffs for two months before being released for lack of
evidence. In 1965, he told a New York Times reporter that he had been
aware of the plot but not involved in its planning. "The plotters set a
good example to the army," he said, "because these men put their lives
on the line against the dictator."

Restored to tank duty, he fought the American Army in western Germany,
escaping after his unit was defeated but later surrendering to American
forces near Berlin.

After the war, Count von Kielmansegg worked for a German publishing
company. But in 1950 he was summoned by Theo Blank, Bonn's first postwar
defense minister, to help draft a plan to resurrect the German Army.
General von Kielmansegg, like other high-ranking officers, feared that
the officer corps could again become a state within a state; they
insisted on civilian control. "What you want is a democratic-thinking
army," he said.

>From 1955 to 1958, the general served as West Germany's military
representative to NATO. And on June 28, 1966, he became commander of
NATO forces in Central Europe, given the post after President Charles de
Gaulle of France withdrew French forces from the alliance. The choice
fell to Bonn because it had contributed the largest number of troops in
the sector.

Three years earlier, respect for General von Kielmansegg was bolstered
when he condemned the notion of a general amnesty for Nazi war
criminals, as a professor at Hamburg University had proposed in a widely
publicized article. The professor, Peter R. Hofstatter, wrote: "Hitler
and the National Socialist state had declared a quasi-state of war on
the Jews. The killings were executed by men in uniforms of a nation that 
was in a state of war." The article prompted large protests. General von
Kielmansegg declared the professor's ideas "not reconcilable with the
honor of a soldier."

Besides his son Hanno, he is survived by another son, Peter of
Heidelberg; two daughters, Levine Lehnoff of Bonn and Ulrike Holle of
Essen; 12 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. His wife of 67
years, Baroness Mechthild Dinklage, died in 2000.


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jun 10, 2006)




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## syscom3 (Jun 24, 2006)

This guy was a Flying Tiger!!!!! I didnt know that!

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-older20jun20,1,6890651.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Charles Herman Older, 88; L.A. County Judge Presided Over Manson Murder Trial
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Times Staff Writer
June 20, 2006

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charles Herman Older had been on the bench only a few years when the trial of accused mass murderer Charles Manson landed in his courtroom. By the time the 10-month, highly publicized trial ended, he was a veteran.

In the early 1970s the case was as bizarre as anything the city had seen until then: Manson and his LSD-dropping followers — mostly young women — told of committing gruesome murders in the name of starting a race war, showed up in court with shaved heads and Xs on their foreheads, and sometimes chanted nonsensically, in keeping with what Older would call Manson's "twisted philosophy."

"That's what made the murders possible: 'There is no wrong, and whatever we do is right,' " Older later told The Times.

Older, whom Manson once tried to attack with a pencil, and who sent a Times reporter to jail for contempt after the trial for failing to reveal a source, resulting in a change in the state Constitution, died Saturday. He was 88.

Older died of complications from a fall at his home in West Los Angeles, said longtime friend and former law partner Edward Cazier.

"He presided over the trial in a very firm, dignified way, and he tried to be fair to both sides, with no preexisting bias," said Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor in the Manson trial.

Older was born in Hanford, Calif., on Sept. 29, 1917. He later moved to Los Angeles with his family and graduated from Beverly Hills High School.

"He was a Renaissance man," Cazier said. "He was, in addition to his wartime and judicial exploits, an accomplished watercolorist and a very good golfer."

After graduating from UCLA in 1939, he joined the Marine Corps Reserve but later resigned his commission and joined the Flying Tigers, a covert group of American pilots recruited by Claire Lee Chennault to fly for the Chinese government in its war with Japan.

Chennault "was a hard-bitten character who knew what he was there for and how to beat the Japanese," Older recalled in a 1991 Times article. "I can't recall anybody who I would rather have as our group leader than Chennault."

According to his family, Older had more than 18 enemy kills, and was the third highest-scoring Flying Tiger ace. Later, Older served as a major in the Army Air Forces, fighting in the China-Burma Theater.

In 1943, Older married Catherine Day. The couple had three daughters: Catherine Lapat of Port Townsend, Wash.; Nancy Yarbrough of Henderson, Nev.; and Victoria Currie of La Jolla. Older's wife and daughters survive him.

In 1952, after serving in the Korean War, he received his law degree from USC and, in 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan appointed Older to the bench.

Manson and three of his followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten — were tried for the gory cult killings of actress Sharon Tate, Leno and Rosemary La Bianca and four others in 1969.

The trial was a daily parade of the bizarre, with Manson's followers maintaining their reverence for him and his so-called teachings and Manson continuing with his behavior.

One day during the trial, Manson asked Older for permission to examine a witness after his attorneys had declined to do so. When Older denied the request, Manson launched into a tirade. The judge warned Manson that he would have Manson removed if the outburst continued.

"I will have to have you removed if you don't stop. I have a little system of my own," Mansion replied, according to a 1970 Times article.

Then Manson leaped across the table, placing his foot on the table in an apparent effort to propel himself toward the bench. As deputies restrained him he shouted "someone should cut your head off."

Older was not harmed.

"It was an important case on a number of grounds, in that it involved a number of defendants with extremely aggressive defense council and, of course, a horrendous crime," said Cazier, "and there was the contest with the press over whether a reporter should be required to divulge his source for a news story."

That debate came to a head after the trial, when Older ordered Times reporter Bill Farr jailed for contempt. Farr had initially covered the trial for the Herald Examiner when he obtained and published an account of a witness who said the Manson family had planned to kill such entertainers as Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor.

Older had imposed a gag order on the case and sought the source of the leak. Farr cited the California "shield law," which he believed protected reporters from naming sources. When Farr later left journalism for a brief time to work as a spokesman for the district attorney's office, Older ordered him to reveal the source. Farr refused and served 46 days in jail. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas ordered Farr released while the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals considered the case.

"There is no need to attach any nobility to what I did," Farr told The Times. "All good reporters feel the same way about protecting news sources."

After his release Farr worked to establish the principle that a reporter had a right to protect sources. That battle led to the strengthening of the shield law. In 1980, a ballot measure was passed that made the shield law part of the state Constitution.

Years after the trial, Theo Wilson, a celebrated national trials reporter for the New York Daily News, wrote about the Manson trial, a trial "where everybody went a little bonkers — judge, jury, reporters, lawyers, deputies and spectators."

One daily spectator, Julie Shapiro, had attracted attention for coming to the courtroom in a see-through blouse without a bra. Older ordered a deputy to tell the woman not to come to court without a bra, and she obeyed. But later she angrily called the prosecutor a liar and deputies arrested her on Older's order, Wilson recalled.

"As Julie was being hustled out, obviously startled that she had created such an uproar, she plaintively asked reporters: 'What's the matter? Why can't I stay here? I'm wearing a brassiere,' " Wilson wrote in a 1994 Times article.

Throughout the trial, Older remained "very meticulous in his demeanor," Bugliosi said. "He was very formal and he measured his words very carefully."


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## FLYBOYJ (Jun 25, 2006)

Here's a link.. http://www.acepilots.com/cbi/older.html


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jun 25, 2006)




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## Gnomey (Jun 25, 2006)




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## syscom3 (Aug 21, 2006)

SAN FRANCISCO - Photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image of six World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred Iwo Jima, died Sunday. He was 94.
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Rosenthal died of natural causes at an assisted living facility in the San Francisco suburb of Novato, said his daughter, Anne Rosenthal.

"He was a good and honest man, he had real integrity," Anne Rosenthal said.

His photo, taken for The Associated Press on Feb. 23, 1945, became the model for the Iwo Jima Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The memorial, dedicated in 1954 and known officially as the Marine Corps War Memorial, commemorates the Marines who died taking the Pacific island in World War II.

The photo was listed in 1999 at No. 68 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.

The photo actually shows the second raising of the flag that day on Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island. The first flag had been deemed too small.

"What I see behind the photo is what it took to get up to those heights — the kind of devotion to their country that those young men had, and the sacrifices they made," Rosenthal once said. "I take some gratification in being a little part of what the U.S. stands for."

He liked to call himself "a guy who was up in the big leagues for a cup of coffee at one time."

The picture was an inspiration for Thomas E. Franklin of The Record of Bergen County, N.J., who took the photo of three firefighters raising a flag amid the ruins of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Franklin said he instantly saw the similarities with the Iwo Jima photo as he looked through his lens. Franklin's photo, distributed worldwide by the AP, was a finalist in 2002 for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography.

The small island of Iwo Jima was a strategic piece of land 750 miles south of Tokyo, and the United States wanted it to support long-range B-29 bombers and a possible invasion of Japan.

On Feb. 19, 1945, 30,000 Marines landed on the southeast coast. Mount Suribachi, at 546 feet the highest point on the island, took four days for the troops to scale. In all, more than 6,800 U.S. servicemen died in the five-week battle for the island, and the 21,000-man Japanese defense force was virtually wiped out.

Ten years after the flag-raising, Rosenthal wrote that he almost didn't go up to the summit when he learned a flag had already been raised. He decided to up anyway, and found servicemen preparing to put up the second, larger flag.

"Out of the corner of my eye, I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera and shot the scene. That is how the picture was taken, and when you take a picture like that, you don't come away saying you got a great shot. You don't know."

"Millions of Americans saw this picture five or six days before I did, and when I first heard about it, I had no idea what picture was meant."

He recalled that days later, when a colleague congratulated him on the picture, he thought he meant another, posed shot he had taken later that day, of Marines waving and cheering at the base of the flag.

He added that if he had posed the flag-raising picture, as some skeptics have suggested over the years, "I would, of course, have ruined it" by choosing fewer men and making sure their faces could be seen.

Standing near Rosenthal was Marine Sgt. Bill Genaust, the motion picture cameraman who filmed the same flag-raising. He was killed in combat just days later. A frame of Genaust's film is nearly identical to the Rosenthal photo.

The AP photo quickly became the subject of posters, war-bond drives and a U.S. postage stamp.

Rosenthal left the AP later in 1945 to join the San Francisco Chronicle, where he worked as a photographer for 35 years before retiring.

"He was short in stature but that was about it. He had a lot of nerve," said John O'Hara, a retired photographer who worked with Rosenthal at the San Francisco Chronicle.

O'Hara said Rosenthal took special pride in a certificate naming him an honorary Marine and remained spry and alert well into his 90s.

Rosenthal's famous picture kept him busy for years, and he continued to get requests for prints decades after the shutter clicked. He said he was always flattered by the tumult surrounding the shot, but added, "I'd rather just lie down and listen to a ball game."

"He was the best photographer," said friend and fellow Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Nick Ut of The Associated Press, who said he spoke with Rosenthal last week. "His picture no one forgets. People know the photo very well."

Ut's 1972 image of a little girl, naked and screaming in agony as she flees a napalm bomb attack during the Vietnam War, stoked anti-war sentiment. But Rosenthal's iconic photo helped fuel patriotism in the United States.

"People say to me, yours is so sad. You see his picture and it shows how Americans won the war," Ut said.

Rosenthal was born in 1911 in Washington, D.C.

He took up photography as a hobby. As the Depression got under way, Rosenthal moved to San Francisco, living with a brother until he found a job with the Newspaper Enterprise Association in 1930.

In 1932, Rosenthal joined the old San Francisco News as a combination reporter and photographer.

"They just told me to take this big box and point the end with the glass toward the subject and press the shutter and `We'll tell you what you did wrong,'" he said.

After a short time with ACME Newspictures in San Francisco in 1936, Rosenthal became San Francisco bureau chief of The New York Times-Wide World Photos.

Rosenthal began working for the AP in San Francisco when the news cooperative bought Wide World Photos. After a stint in the Merchant Marine, he returned to the AP and was sent to cover battle areas in 1944.

His first assignment was in New Guinea, and he also covered the invasion of Guam before making his famous photo on Iwo Jima.

In addition to his daughter, Rosenthal is survived by his ex-wife Lee Rosenthal, his son Joseph J. Rosenthal Jr., and their families.


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## evangilder (Aug 21, 2006)

Rest well, Joe, you have earned it.


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## syscom3 (Aug 27, 2006)

From the Daily Telegraph (Filed: 16/08/2006)

Jack Edwards, who has died aged 88, survived the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and copper mine at Kinkaseki, Taiwan, to become a relentless campaigner for former servicemen and their widows in the Far East.

The greatest triumphs arising from his battles with the British government were the award of pensions to ethnic Chinese veterans and their widows in Hong Kong, agreed in 1991, and the granting of British passports to survivors' wives and widows in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Increasingly exasperated by the government's refusal to give way over the latter issue, Edwards devised a series of elaborate stunts, finally mounting a daily vigil outside Government House in Hong Kong, at which he carried the first Union Jack to be hoisted over Victoria Peak after the Japanese surrender. Eventually he was summoned inside to meet John Major, the prime minister, who was in Hong Kong for final negotiations in early 1996. "Major placed his hand on my arm and said he had some good news," he later recalled. "I said, 'Thank goodness for that.'" Jack Edwards was born at Cardiff on May 24 1918.

Having joined the Royal Corps of Signals, he was a sergeant in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942. On being taken prisoner, his first job was removing from the beaches the corpses of captives killed by the Japanese at sea and thrown overboard.

Later that year he was transferred from Changi jail to the Japanese colony of Taiwan, then known as Formosa. Kinkaseki, in the mountains near Jiufen, never achieved the notoriety of the Burma railway, but is acknowledged to have been among the most brutal of the Japanese camps. Inmates worked the mine daily in tropical heat until they dropped or died in rock-falls. Those failing to meet the steep production targets were beaten viciously by the Japanese and Taiwanese guards. Malnutrition, beri-beri and dysentery claimed many lives. As the end of the war approached, the emaciated survivors were marched to a mountainside south of Taipei, where they were forced to build a new camp in the jungle. Those who made it to the Japanese surrender - 64 out of an original 526 (though some had been transferred elsewhere) - were "walking on the narrow edge between man and animal," Edwards wrote. "All of us looked ghastly, eyes sunken, mere skeletons, covered with rashes, sores, or cuts which would not heal. Others too far gone to save were blown-up with beri-beri, legs and testicles like balloons."

Forty years later he recorded his experiences in a book, Banzai, You Bastards! The title, he said, was not intended to be inflammatory, but referred to the only release from suffering, other than death, that the prisoners enjoyed: as the Americans advanced across south-east Asia, bombing raids would force the guards and camp commanders into shelters; the inmates would emerge from their huts and, when no one was looking, cheer on the bombers with borrowed war-cries. On one occasion Edwards was overheard and beaten with bamboo rods.

The book was translated and published in Japan (where Edwards was, in his later years, to make many friends) under the more conciliatory title Drop Dead, Jap! While a PoW Edwards had discovered that a tunnel built into a nearby hillside was to be the prisoners' tomb: orders had been given that, should the Americans land in Taiwan, the PoWs were to be taken there and shot. After the war he returned to Kinkaseki with war crimes investigators, and gave evidence at the subsequent trial in Tokyo.

Edwards spent a year recuperating in London, then returned to south Wales, where he worked in local government; but he was unable to settle, and in 1963 took up a post in the housing department of the Hong Kong administration. There he became active in the Royal British Legion and the Hong Kong Ex-Servicemen's Association.

Among the successful campaigns which he supported were the effort by former "comfort women" to force the Japanese government to admit that their enslavement into prostitution was an official policy, not just a by-product of war; and, in 1986, the granting of British passports to Hong Kong ex-servicemen. He was greatly outraged to discover that ethnic Chinese servicemen, and their widows, were not entitled to war pensions, unlike the British alongside whom they had fought. "When I first learned this, I assumed it must have been a mistake, an oversight," he said later. "When I wrote to the Ministry of Defence and found it was policy, I felt deeply ashamed to be British, though I had always been a patriot."

On having this wrong rectified in 1991, Edwards turned his attention to winning passports for ex-servicemen's wives and widows, whom the British government had decided did not qualify to be part of the scheme which gave citizenship to 50,000 Hong Kong residents before the handover. Edwards argued that a clause offering 6,300 passports in recognition of "special services to the Crown" could be used for the women, but he was repeatedly rebuffed. As well as writing letters to the administration and government, he raised the issue with visiting politicians and eventually won the support of the last governor, Chris Patten. At one point, he ambushed John Major while the prime minister was on an official visit to Tokyo.

In 1995, at the parade down the Mall commemorating the 50th anniversary of VJ Day, he carried a protest banner. By the time of Major's change of heart, Edwards had come to be seen even by some sympathisers as a "difficult" character, with his daily Union Jack vigil outside Government House. But in the wake of the decision, beneficiaries of his campaigns wrote to the South China Morning Post demanding Edwards be given a knighthood.

In the end, he was appointed OBE in the Birthday Honours' List of 1997, to add to his earlier MBE.

Edwards's first marriage did not survive the war. In the 1970s he met Polly Tam So-lan, a former member of a Chinese People's Liberation Army dance troupe. She and Edwards married in 1990, and lived in a flat in Sha Tin new town. Edwards, who spoke fluent Cantonese, insisted on hanging his Union Jack from his window on Remembrance Day. The couple shared a love of dancing, which they practised in their small living-room to recordings of Taiwanese songs.

Jack Edwards, who died on Sunday, is survived by his wife and her daughter by her first marriage.


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## syscom3 (Sep 4, 2006)

Now this guy has "balls".

WWII hero Gabaldon dies - Yahoo! News

MIAMI - Guy Gabaldon, who as an 18-year-old Marine private single-handedly persuaded more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers to surrender in the World War II battle for Saipan, has died. He was 80.

Gabaldon died of a heart attack Thursday at his home in Old Town, his son, Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Hunter Gabaldon, said Monday.

Using an elementary knowledge of Japanese, bribes of cigarettes and candy, and trickery with tales of encampments surrounded by American troops, Gabaldon was able to persuade soldiers to abandon their posts and surrender. The scheme was so brazen — and so amazingly successful — it won the young Marine the Navy Cross, and fame when his story was told on television's "This Is Your Life" and the 1960 movie "Hell to Eternity."

"My plan, as impossible as it seemed, was to get near a Japanese emplacement, bunker, or cave, and tell them that I had a bunch of Marines with me and we were ready to kill them if they did not surrender," he wrote in his 1990 memoir "Saipan: Suicide Island."

"I promised that they would be treated with dignity, and that we would make sure that they were taken back to Japan after the war," he wrote.

The 5-foot-4-inch Gabaldon used piecemeal Japanese he picked up from a childhood friend to earn the trust of the enemy, who believed his story of hundreds of looming troops. In a single day in July 1944, Gabaldon was said to have gotten about 800 Japanese soldiers to follow him back to the American camp.

His exploits earned him the nickname the Pied Piper of Saipan.

The private acknowledged his plan was foolish and, had it not been pulled off, could have resulted in a court-martial. His family suspected his initial disobedience — though they say officers later approved — might have kept him from receiving the Medal of Honor.

"My actions prove that God takes care of idiots," he wrote.

Born March 22, 1926, in Los Angeles, Gabaldon signed up for the service on his 17th birthday and arrived on Saipan on D-Day. His military career was cut short after two-and-a-half years by injuries from machine gun fire. He spent the years that followed running a variety of businesses, including a furniture store, a fishing operation and an import-export firm, and the unsuccessful pursuit of a California congressional seat in 1964.

Services for Gabaldon were to be held Tuesday in Cross City, Fla.


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## Wildcat (Sep 5, 2006)

Yep what a man, I noticed he named his son after the actor who played him in the movie "Hell to Eternity".


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## evangilder (Sep 5, 2006)




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## Gnomey (Sep 5, 2006)




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## syscom3 (Sep 27, 2006)

Ex-nurse thought to be Minnesota's oldest veteran dies

Johanna Berlin was buried Monday near her country church in southwestern Minnesota, just down the road from the farm her parents had built in Heron Lake Township nearly a century earlier.

The rural Lakefield woman's life had been full of independence and moxie. She possessed the tender heart of a devoted Army nurse and was believed to be the oldest war veteran in Minnesota.

Berlin died Thursday at the Royal C. Johnson Veterans Hospital in Sioux Falls, S.D. She was 108.

"Her faith in God was incredible, and it inspired people," said Ed Hansen, a Lakefield funeral director. "Here she was in her 100s, and she was still living in her home. Her attitude in life was fantastic. She always had a smile on her face."

Born in 1898 in Berlin, Germany, Johanna was 13 when she left in 1911 with her parents and younger sister. The family moved to farmland in Jackson County.

Johanna Berlin never married, and she was working as a factory clerk in Sheboygan, Wis., with 10 years under her belt when the Depression wiped out her job.

Berlin took her savings and attended nursing school at Chicago Hospital. She enlisted in the Army in 1943.

"At that point in our country's history, they needed nurses," said nephew Mike Hasara of rural Lakefield.

At age 45, Berlin became an Army nurse, traveling the world to take care of shell-shocked soldiers and Japanese prisoners during World War II and for a few years after. Her job was to help those who had become so battle-fatigued and full of fear that they had trouble functioning. She helped them work through what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

She had gone into training at Camp Pickett in central Virginia in 1943 and later went to Yuma, Ariz., for desert training. Berlin was stationed in Hawaii, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, Johnson Island in the Pacific and Tokyo.

She entered the Army as a second lieutenant and was discharged as a captain.

She returned to Lakefield and became an anesthetic nurse after further training at the University of Minnesota.

Berlin became active in St. Peter Lutheran Church and was a lifelong member of Swen-Rasmussen American Legion and Hansen-Ward VFW in Lakefield.

She was named an honorary commander of the American Legion several years ago.

She never had a driver's license, but that didn't stop her, from learning all of the traffic laws and enforcing them from the back seat, Hasara said.

She never stopped doting on people and animals, her relatives said, from her grandnieces to the goats she bottle-fed after she went to live with her relatives on the Lakefield farm.

Her grandniece MaryAnn Hasara and her husband had welcomed Berlin into their home to live when she was 106.

"You'd come in from the barn, and there she'd be, rocking a goat, having it covered up in her afghan," Mike Hasara said.

"Nobody should be sorry or grieving that Johann died," Mike Hasara said at her wake Sunday night. "She lived a good life. ... She was a nice, good-hearted woman."


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## evangilder (Sep 27, 2006)




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## evangilder (Oct 5, 2006)

Frantisek Fajtl

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) _ Czech fighter ace Gen. Frantisek Fajtl, who fought in the French and British air forces against Nazi Germany in World War II, died Wednesday, an official said. He was 94.

He died in Prague's military hospital, said Defense Ministry spokesman Andrej Cirtek.

Fajtl fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 and joined France's air force. After France capitulated, he fled to Britain to join the Royal Air Force.

His plane was shot down over northern France in May 1942, but Fajtl escaped to Spain, where he was captured and arrested. He was released after London intervened and was returned to Britain.

He left the RAF in 1944 to help build the Czechoslovak fighter squadron in the Soviet Union.

After returning home, Fajtl was arrested as an enemy of state by the Communist regime in 1950, and spent 17 months in prison. After his release, he was given only menial jobs.

His reputation was fully rehabilitated after the 1989 collapse of the communist regime, and in 2004, he was awarded the highest Czech honor _ the White Lion Order.


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## Gnomey (Oct 5, 2006)




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## evangilder (Oct 15, 2006)

Found this in today's paper. I would certainly call this guy a patriot!


> Herbert Schaeffer Sieler
> 1921 - 2006
> 
> Our beloved dad, Herbert Schaeffer Sieler, 84, died on Oct. 11, 2006, at St. John's Regional Medical Center after a courageous battle with lung cancer. As honorably and gracefully as he moved through his life, so he did as he entered heaven.
> ...


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## FLYBOYJ (Oct 20, 2006)

Earthquake McGoon’ finally flying home
Remains of legendary pilot killed 52 years ago being returned to family


Updated: 2:41 p.m. MT Oct 19, 2006
NEW YORK - More than half a century after he died in the flaming crash of a CIA-owned cargo plane and became one of the first two Americans to die in combat in Vietnam, a legendary soldier of fortune known as “Earthquake McGoon” is finally coming home.

The skeletal remains of James B. McGovern Jr., discovered in an unmarked grave in remote northern Laos in 2002, were positively identified on Sept. 11 by laboratory experts at the U.S. military’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii.

They will be flown back to the mainland next week for a military funeral in New Jersey on Oct. 28, said McGovern’s nephew, James McGovern III, of Forked River, N.J.

“Bottom line, it’s closure for my family and a great feeling,” McGovern said.

Larger than life
Six feet and 260 pounds — huge for a fighter pilot — McGovern carved out a flying career during and after World War II that made him a legend in Asia. An American saloon owner in China dubbed him “Earthquake McGoon,” after a hulking hillbilly character in the comic strip “Li’l Abner.”

He died on May 6, 1954, when his C-119 Flying Boxcar cargo plane was hit by ground fire while parachuting a howitzer to the besieged French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. “Looks like this is it, son,” McGovern radioed another pilot as his crippled plane staggered 75 miles into Laos, where it cartwheeled into a hillside.

Killed along with “McGoon,” 31, were his co-pilot, Wallace Buford, 28, and a French crew chief. Two cargo handlers, a Frenchman and a Thai, were thrown clear and survived.

Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces captured Dien Bien Phu the next day, ending a 57-day siege that had captured the world’s attention. It signaled the end of French colonial power in Indochina, and helped set the stage for the 15-year “American war” that ended with the fall of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government in 1975.

Although civilians, the swashbuckling McGovern and Buford, an ex-World War II bomber pilot, were the first Americans to die in combat in the Asian country where war would later take nearly 60,000 American and more than a million Vietnamese lives.

Flying for spooks
It was no mystery in 1954 that the United States was supporting colonial France against Vietnam’s communist-led rebellion, and “McGoon” was already famous for his exploits when he was killed.

The only secret was that his employer, a charter airline called Civil Air Transport, or CAT, “was owned by the CIA — lock, stock and barrel,” Felix Smith, a retired CAT pilot and McGovern friend, said in an interview in 2002. (It was not until the 1990s that the CIA-CAT connection was finally declassified.)

The CIA is arranging for James McGovern III to fly to Hickam Air Force Base near Honolulu and escort his uncle’s remains home, he said.

The CIA did not immediately return a call for comment.

Dr. Thomas Holland, director of JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory, said McGovern was the only the second person ever identified through “nuclear” DNA from a male relative — a particularly difficult task with bones that are decades old. The first was another Southeast Asia casualty identified recently. Most cases rely on mitochondrial DNA, from female relatives.

Heroics began in WWII
McGovern first went to China in 1944, as a fighter pilot in the 14th Air Force’s “Tiger Shark” squadron, descended from the famous Flying Tigers. According to Smith, he was credited with shooting down four Japanese Zero fighter planes and destroying five on the ground.

At war’s end in 1945, McGovern signed on with CAT, which was under contract to Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chinese Nationalist regime, then fighting a civil war against Mao Zedong’s communists.

Captured by communist troops after a forced landing, “McGoon” was freed six months later. Colleagues joked that his captors simply got tired of feeding him.


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## syscom3 (Oct 20, 2006)

Thanks for the story Flyboy!


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## Gnomey (Oct 20, 2006)




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## FLYBOYJ (Oct 20, 2006)

syscom3 said:


> Thanks for the story Flyboy!


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## evangilder (Oct 20, 2006)




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## Emac44 (Oct 30, 2006)

A few years ago Australian Army Nurse Vivienne Bullwinkle Passed away. She lived in Western Australia and served with the Australian Corp of Nurses in Singapore. She with other nurses left Singapore after being evacuated by ship. Her ship she was travelling on was sunk by Japanese forces in the area of Indonesia. She with other people being evacuated from Singapore struggled to one of the islands of Indonesia. Many wounded sick and injuried personal came ashore with her. It was decided to surrender to a force of Japanese soldiers in the area. All survivors including Nurse Bullwinkle were promptly Marched back into the sea by the Japanese and were imediately machine gunned to death. Nurse Bullwinkle was wounded but survived this ordeal. She was later found taken to another POW camp and spent 3 1/2 years in captivity under the Japanese. She later testified in War Crime Tribunal to what occured to her and her fellow survivors who were butchered by the Japanese. We tend to forget at times women who served in our militaries. We must never forget the sacrifices these women like Vivienne Bullwinkle went through. In God's care we entrust Nurse Vivienne Bullwinkle


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## Heather (Nov 15, 2006)




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## twoeagles (Nov 16, 2006)

From Associated Press today - *Leo "Shorty" Gordon*, shot down and parachuted from a B-17 belonging to the 305th Bomb Group Febr. 26, 1943, has died. Shorty is notable as the first confirmed American POW escapee. After two failed attempts escaping from Stalag IVA, he made a successful attempt and arrived abck in England Febr. 27, 1944.

Shorty was 84 years old.


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Nov 16, 2006)




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## Gnomey (Nov 16, 2006)




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## R-2800 (Nov 20, 2006)

my mom's close friend Hank was in the Belgian resistance during WWII, was telling storys about how he was working on a He-111 and sabatagod the engine but was caught but the guy let him go


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## evangilder (Dec 25, 2006)

It is with profound sadness that I report the death of a good friend, James Lidia. Jim had worked in all kinds of aviation related industries during his lifetime and instructed young RAF pilots how to fly at Falcon Field in Mesa Arizona in the late 1930s/early 1940s. He passed away late last night. He was 90 years old. 

In his life, he flew DC-2s with Braniff, built airplanes with Vought, taught RAF pilots to fly and fight and many other things. He was a quiet and friendly guy that lit up when he talked about airplanes and flying. He was likely my biggest aviation photography fan. He has now gone west, but will forever be in my memory. I am happy that he can now be reunited with his beloved wife, who he never stopped missing or loving after she passed.

Rest well Jim, and thanks for everything.


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## Nonskimmer (Dec 25, 2006)

He lived a good long life at least. RIP, Jim.


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## FLYBOYJ (Dec 25, 2006)




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## Wildcat (Dec 26, 2006)




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## Gnomey (Dec 26, 2006)




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## evangilder (Jan 19, 2007)

Elliott "Doc" Pood passes away

Last night, at his home in Hattiesburg, MS., Doc Pood died of cardiac failure. As his partner Bob "No Neck" West put it, "we have lost a very dear friend, Public Affairs Officer of TORA, TORA, TORA, strong supporter of the CAF as well as the entire pyrotechnic industry, a great head of the ICAS Pyro Safety Committee and an all around good fellow." Doc leaves his wife (and mother of their three children) Bonnie, son Ken (married), and two daughters Lindsey and Elise. Elliott was also the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi. Please keep his family and many friends in your thoughts and prayers to help them on this current journey. The funeral service will be held Sunday at 2:00 PM at the Heritage United Methodist Church. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to the Elliott and Bonnie Pood Scholarship Endowment Fund through The University of Southern Mississippi Foundation, 118 College Drive #5004, Hattiesburg, MS 39406. The fund will provide scholarships for outstanding undergraduate students in speech communication.

If you would like to send a card to the family their address is listed below.

Mrs. Bonnie W. Pood
104 Cottoncreek Dr.
Hattiesburg, MS 39402-7610


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## FLYBOYJ (Jan 19, 2007)




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## Gnomey (Jan 19, 2007)




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## evangilder (Jan 19, 2007)

Art Buchwald passed away as well. He was a noted American humorist and few people know that he served in the Marines during WWII:


> When he turned 17 in 1942, he ran away to join the Marines. Told that he would need parental consent to become a leatherneck, the underage Buchwald reportedly enlisted a drunk who, for a pint of whiskey, agreed to pose as his father.
> 
> Buchwald, who came to love the armed forces, served in the Pacific theater until 1945. Most of the time, he was stationed on Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, where he edited his outfit's newspaper. He was discharged in Los Angeles with the rank of sergeant.
> 
> "I felt that the Marines were the only ones I had ever cared about or who had ever cared for me," he once told an interviewer, the New York Times reported in 1972.



Sign Up

Semper Fi, Art. Thanks for all the laughs.


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## pbfoot (Feb 6, 2007)

Another one has gone westCanadian Press 
Ian Keltie, shown in this 1943 photo, flew Spitfires in World War II. He died last week, aged 86. Email story 



Toronto man flew 75 missions

Feb 05, 2007 04:30 AM 
Michele Henry 
Staff Reporter

The cockpit cover flew off. The wind lashed his exposed head and face. And Ian Keltie felt like he'd been "hit with a hammer." 

Keltie, a pilot barely 22 years old and fighting for Canada in World War II, struggled to assess the damage to himself and his aircraft during that mission on Aug. 24, 1942. 

He was escorting American B-17 bombers on a daylight raid of a target in France. He was under attack. 

"I took violent evasive action and climbed hard and fast," Keltie wrote in Spitfire II, a book about Canadian fighter pilots published in 1999.

But as he mounted his defence and tried to retreat from the German enemy, he was careful not to turn his gaze too far to either side, into the wind.

"He didn't want to lose his sunglasses," Ross Keltie, Ian's son, said yesterday from his Toronto home. 

"He had brand new sunglasses. They cost him two weeks' pay. He was always like that."

Ian George Secord Keltie died in Toronto on Jan. 29. He was 86. 

Known to his family as "Grampie," Keltie is believed to have been one of the few surviving Canadians to have flown a Spitfire. With a Rolls-Royce engine, it was the top fighter plane of its day. 

He flew under Billy Bishop, who was Canada's highest-scoring fighter pilot in World War I. 

As a fighter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, 402 Winnipeg Squadron, Keltie flew 75 missions over enemy territory between 1940 and 1944. 

He was the second pilot to land in Normandy on D-Day, Ross says, noting his dad told him the first plane plowed into a farmer. Keltie flew in support of the Dunkirk evacuations in 1940. 

King George VI awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross at Buckingham Palace.

Throughout his life, Keltie loved to travel and spend time with family. 

A modest man, he rarely talked about his life during the war, barely telling his children about his missions. 

Ross Keltie knew little about how his father was wounded that "hot" day in 1942 on the flight back to Kenley air force base in southern England. 

"He'd tell parts of the stories," Ross Keltie said. "We'd have to squeeze it out of him."

Keltie was halfway over the English Channel when his plane was hit. His leg was numb, he wrote in Spitfire II, so he wasn't in too much pain.

He opened fire on one of the two German Fw190 planes that he could see were closing in on him. Black smoke erupted into the air. 

"He kept heading back to England," Ross Keltie, 53, said. "That was the safest thing to do." 

Keltie flew low over English land, praying enemy planes would retreat for fear of being hit by ground troops. 

Within minutes he landed on the base. Shrapnel had hit him in the leg. His boot was full of blood. 

After three weeks in the hospital, Ross Keltie said, his father was back in the cockpit of his Spitfire, which had the spunky cartoon sailor Popeye painted on its nose. 

The eldest of five children, Ian Keltie was born May 26, 1920, in Millet, Alta. The son of a farmer who served in a Scottish cavalry regiment in World War I, Keltie joined the air force in 1939. 

He was 19, fearless and raring to go. 

"He always wanted to fly," Ross Keltie said. 

Keltie grew up on a farm before moving to Edmonton to attend high school with his siblings. When he finished his studies the war broke out. 

He returned to Edmonton shortly thereafter and married June Martin, who died 14 years ago at the age of 69. 

For a while he worked as a bush pilot. After that he sold life insurance, then spent 25 years as a distributor of floor coverings. He flew a plane out of Toronto's Island airport until he was in his 50s. 

Keltie was proud of his role in the air force. He let his children play dress-up with his uniforms, even if he wasn't able to talk about his experiences.

Ross Keltie had plans to ask his dad for more stories. 

"You keep putting it off and then it's too late," he said. 

Ian Keltie leaves his three children – Heather Sloan, Margot Dobson and Ross – seven grandchildren and a great-grandchild, who was born Friday.


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## evangilder (Feb 15, 2007)




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## timshatz (Feb 15, 2007)

Good story. Good life.


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## Nonskimmer (Feb 15, 2007)




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## syscom3 (Mar 26, 2007)

March 26, 2007 
Matthew Chung
Staff Reporter

There had been months spent planning for this air raid on the 
Gestapo's Danish headquarters in Copenhagen. 

But now the daring daylight Royal Air Force mission was going all 
wrong. 

It was March 21, 1945 and planes in squadron 613 were flying just 50 
feet above ground, loaded with bombs on a surprise, precision attack 
with the hope of freeing some members of the Danish resistance held 
prisoner.

Among the members of the special unit, which became known as the 
Gestapo Hunters, was Bernard Standish, an English navigator who would 
fly 44 missions in Europe. 

Standish died March 15 at Orillia Soldiers' Memorial Hospital. He was 
95. 

Sixty-two years ago, he and his pilot would help ensure the success 
of the important mission in Denmark. Already he'd been cited for 
valour and bravery and awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for 
his job as lead navigator in a similar high-risk mission aboard a De 
Havilland Mosquito.

In the raid on Gestapo HQ, a plane in the first wave had flown in so 
low that it struck either the top of the headquarters or a tall lamp 
post and crashed nearby, crossing up the second and third wave of the 
attack.

Some other pilots mistook the burning plane for the target and 
dropped their bombs, killing a number of children when the explosives 
struck a French school. But others, including Standish's plane, hit 
the headquarters. The mission did end up liberating some Danish 
prisoners. 

For the raid's success, Standish was again decorated, with a bar 
added to his DFC.

But in the years following the war, Standish rarely spoke about the 
missions, family and friends say.

"My job was to get them there," he'd say before pausing a moment if 
you'd asked. "And get them back."

"He wasn't a man for bringing this kind of stuff into a 
conversation, " said his son, John, 67. Like many who fought in the 
war, "They felt it was a job that had to be done and they just had to 
do it."

Born April 14, 1911 in London, England, Standish graduated from 
school at the age of 15 and in 1927 began a career that spanned 49 
years with the Prudential Assurance Company in England. 

He met Mary Varnals at the company and they were married in 1938. It 
was a partnership that lasted 60 years, until she died in 1998.

Being recently married and with their first child, John, just 2, 
Standish hesitated to join the war effort, his son said.

But in 1942, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force and trained in 
Chatham, N.B. and Fingal, Ont before shipping off to Europe.

When the war was over, Standish recalled getting up close and 
personal with Mary Churchill, daughter to then-Prime Minister Winston 
Churchill, after taking part in a low-level flying exhibition.

"After this (exhibition was done), one of the VIPs was Mary Churchill 
and she asked for a lift back to London," John said. "Dad had Mary 
Churchill on his knee for 2 1/2 hours as they flew back."

Standish returned to his office job in London until 1954, when he 
accepted a transfer to Prudential's Canadian head office in Montreal 
and Mary, John and daughter Margaret relocated with him.

He retired from the company in 1976 and moved to Guelph, having 
climbed the corporate ladder to become senior vice-president, 
administration. And during his climb, he'd advocated for pay equity 
for women, said Alice Haughton, his secretary of 16 years.

"He was always ready to try and bring the gals up to where the men 
were," Haughton said. "He promoted me ... I became a junior officer 
of the company.

"I was happy about that, but they hardly knew what to do with me ... 
I don't think there were anymore (female junior officers) in the 
company, which was worldwide."

Following his wife's death, Standish moved to Ajax before settling 
about six years ago in Beaverton.

Described by his son as "an officer and a gentleman," who, even after 
retirement, kept wearing suits every day – "that's how he felt 
comfortable" – Standish may not have spoken much about the war, but 
Haughton says she used to kid him that his training there came in 
handy when something needed to be done quickly on the job.

"Occasionally when something would be happening I would say, `Well I 
guess that's your air force training," she said.


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## Wildcat (Mar 26, 2007)




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## Bernhart (Mar 27, 2007)

Olive Roblin 
Olive Roblin, age 92, a resident of Spruce Lodge, 643 West Gore Street, Stratford, and formerly of Victoria, B.C., died at her residence on Saturday, March 24, 2007. She was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and was the daughter of the late Ernest and Lillian (Coxon) Wilson. After completing her education in Albert, she moved to Victoria, B.C., to train as a Registered Nurse at the Royal Jubilee Hospital and graduated in February 1937. She went on to post-graduate work at McGill University where she graduated as a hospital administrator. She remained in Victoria and married Walter Roblin in 1972. After her husband’s death in 1990, she remained in Victoria until 1992 when she moved to Ontario. She had served in the Royal Canadian Nursing Service in Canada and overseas during the Second World War. She continued on in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve in Esquimalt, B.C., and later received the Royal Red Cross Decoration for her service during the war. She continued nursing in Victoria at the Veterans Hospital and Royal Jubilee Hospital until 1974. She received the Canadian Federation Medal in 1967 for her dedication to the nursing sisters in Victoria, B.C. She received a life membership to the Royal Jubilee Alumnae Association and the Naval Officers Club in Victoria


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## Gnomey (Mar 27, 2007)




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## Njaco (Apr 6, 2007)

This lady I met for only a few minutes at an air show near here. Very nice.

Gloria Bain 
Gloria Bain (nee Jaggard), age 79 died on April 1, 2007. Born in Camden and raised in Deptford Township, she was a resident of Woodbury for over 40 years. She graduated from Woodbury High School and Glassboro State College and did graduate work at the University of Delaware and Rutgers University. 

She retired from Deptford Township School System after 28 years of teaching. Gloria began flying at the age of 12 in Piper Cubs. She later flew on occasion a Culver Cadet and Wings (open cockpit biplane) and soloed at age 16. 

She was a Sergeant and Cadet Squadron Leader in the Almonesson Squadron of the Civil Air Patrol. She was also a Cub Scout Den mother, Brownie Troop Leader, Deptford Day Committee Member for 20 years and served on the Woodbury Board of Health for 30 years in many different positions. 

She served as Secretary and Membership Chair of the NJEA, 20 year Delegate for the NEA, Gloucester County Retired Teacher¹s Association and an honorary member and Newsletter Editor of the Friendship Fire Co. in Woodbury. 

She was the wife of the late Andrew G. Bain Sr. Survived by children Andrew G. Jr. (Debbie) of Woodbury, Susan B. Nordaby of Woodbury Heights, Alan G. (Debbie) of Woodbury and Karen E. Bain of Woodbury, grandchildren Kelly Bain, Sarah McLaughlin, Michael Bain and sisters Ella Johnson of Colo., Shirley Borgerding of Minn. and Joanne Saccomanno of Calif. 

Friends may call on Thursday after 7 p.m. and Friday after 10 a.m. in the BUDD FUNERAL HOME, 171 Delaware St., Woodbury, N.J. 

Funeral service Friday at 11 a.m.


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## evangilder (Apr 29, 2007)

April 25, 2007
Warren E. Avis, 92, Founder of Car Rental Company, Dies
By MICHAEL BARBARO

Warren E. Avis, a Michigan car dealership owner who, frustrated at waiting for taxis outside airports, founded a chain of car rental agencies and turned it into the nation’s second biggest, died yesterday at his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 92.

Mr. Avis’s death was confirmed by his wife, Yanna, who said he died from natural causes.

In 1946, when Mr. Avis opened his first Avis Airlines Rent-A-Car in Florida and Michigan, all his rival companies were in downtown garages.

So Mr. Avis, a former major in the Army Air Force who spent a great deal of time at airline terminals, decided to open rental centers at airports, where he reasoned thousands of airline passengers would need a ride.

“Nobody thought it would work,” Mr. Avis said in a 1987 interview. “There was incredible trouble. You had to get all the airlines to cooperate. Where did you put the cars?”

But it did work. Avis employees parked the cars outside airport terminals, and customers, who were at first confused, soon figured out the new system.

Within a decade, Avis was second in size only to Hertz — a fact the company would later promote to its benefit in advertisements that carried the tagline, “We try harder.”

Warren Edward Avis was born in Bay City, Mich., north of Detroit, in 1915. His peripatetic career began in the Michigan department of investigation, where he investigated auto dealerships, moved onto a drug company, where he sold pills, and then to the Army Air Force.

When his military service ended, he bought a stake in a Ford dealership in Detroit, where he began developing a plan for a new type of car rental center focused on airports. Using $10,000 of his own money, he started Avis.

Despite the company’s early success, Mr. Avis quickly sold it in 1954, putting in motion a series of sales that would, over the next few decades, leave his car rental company in the hands of a dozen different owners.

Mr. Avis, who acknowledged that he was restless in matters of business, began buying and selling factories, hotels — even a bank. When he decided that a company, like the bank, was “boring,” as he said, he quickly sold it. Later in life, he invested in technology companies, purchased sporting goods distributors and began developing office buildings on his 300-acre farm near Ann Arbor.

He is survived by his wife, Yanna; three children from a previous marriage, Wendy Avis-King of Moreland Hills, Ohio; Wayne Avis of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; and Warren Avis Jr. of Palm Beach, Fla.; six grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Mr. Avis was fit and active until shortly before his death, even water skiing until the age of 89, his wife said last night. She called him an “amazing, out-of-the-ordinary man.”

Mr. Avis was not bashful about his wealth, or his desire to spend it.

“I’ve never been interested in making a fortune and having a heart attack, as some people do,” he told The New York Times in 1987.” If you don’t enjoy the money, then the money doesn’t have any value.”

Warren E. Avis, 92, Founder of Car Rental Company, Dies - New York Times


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## Gnomey (Apr 29, 2007)




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## syscom3 (Apr 29, 2007)

I saw this in the OC Register this morning.

*He was a member of VMF-215 "The Fighting Corsairs" serving in the SW pacific off of Vella LaVella and Bougainville. Six kills to his credit, all over Rabaul.*

Conant, Roger, 88, a thirty five year Newport Beach resident, passed away on March 10, 2007. He was predeceased by his wife Evelyn of forty-seven years, and survived by his wife Londi of seven years; his daughters, Gayle Novacek and Lynn Conant, and his son, Roger Conant. Born in Crystal Falls, Michigan, and raised in Marinette, Wisconsin, Roger graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1941 and then joined World War II as a fighter pilot in the South Pacific. In combat, he became a Fighter Ace and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross along with numerous metals and accommodations for bravery, heroism and his skills as a pilot. After World War II, he served again in Korea. Retiring from the Marine Corps as a Lt. Col., he then began work as a test pilot for Douglas Aircraft (McDonnell Douglas, now Boeing). His stories of bravery, heroism and his love of live are an inspiration to us all. He will be missed, but he will remain in our hearts forever. A memorial service is planned for May 5, 2007 beginning at 10:00 a.m., 500 Morning Star Lane, Newport Beach, California.


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## evangilder (Apr 29, 2007)




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## FLYBOYJ (Apr 29, 2007)

He flew with "Butcher Bob" Hansen.


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## syscom3 (Apr 30, 2007)

Wing-Commander Robert Gibbes
PHIL DAVISON 
Second World War pilot 

Born: 6 May, 1916, in Young, New South Wales. 
Died: 11 April, 2007, in Sydney, aged 90. 

WING-COMMANDER Bobby Gibbes was one of Australia's most decorated 
Second World War fighter pilots, seeing action in north Africa, in 
the defence of Australia against Japanese air raids and in the aerial 
battles over Japanese-occupied Pacific islands. His P40 Kittyhawk 
fighter was decorated with a painted kangaroo kicking the backside of 
a German dachshund. 

Gibbes, who died after a stroke, was shot down once and crashed once. 
He was credited with downing at least ten enemy aircraft and was once 
recommended, unsuccessfully, for the Victoria Cross. For his wartime 
action with the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), he was awarded 
Britain's Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and Distinguished Flying 
Cross (DFC, with bar). In 2004, he was given his own nation's Medal 
of the Order of Australia (OAM) for "services to aviation and 
tourism", particularly in Papua New Guinea, then under Australian 
control, where he moved as a business pioneer after the war. 

One of Gibbes's most-renowned exploits, recounted in detail in his 
1994 autobiography, You Live But Once, took place on 21 December, 
1942, south of the Libyan city of Sirte. He and five other Kittyhawks 
from the RAAF were on a reconnaissance mission over an Italian 
airfield when they came under heavy ground fire. One of his 
colleagues plunged rapidly to inevitable death. Another, Rex Bailey, 
crash-landed. 

Although his own plane had been damaged by shrapnel after he flew 
over the airfield "at nought feet" and blew up an Italian Savoia 
aircraft, Gibbes managed to land some distance from Bailey's downed 
plane. Evading Italian troops, Bailey ran to reach his comrade, who 
dumped his own parachute to fit him into the cockpit and "used him as 
my seat" to take off and fly back to base. Having lost a wheel 
against a ridge in the 300ft take-off, Gibbes had to pull off a 
dangerous one-wheel landing at base. The rescue, and the Kittyhawks' 
destruction of a dozen Italian planes at the airfield, were cited in 
his DSO award. 

Just over three weeks later, with his aircraft patched up, Gibbes was 
shot down 120 miles behind German lines, but he evaded search parties 
sent out by Rommel's Afrika Korps, fooling them by walking west - 
away from his RAAF base. After 72 thirsty hours, his plan paid off as 
he ran into a British unit, greeting them with the 
inevitable: "G'day, mate. Got any water?" 

Towards the end of the war, in the Pacific, "Gibbsy" was one of eight 
senior Australian fliers involved in the so-called Morotai mutiny, 
named after the Indonesian island where they and their Spitfire 
squadrons were based. In April 1945, the eight complained they were 
being relegated to "pointless" ground attack missions against 
demoralised Japanese forces on non-strategic islands, and taking too 
many losses from anti-aircraft fire because of their low altitude, 
while their Spitfires should have been used in vital air-to-air 
combat. 

The officers were persuaded to withdraw their resignations. But, amid 
split loyalties at the top of the RAAF hierarchy, Gibbes and two 
others, including Australia's "top gun", Clive "Killer" Caldwell, 
were hit with what was widely seen as a retaliatory, trumped-up 
charge of smuggling alcohol. All three war heroes were court-
martialled - in Gibbes's case because of a bottle of gin, one of wine 
and two of Scotch found in his quarters. 

Needless to say, by attempting to ensure their supply of booze, the 
three retained the sympathy and support of virtually everyone back 
home, where they were by then household names. 

Robert Henry Maxwell Gibbes was born in the town of Young, New South 
Wales, in May 1916. When the Second World War started, he enlisted as 
an air cadet and was flying with the RAAF by June 1940 after lying 
about his height, short of the stipulated minimum. 

From 1941-43, most of his combat action was in north Africa. In the 
latter year, he was recalled to Darwin after continuous Japanese air 
raids on the city. Crashing during a training flight the same year, 
he suffered serious injuries and burns and found himself being 
treated by a Red Cross volunteer called Jeannine Ince. They married 
in December 1944. 

After the war, realising the need for air links across the highlands 
of Papua New Guinea, then an Australian "external territory", he 
moved to PNG and launched Gibbes Pepik Airways, using Junkers JU52 
aircraft he bought in Scandinavia. He sold the business in 1958, 
developed a coffee plantation on PNG, and started a hotel, the Bird 
of Paradise, in the city of Goroka, eventually turning it into a 
chain. 

By the time he returned to Australia in 1975, Gibbes was seen as an 
important pioneer of Papua New Guinea's development. Never one to 
take it easy, and already in his sixties, he sailed his 40ft 
catamaran, Billabong, solo from Southampton to Sydney. 

Still flying as an octogenarian, he built his own miniature, two-
engined aircraft in the lounge of his home on Collaroy Beach, Sydney. 
After miscalculating its wing-span, he had to knock down a wall to 
get it out and in the air, but it worked. 

He flew the contraption, described by friends as looking "like a 
lawnmower" until he was 85, when Australian civil aviation 
authorities decided he was too old to retain his licence. He was not 
amused and, as always, said so in no uncertain language. 

During Gibbes's funeral in a Sydney Anglican church, a single 
Spitfire Mk-VIII, its nose painted with a "shark's jaws" logo and the 
personalised signature his own Spitfire used to carry - Grey Nurse - 
overflew the church with an escort of four modern F-18 Hornet 
fighters. 

He is survived by his wife of 62 years, Jeannine, daughters Robyn and 
Julie, and five grandchildren.

Scotsman.com News - Obituaries - Wing-Commander Robert Gibbes


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## Wildcat (Apr 30, 2007)

Thanks sys. I knew about his passing a few weeks back but forgot to do a post. A great Aussie aviator who will be missed. However there are two a/c in Oz that fly in his colours that will keep the memory alive.


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## evangilder (Apr 30, 2007)




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## Gnomey (May 1, 2007)




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## Heinz (May 1, 2007)

R.I.P sir........


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (May 1, 2007)




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## pbfoot (May 2, 2007)

I heard he flew Daks on D day
By Duane Byrge 

May 2, 2007

Tom Poston, the comedian and actor who was nationally recognized for his long run on "To Tell the Truth" and his comic turns on "The Bob Newhart Show," died at his home Monday in Los Angeles after a brief illness. He was 85.

During the 1950s and '60s, Poston was ubiquitous on quiz and panel shows. Beginning with guest appearances on "The Tonight Show" when Steve Allen hosted it, he was a popular talk-show guest. He won an Emmy for performing on "The Steve Allen Show," a stint he continued for four years. 

Poston also was a recognizable comic actor. He played the grouchy neighbor on "Mork Mindy" but he particularly jelled with Newhart. His guest spots on "The Bob Newhart Show," when he played Bob's low-brow college chum, Peeper Murdock, who inspired the normally straight-laced Bob to "Animal House" antics, were popular episodes. When Newhart launched a new comedy series in 1982, Poston was cast as George Utley, his dull-witted sidekick whose loony observations packed wisdom. His slack-eyed look and slow-talking style were a hilarious combination, particularly when he punctuated them with inspired observations. 

Poston was reportedly originally offered the role of Maxwell Smart in "Get Smart," but turned it down.

Similarly, Poston shone as a comic sidekick for Tim Conway's Derk Dorf character, and made memorable appearances as Mr. Looney, the school custodian, on "Family Matters." In 1995, he joined "Grace Under Fire" as Floyd, Russell's (Dave Thomas) odd father. He teamed with Howie Mandel in the short-lived 1990 Fox series "Good Grief" a comedy set behind the scenes at a mortuary. Poston occasionally appeared in TV longforms, like the daffy 1986 CBS miniseries "Fresno."
Advertisement


While best known for his comedic TV appearances, he also did dramatic turns in such shows as "The Defenders," which starred E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed as a father/son lawyer team. 

Poston was active in theater throughout his career, highlighted by his Broadway turn in the advertising satire "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" He also played Trinculo in the 1960 "Hallmark Hall of Fame" rendition of Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

Poston's feature film appearances were sporadic. He began on film as a detective in 1953's "The City That Never Sleeps" and played the town two-timer in the Norman Lear comedy "Cold Turkey" (1971). He also performed in "Soldier in the Rain," which starred Steve McQueen and Jackie Gleason, and "Rabbit Test," with Billy Crystal. More recently he appeared in "Krippendorf's Tribe" with Richard Dreyfuss, and "The Story of Us," which starred Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Poston was born Oct. 17, 1921, in Columbus, Ohio. He was a student at Bethany College, but entered the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II and served in England from 1941-45. Poston was accorded an Air Medal for his efforts on D-Day, and won two other Oak Leaf Medals, gaining an Oak Leaf Cluster in military terms. 

After his discharge, he moved to New York and began to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. He worked under such teachers as Sanford Meisner and Charles Jehlinger. Soon, he won a part in the Broadway production of "Cyrano de Bergerac," which starred Jose Ferrer. 

Poston varied his performances between Broadway and live TV. He soon won a gig as the host of a live daily TV show, "Entertainment." His early TV performances were on a wide array of shows, including "Lights Out," "Studio One," "Goodyear Television Playhouse," "Robert Montgomery Presents" and "The Phil Silvers Show." During this time, he made periodic forays onto the game shows, frequently appearing as a celebrity or mystery guest on such programs as "What's My Line?" and "I've Got a Secret."

However, it was his turns on "The Steve Allen Show" which won him nationwide recognition and led to more starring roles on Broadway. His stage appearances became increasingly frequent, starring and touring in such productions as "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," "Come Blow Your Horn," "Bye, Bye Birdie" and "Fiddler on the Roof," among others.

Poston was married three times: To Jean Sullivan, Kay Hudson and, in 2001, to Suzanne Pleshette, who starred as Newhart's wife on "The Bob Newhart Show." He is survived by Pleshette and three children: Francesca Poston, his daughter from his marriage to Sullivan, and two sons, Hudson Poston and Jason Poston, from his marriage to Hudson.


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## Gnomey (May 2, 2007)




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## Njaco (May 10, 2007)

NJ.com: Everything Jersey
*To the core, he was of the Corps*
Thursday, May 10, 2007
A noted Marine died the other day. Brig. Gen. Edwin H. Simmons, 85, died May 5 at home in Alexandria, Va. 

Some people considered Simmons the memory of the Marine Corps. He wrote "The United States Marines: A History" in 1974 and it has been reprinted and updated several times. He wrote several books, including a novel in 2001 called "Dog Company Six." He was the director emeritus of Marine Corps History and Museums. He served in the Corps for 53 years 36 in uniform, 17 as a civilian. He served on Guam during World War II. He was part of the Inchon landing and the Chosin Reservoir campaign in Korea. He did two tours of duty in Vietnam. 

He was a Marine's Marine. 

But he wasn't always a general or a Marine. 

Back when he was little Eddie Simmons in Paulsboro, in fact, his mom wanted to make sure he had the right kind of friends, the kind that might make him tougher. 

"His mom, Nettie, came to me and said, I don't want him to grow up being a sissy,'" recalled Bob Cassel, who lived across the street from Eddie Simmons on Billings Avenue. 

"Back in the '20s and '30s, it was all fields in Billingsport down around 4th," he said. 

Bob is 92, which means he was seven years older than Eddie Simmons. Was he that rough-and-tumble a guy, that Nettie Simmons would choose him to help toughen up her son? 

"We played ball on the dirt street," he said. Not only were the streets unpaved, but the boys used silver maple trees to mark the bases. 

"I was the only one who would play catcher. We didn't have masks, so I'd get hit in the face," said Bob, who now lives in Mantua Township.

"I took him under my wing. We introduced him to everything in the neighborhood." 

Bob started to recall some of the things they did as kids, but soon realized he was reciting a list of activities that would be considered dangerous by today's standards.
"Oh, I wouldn't want kids to do that," said Bob. 

Bob's sister asked Eddie once what he was going to be when he grew up. Eddie answered, "I'm going to be a policeman." 

"Oh, no," said Bob's sister. "I don't want to marry a policeman." 

Bob's dad moved out of a duplex in Paulsboro to a whole house in Woodbury for the same rent of $28 a month when Bob was about 14. The boys went their separate ways. 

Years later, Bob discovered Simmons was living about a mile from his daughter in Virginia. 

"We'd visit (my daughter) and he'd say, Come over,'" said Bob. Wasn't the important general too busy to visit? 

No. He even insisted they come visit him the night before Thanksgiving. 

"He wanted to talk old times," he said. 

Bob said he feels some small sense of pride when he considers what kind of man old Eddie Simmons became. 

"He helped MacArthur on the Inchon landings. He started the Marine Museum," said Bob. "He looked up to me because I was an older kid."


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## pbfoot (May 10, 2007)

John Goddard 
Staff Reporter

A private funeral with military honours is being arranged for World WarI veteran Dwight Wilson, who died at Sunnybrook hospital yesterday at 106.

His passing all but eliminates the possibility of a state funeral for the last surviving Canadian veteran of the conflict, a proposal the House of Commons endorsed unanimously in November.

With Wilson's death, the distinction of being Canada's last living veteran of the Great War belongs to John Babcock of Spokane, Wash. 

"That means that I'm it," Babcock told Canadian Press from his home, after expressing his regret at Wilson's death.

Babcock became a U.S. citizen 60 years ago and has made it clear he doesn't want a state funeral in Canada, an honour usually extended only to prime ministers and governors general.

Lloyd Clemett was the most recent World War I veteran to die. He passed away at Sunnybrook in February at the age of 107.

Rudyard Griffiths, executive director of the Dominion Institute, called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to personally offer Babcock a state funeral in light of yesterday's development.

"The important thing is for that offer to be extended," said Griffiths, whose organization pushed for the state funeral idea last fall with a petition of 90,000 signatures.

"We now have one – John Babcock – and we feel the government should be acting," Griffiths said in an interview.

Family members asked for privacy yesterday and declined interviews.

Prime Minister Harper and other politicians expressed condolences to Wilson's family.

"As a nation, we honour his service and mourn his passing," Harper said in a release.

Opposition Leader Stéphane Dion observed that "Mr. Wilson and others of his generation made tremendous sacrifices" for the country.

Toronto Mayor David Miller called Wilson "one of Canada's true heroes" and said flags at city hall and the five civic centres will be flown today at half-mast.

Sunnybrook hospital also lowered its flags to honour Percy "Dwight" Wilson, who moved to its veterans' care wing last June from Cedarcroft Place retirement home in Oshawa.

Hospital nursing staff and residents will miss Wilson for his rich, baritone singing voice that once graced Massey Hall and national radio broadcasts, said media relations officer Sally Fur.

"You could often hear him down in Warrior's Hall ... singing and taking part in daily entertainment programs," she said.

Wilson was born on Feb. 26, 1901, in Vienna, Ont., in Elgin County, one of nine children.

At 14, feeling patriotic and looking for adventure, he trained as a mounted bugler in the militia. The following year, in July 1916 – still three years shy of the legal enlistment age – he joined the 69th Artillery Battery in Toronto.

He trained at Camp Niagara and Camp Petawawa, and shipped out that fall on the RMS Grampian, singing on occasion to his fellow troops.

"I was entertaining the boys," Wilson said in an interview three years ago as he recalled the two-week sea voyage, much of which he spent throwing up. "I just had the urge to be one of the gang."

In England, his age was discovered. For a while, he dug defensive trenches at Dover with the 34th Battalion, a reserve unit. He was sent home in January 1917 and discharged as a minor.

The following year, still underage, he re-enlisted in the 69th Battery but the war ended before he could be shipped overseas again.

"I think that's probably the only time that my dad actually didn't tell the truth," his son Paul once said. 

Like Wilson, Babcock also escaped combat because he was underage. By October 1918, the then 18-year-old was awaiting training that would send him to France but Germany's surrender in November ended the war.

Some 650,000 Canadians served in World War I, of which about 66,000 were killed and another 172,000 were wounded.

With the war over, Wilson took a job with Bell Canada, holding numerous positions in several communities and rising to manager of the phone company's Stratford operation. He retired in 1966.

Throughout his life he also sang. 

"I love to sing and I'll sing anywhere," he said last November.

He met his wife Eleanor Dean, a singer and pianist, while studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music. They wed in 1927 and remained together until her death in 1993 at 94. They had two sons, Dean and Paul.

When World War II broke out in 1939, Wilson tried to enlist but at 38 was deemed too old. Instead, he joined Stratford's 7th Perth Regiment Reserves, rising to the rank of captain.


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## Wildcat (May 10, 2007)




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## Gnomey (May 11, 2007)




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## trackend (May 11, 2007)

Found this in the Daily Mail today death is part of life and this guy went leaving a smile on everyones face.
The final take-off: WWII ace goes to his grave in a coffin shaped like a Hurricane fighter | the Daily Mail


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (May 11, 2007)




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## syscom3 (May 18, 2007)

Delaware man was with famed general for most of enlistment
By BETH MILLER, The News Journal 

Posted Tuesday, May 8, 2007
The Delaware man whose shorthand skills propelled him to a job as Gen. George S. Patton Jr.'s secretary during the controversial general's World War II service died Saturday in the Manhattan home of his caretaker, Sindia Pacheco. He was 92.

Joseph D. Rosevich served as Patton's secretary for 3 1/2 years -- almost his entire Army career. From Feb. 15, 1942, when he was summoned to Patton's office at Fort Benning as a private, until June 3, 1945, Rosevich was within earshot of Patton at almost all times.

He was with the hard-charging general during the invasion of Africa, in Sicily, during his return to England after losing command of the Seventh Army for slapping two soldiers, and during his dash across France and Germany with the Third Army.

But, Rosevich said, the public Patton was quite different than the private Patton. The four-letter words, the pearl-handled guns, the shiny boots, the show of medals -- all were part of Patton's public persona, he told News Journal reporter Tom Malone in 1971.

"Privately, he wasn't like that at all," Rosevich said. "He was a reserved man, I'd almost say a shy man."

And unlike actor George C. Scott, who played the general in the hit movie "Patton," Patton had an alto voice, Rosevich said, unless he was mad. Then it moved into the soprano range.

"It was shrill," Rosevich said. "It carried. I mean, it carried. You could hear it a long way."

Patton promoted Rosevich from private to master sergeant and in Sicily, awarded him the Bronze Star for meritorious service.

Patton could not endure errors -- on the battlefield or in the office. So the letter of commendation he dictated to Rosevich was something of a medal in itself:

"My dear Sgt. Rosevich: You have been my personal secretary since Feb. 15, 1942, and have accompanied me in all my campaigns. Your work has been of very high class, both rapid and accurate. I am sorry that the exigencies of the service cause us to separate and I hereby commend you for the superior performance of duty. Very sincerely, G.S. Patton Jr., General."

When Rosevich typed the letter and returned it to Patton, the general signed it and said, "There you are, sergeant. Perhaps that will be of some help to you in getting a civilian job."

Rosevich was invited to the première of "Patton" the movie.

Rosevich said he wanted to tell Scott, "You played Patton better than Patton could have played Patton."

Rosevich told The News Journal he was in Germany helping refugees from Nazi death camps when he heard Patton had been killed in a car accident.

A Delaware native, Rosevich graduated from Wilmington High School and the University of Delaware. He took shorthand and typing at Goldey College, and later earned his master's degree at Teachers College of Columbia University. He taught at Surrattsville High School in Preston, Md., until World War II.

"He always made my sister and I feel really special," said his niece, Sharon Rosevich, of Wilmington. "He took interest in everything we did. Everybody who met him just loved him."

In addition to his niece, Sharon, Rosevich is survived by a sister-in-law, Geraldine Rosevich, of Brandywine Hundred; niece Judy Curtis of Houston, Texas, and other relatives.

Rosevich's family was among the founders of the small, orthodox Jewish synagogue Machzikey Hadas, said Alan Schoenberg of Schoenberg Memorial Chapel.


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## syscom3 (May 27, 2007)

Brooks died at 85 died in London.

He parachuted into France in July 1942, to aid the French resistance. Before he was 21, he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Sabotage by his network of resistance fighters had brought railway transit to a stop in southern France after D-Day in June 1944. General Eisenhower wrote letters commending the effort.

Brooks' circuit was called Pimento, and his own code name was Alphonse. He had been raised in France and Switzerland, and spoke French with complete fluency. He remarked at one point that he had used one of his fake identities to vote in postwar French elections.

In 1945 he learned that his father had himself flown clandestine missions in World War One.


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## 102first_hussars (May 27, 2007)




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## Gnomey (May 28, 2007)




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## Bernhart (Jun 7, 2007)

RAF gunner war hero dies aged 87 
A war hero who became the RAF's most decorated air gunner has died at the age of 87. 
Wallace McIntosh from Aberdeen survived 55 World War II missions as a Lancaster rear gunner in Bomber Command's 207 Squadron. 

Flying Officer McIntosh is believed to hold the record for downing the most enemy planes from a bomber, with eight confirmed kills and one "probable". 

He died on Monday from lung cancer, at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. 

Mr McIntosh was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal and Distinguished Flying Cross twice - the RAF's highest honour for bravery - for bombing raids between 1943 and 1944. 

In one mission he shot down three German fighter aircraft as his Lancaster bomber carried out a raid on enemy armour during preparations for the Normandy landings. 

His efforts earned him a rare telegram of congratulations from the leader of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. 

'Against the odds' 

Mr McIntosh was born in a barn near Tarves, Aberdeenshire, in 1920. 

He was brought up by his grandparents after his teenage mother abandoned him. 

According to his 2003 biography, Gunning for the Enemy, he joined the RAF at the height of the war to escape from the poverty of life as a farm labourer. 

During the war, he was based at RAF Langar in Nottinghamshire and RAF Spilsby in Lincolnshire. 

RAF spokesman Michael Mulford described Mr McIntosh as a "true hero". 


He said: "Anyone who flew in Lancasters during the bombings knew the odds were against them. 

"Your life was on the line every moment. To do the job as well as he did was truly exceptional. 

"He did that 55 times and lived to tell the tale. 

"You had to be very highly skilled to be able to fire these guns when your own aircraft is bouncing about twisting and turning." 

Lancaster crews faced some of the most hazardous conditions during WWII with tail gunners particularly exposed. 

The 207 Squadron alone lost 1,007 men. 

One of Mr McIntosh's three children, Mary McIntosh, 44, said: "We never really became aware of his achievements until after he retired. 

"He had a very hard start to life and did well to overcome that." 

His funeral is expected to be held at Dyce Parish Church.


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## evangilder (Jun 7, 2007)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jun 7, 2007)




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## Gnomey (Jun 7, 2007)

Didn't even know he was living within 20 miles of me either :/


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## Wildcat (Jun 8, 2007)




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## Emac44 (Jun 8, 2007)

Rest in Peace Sir.


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## syscom3 (Jun 12, 2007)

Obituary: German WWII sailor dies in Uruguay
Friedrich Adolph was survivor of German battleship.
Article Launched: 06/09/2007 06:33:34 PM PDT

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay - Friedrich Adolph, the last surviving sailor in Uruguay from the famed German battleship Admiral Graf Spee that sank off this country's coast at the outset of World War II, has died, his family said. He was 89.

Adolph died Friday and had been "very sick," according to his grandson, Tobias Friedrich Adolph.

The Graf Spee was considered one of the most sophisticated battleships of its time.

The battleship prowled the South Atlantic, sinking as many as nine allied merchant ships before warships from Britain and New Zealand tracked it down and damaged it during the "Battle of the River Plate" that began on Dec. 13, 1939.

The damaged Graf Spee limped into Montevideo harbor where injured and dead sailors were taken ashore. To prevent it from falling into enemy hands, the Graf Spree's German captain later dynamited it and sank it a few miles from Montevideo.

Several German sailors who survived settled in Uruguay and others emigrated to Argentina.

Adolph was among those who remained in Montevideo. He was the last surviving sailor from the Graf Spee in Uruguay, but it was not immediately known if there are more survivors living in Argentina or elsewhere.

The ship has remained for decades in waters less than 30 feet deep only miles outside Montevideo.

In 2004, a recovery group using a barge with a crane raised a piece of an early radar system called a telemeter from the Graf Spee. In February 2006, they also removed a Nazi bronze eagle, weighing more than 800 pounds, from the ship's bow.

Adolph will be buried Saturday, his grandson said.


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## Njaco (Jun 12, 2007)




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## evangilder (Jun 15, 2007)

6/15/2007 - U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. (AFPN) -- Legendary fighter pilot, retired Brig. Gen. *Robin Olds*, died June 14 from congestive heart failure one month short of his 85th birthday.

He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on July 14, 1922, the son of Maj. Gen. Robert and Mrs. Eloise Olds. He spent his younger years in Hampton, Va., and attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he was an All-American tackle. He graduated in 1943 as a second lieutenant.

Following graduation from pilot training in 1943, General Olds was assigned to the European Theater at the end of World War II, where he flew 107 combat missions in the P-38 Lightning and P-51 Mustang. He shot down 13 enemy aircraft over Europe and became a triple ace 23 years later during the Vietnam War when he downed four MiGS. He flew 152 combat missions in the F-4 Phantom as the wing commander of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon Air Base, Thailand.

General Olds' exploits as the creator and mission commander of Operation Bolo, the most successful aerial battle of the Vietnam War, has been documented in the recent History Channel Dogfights Special series "Air Ambush."

General Olds served his country in assignments to England, Germany, Libya, Thailand and the United States, in positions of squadron, base, group and wing commander, and assignments to Headquarters U.S. Air Force and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He was assigned to the first jet P-80 squadron in 1946; was a member of the first jet Aerial Acrobatic Demonstration Team; won second place in the Thompson Trophy Race, jet division, in Cleveland, in 1946; and participated in the first dawn-to-dusk transcontinental round trip flight. He was a squadron commander of Royal Air Force No.1 Fighter Squadron, Sussex, England, during an exchange tour in 1948.

General Olds' military decorations include the Air Force Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, Silver Star with three oak leaf clusters, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross with five oak leaf clusters, Air Medal with 39 oak leaf clusters, British Distinguished Flying Cross, French Croix de Guerre, Vietnam Air Force Distinguished Service Order, Vietnam Air Gallantry Medal with gold wings, and Vietnam Air Service Medal.

After his duty in Vietnam, General Olds was named commandant of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy from 1967 to 1971. His last assignment before retiring from the Air Force in 1973 was as director of safety for the Air Force.

Up to a few months prior to his illness he was frequently called upon as guest speaker and lecturer for his inspirational and motivational talks. He was married to Ella Raines, who died in 1988, and then to Morgan Olds.

General Olds is survived by two daughters, Christina Olds of Vail, Colo., and Susan Scott-Risner of North Bend, Wash.; one granddaughter, Jennifer Newman of Santa Monica, Calif., and half-brother, Fred Olds of Virginia. He died peacefully at his home in Steamboat Springs, Colo., in the company of family and friends.

A memorial service will be held at the U.S. Air Force Academy within the next two weeks. In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots Association toward scholarships for the children or spouses of armed forces aircrew members killed or missing in action.


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## pbfoot (Jun 15, 2007)




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## Wildcat (Jun 15, 2007)




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## Heinz (Jun 15, 2007)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jun 16, 2007)




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## Gnomey (Jun 16, 2007)




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## ToughOmbre (Jun 16, 2007)




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## FLYBOYJ (Jun 16, 2007)




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## syscom3 (Jun 17, 2007)

Lieutenant Dave Wright

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 15/06/2007

Lieutenant Dave Wright, who has died aged 85, flew highly
dangerous sorties over the sea during the Second World War and wrote the Fleet Air Arm's most famous song; after the war he founded a company making gold braid for senior
British and Commonwealth officers.

Having joined the Fleet Air Arm as a newly qualified pilot
in 1940, Ward became one of 804 Squadron's small band of "catapilots" , flying the Canadian-built Hawker Sea Hurricane XIIA fighters from catapult-armed merchant ships.

Sailing in Atlantic and Arctic convoys, he would be launched by rocket-propelled sledge to attack approaching Condor bombers. Fourteen 11ft-long missiles ignited together to send his aircraft accelerating down a 70 ft ramp in a blast of fire which would be followed by a roar like an exploding bomb; the pilot would briefly black out ahead of the sound wave.


It was only after being launched on his first sortie from
the former banana boat Maplin that it dawned on the
20-year-old Wright that he was far from land with no
instructions about his return.

The theory was that he should land on the water and hope to be picked up by a passing vessel; but he realised that the oil-cooler underneath the Hurricane would scoop up water, causing it to sink like a stone.

So Wright perfected a manoeuvre in which he first jettisoned the canopy; then, crouching on the seat, he would decelerate the Hurricane and roll it slowly on to its back; he would then fall away from the aircraft, kicking the control column forward to avoid being hit by the tailplane as the Hurricane plunged into the sea.

In this way Wright survived 24 launches before switching to 893 Squadron, flying Martlets and Seafires from the fleet
carrier Formidable, to take part in the landings in North
Africa, Sicily and Salerno.

David Wright was born on July 14 1921 at Haworth, West
Yorkshire, where his father was a textile machinery designer and the inventor of the centrifugal spinning system. Dave was educated at Keighley Boys' Grammar School.

After the war he returned to Haworth, where he founded
Wyedean Weaving Company to make gold braid and medal
ribbons. All around the world police and armed forces wear
Wyedean products, which include sashes for the Royal Family and senior officers at Trooping the Colour as well as touch cord for cannon and jute webbing for undertakers.

It even made false eyebrows for camels for the film The
Mummy (1999). Wright liked to joke that he preferred clients in Africa because coups were more frequent there and the generals changed the braid on their uniforms regularly.

Wright founded the Haworth Round Table and helped open a private airfield at Black Moor, Oxenhope, where he took up flying again. As a prominent member of the Bradford Motor Club, he became a star attraction by riding a motor-cycle through flaming hoops at Haworth Gala.

He also composed sacred music, and for more than 60 years played the organ at Hall Green Baptist chapel, where his grandfather had been choirmaster. He was a talented jazz pianist, and as a wartime DJ entertained the ship's company of Formidable.

With Lieutenant Derek Stevenson, he wrote and set to music a version of the famous song Villikins and his Dinah; it lampooned the tedious A25 accident report form, beginning:
They say in the Air Force a landing's OK / If the pilot gets
out and can still walk away, / But in the Fleet Air Arm the
prospect is grim / If the landing's piss-poor and the pilot
can't swim.

The chorus (Cracking show, I'm alive / But I still have to
render my A25 ) has been sung, with other scurrilous verses, in every British carrier and naval air station ever since.

Dave Wright married, in 1946, Norma Hiley, for whom he liked to compose racy poems on the occasion of her birthday. She survives him with their two daughters and a son.


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## FLYBOYJ (Jun 17, 2007)




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## Gnomey (Jun 17, 2007)




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## Heinz (Jun 19, 2007)




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## trackend (Jun 25, 2007)

This is personnel one from me.
Last night aged 82 William (Bill) John Miles ex RN ABS (my father) died
He served In LCA's and saw action both in Europe and the far East. I intend to post my own thread on his Service as a personnel tribute much the same as I did for my Uncle Dennis who was a Wellington pilot but unlike my father did not survive the war.


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## Emac44 (Jun 25, 2007)

Rest in peace. For both your father and uncle Dennis Track. Yes please remember both of them mate. They would have been great men and my condolances to your family Track


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## pbfoot (Jun 25, 2007)

My condolences on the loss of your Dad


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## Lucky13 (Jun 25, 2007)




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## trackend (Jun 25, 2007)

Thanks guys he was a bit of a bugger at times as well as being tough and stubborn as hell but not a bad father.


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## Emac44 (Jun 25, 2007)

trackend said:


> Thanks guys he was a bit of a bugger at times as well as being tough and stubborn as hell but not a bad father.



As was my Father. Track. Well remember my Father's exploits of his during WW2. Tough as nails and stubborn as hell. Dad once got arrested by the Provost (Military Police) during the infamous Battle of Brisbane in 1942. Not because he was rioting mind you Track. Because Dad went and kicked this Red Cap fair up the arse for the excuse that the Red Cap was arresting one of Dad's mates and it seemed my Dad objected to this action. Dad was a fair bugger too Track. But in all given the fact he made mistakes as any man does. He was a good Father and I miss him. What you will do Track in say a few months begin remembering your Dad and all the funny things he you and family did. Enjoy those memories Track because he was a good man. I say this even though I don't know him or you personally


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## syscom3 (Jun 25, 2007)

Sorry to hear that.


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## trackend (Jun 25, 2007)

Thanks for the kind words EM SY.
Sounds like your dad was a bit rough handful too Emac but I think the war and before that the depression made people tougher in those days. 
He did do some crazy things tho I remember him burying a car engine in the middle of our lawn so he could use the fly wheel as a telescope mount and making a zip line for us kids out of two telegraph poles, again buried in the garden trouble was I was too short to touch the ground to stop so I used to just bash into the bottom pole.(lost 3 teeth cause of that) 
He wrote a short booklet (only 48 pages) on his WW2 exploits I may copy it into his own thread so it will at least be some where on the web for years to come. All the people who have read it enjoyed it and a local college English teacher said it was well written for a person with only basic education. With lots of humour as well as the serious side from a lower ranks point of view it makes interesting reading.


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## FLYBOYJ (Jun 25, 2007)

My condolences Track...


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## trackend (Jun 25, 2007)

Cheers Joe


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## Erich (Jun 25, 2007)

Gents if I may, although it is a great idea to post a tribute to a loved one, please make your own personal copy of their recollections if possible and if not then your own memories to treasure personally, I know from my own background as a boy I was not on top of things and lost all records, thoughts of my two Grandfathers that served in WW 1.
You will want this for your own children, and for their children .......... part of your heritage

my condolences

E ~


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## trackend (Jun 25, 2007)

Thanks Erich
I agree with your views. The little book I mentioned has been copied and is in the hands of several people both academic and just friends he is also mentioned in a published book called
Invaders by Colin John Bruce of which I have a copy.
Unfortunately I nor my brother have any children of our own (the step kids are not interested) to pass this and his letters, documents and medals on to so the blood line will end with us.
I have already entered some of his recollections onto the BBC's peoples war in the hope they will be recorded for posterity. and will when my time comes pass what I have to my cousins kids to look after.


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## Emac44 (Jun 25, 2007)

trackend said:


> Thanks for the kind words EM SY.
> Sounds like your dad was a bit rough handful too Emac but I think the war and before that the depression made people tougher in those days.
> He did do some crazy things tho I remember him burying a car engine in the middle of our lawn so he could use the fly wheel as a telescope mount and making a zip line for us kids out of two telegraph poles, again buried in the garden trouble was I was too short to touch the ground to stop so I used to just bash into the bottom pole.(lost 3 teeth cause of that)
> He wrote a short booklet (only 48 pages) on his WW2 exploits I may copy it into his own thread so it will at least be some where on the web for years to come. All the people who have read it enjoyed it and a local college English teacher said it was well written for a person with only basic education. With lots of humour as well as the serious side from a lower ranks point of view it makes interesting reading.



Not sure if you could call my Dad a rough handful Track. But he surely was an Aussie Larakin. God he had some adventures my Dad. It wasn't until he died Track. That I decided to source out his Army Records when he was with the 6th Division 2nd AIF earlier in the War. Rotten Old Devil had more run ins with the MPs and Army Justice in North Africa and the Middle East from 1940 to 1942. There were more transcripts than a 4 act play for a Shakespearian Threate Group. All of which he never told us about and I only found out about after his death some years later when I received his Army records from Australian War Museum records department. I was sure I heard him having a bloody good chuckle whilst I read his numerous charge sheet records attached to his normal army records.

But the funniest memory I have of my Dad. Was when he was having his morning shave with his trusty old cut throat razor over a laundry sink. When my elder brother came up behind Dad and stuck a nappy (diaper) pin right into Dad's arse cheek. why my brother did that was unclear, still is to this day. But Dad straigthened up as one would. He cut himself shaving and his eyes lite up like 2 roman candles. When dad had recovered from this he took off after my brother like a malley bull in the scrub. Brother was slightly quicker than Dad and beat a hasty retreat up the street. Leaving Dad rubbing his 2 different cheeks alternatively and swearing revenge. Which he got when my brother thought it was safe to come home. Then it was my brother"s turn to have a sore bloody arse


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jun 25, 2007)

Sorry to hear that track. My condolences.


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## Gnomey (Jun 25, 2007)

My condolences Track.


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## trackend (Jun 25, 2007)

Good story EM its what makes a family tick 

Cheers Adler Gnomey for the thought, all part of life.

Unfortunately it was not an easy death for him and he was in a lot of pain. Having said that he still told the nurse to sod off when she went to put an oxygen mask on him the cantankerous old devil.


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## Wildcat (Jun 26, 2007)

Sorry to hear of your loss Trackie. Keep your chin up mate.
 to your Dad.


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## trackend (Jun 26, 2007)

Ta WC


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## Heinz (Jun 27, 2007)

sorry for your loss trackend,


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## trackend (Jun 27, 2007)

Cheers H


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## Njaco (Jul 1, 2007)

Might be alittle late here but my condolences Track. Lost my dad a few years ago and can somewhat know what you're goin thru.


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## syscom3 (Aug 15, 2007)

Lieutenant-Commande r "Fairy" Filmer, who has died aged 91, helped to sink a German cruiser in a dive-bombing attack; spent five years as a German prisoner-of- war; and later was a master of merchant ships in the South Seas.

Diving at 60 degrees from 12,000ft as part of a force of 16 Blackbird Skuas with 800 and 803 naval air squadrons on April 10 1940, he hit the German light cruiser Königsberg with a 500lb bomb, which was one of three which caught the ship in Bergen harbour, and sank her. It was, Filmer recalled, "the first time in the history of aviation that a major warship was sunk by air attack in wartime"; he was mentioned in dispatches for his daring and resource in the conduct of hazardous and successful operations.

Between April 12 and 26 Filmer flew five more sorties against German shipping and the Luftwaffe from Hatston in the Orkneys and the carrier Glorious. On the last of these he broke away from his flight of three Skuas to attack three Heinkel 111s, shooting down one but being caught by a burst of fire.

Blinded by spraying petrol and with his cockpit full of smoke, he ditched his aircraft in a fjord, but his torpedo air gunner, Petty Officer Ken Baldwin, was killed. Filmer was ever afterwards haunted by the thought that had he waited for his flight to follow, Baldwin might never have been killed.

With Norwegian help he salvaged his aircraft, and was evacuated to Tromsø in the cruiser Glasgow with King Haakon and the Norwegian gold reserves before taking a short period of survivor's leave and rejoining 803 squadron with a replacement aircraft.

His memory of meeting the Norwegian king made Filmer all the more determined when, on June 13, he was a section leader of 803, which flew from the carrier Ark Royal to make an ill-fated attack on German ships.

"As we neared Trondheim I was stunned to see the battlecruiser Scharnhorst was surrounded by a heavy cruiser and four destroyers," he remembered. "It was painfully evident that the firepower from the six naval ships, plus the land batteries, was going to be immense. The tracer bullets commenced rising well before we were within striking distance".

Despite the heavy flak Filmer completed his attack, but was jumped by two Me 110 fighters. Outgunned and out-manoeuvred, he ditched his aircraft to save his wounded observer, Midshipman Tony McKee, landing wheels-up on the fjord where they were picked up by Norwegians in a small boat. En route to hospital Filmer and McKee planned their escape to Sweden, but they were taken prisoner and flown to Germany.

Cecil Howard Filmer, known as "Fairy", was born in South Africa in 1916, and in 1931 he joined the South African training ship General Botha. He was runner-up to the King's Gold Medallist for his term and appointed midshipman, RNR. After three years' apprenticeship with Houlder Brothers, a UK firm, he passed his 2nd mate's certificate and was sent to the destroyer Foresight.

He then transferred to permanent service, serving as a sub-lieutenant in the battleships Resolution and Ramillies. Aged 21, he was appointed navigator of the destroyer Grenade in the Mediterranean, and volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm as a pilot, obtaining his wings in 1938.

Filmer spent five years as a prisoner of war, beginning in Dulag Luft, and delighted in making repeated escape attempts. Once he and five others jumped at night from a train travelling at about 25 mph, but were recaptured the next day. Another time he hid in the false bottom of a box filled with empty food tins and was carried out to a rubbish dump. While the guard was distracted, he slithered out and hid in a hut until darkness fell and walked away from the camp using the lights behind him as a navigation aid. After 10 days he reached the Danish border, where he was caught again.

He helped with the tunnel at Stalag Luft III for the Great Escape of April 1944, which led to 50 of the airmen who got away, including his Norwegian friend Halldor Espelid, being shot on Hitler's orders. Finally, with several thousand other PoWs, Filmer marched hundreds of miles, in freezing conditions, from southeast of Berlin to the port of Lübeck in order to avoid the advancing Russians. He was mentioned in dispatches for his good services while a prisoner of war.

After the war Filmer flew again with the Royal Navy but retired in 1958, returning to his first love, the merchant navy, and within 12 months he was master of a ship belonging to the King of Tonga.

Once, south of New Caledonia, his ship broke down, and being unwilling to be adrift in the hurricane season, Filmer made sails out of deck awnings and sailed 350 miles at four knots to a rendezvous with an Australian rescue tug. He continued for a further 16 years, based at Fiji, and sailing between Tahiti, Rarotonga, Honolulu and the Gilbert Islands, before retiring aged 69 to Durban.

"Fairy" Filmer, who died on July 15, never married. "Just as well," he said. "A wife would not have seen much of me over the years."


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Aug 15, 2007)




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## trackend (Aug 15, 2007)

WW2 vets are thinning out very quickly be a very sad day when they are all just recorded voices and images


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## ToughOmbre (Aug 15, 2007)

Every one a hero


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## Gnomey (Aug 16, 2007)




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## syscom3 (Aug 20, 2007)

Captured submarine ace whose many escape attempts culminated in a 400-mile trek across Italy to Switzerland
Vice-Admiral Sir Ian McGeoch, who has died aged 93, was a wartime submarine ace and a serial escaper after being captured by the Germans in the Mediterranean in 1943.

McGeoch's most famous exploits in submarines came in the period between November 1942 and April 1943. On his first war patrol he was deployed off Naples to ambush any Italian battleship which might threaten the Allied landings in North Africa. 

He hunted and missed a German U-boat, but when an anti-submarine schooner was sighted the same afternoon McGeoch surfaced and fired a few shots to persuade the crew to abandon ship; he then boarded and searched her before setting her on fire. He allowed an armed merchant cruiser to pass unmolested, but the next day another U-boat proved too tempting to resist - it was not an easy attack, however, and McGeoch's torpedoes missed their target.

A day later - determined not to waste his one remaining torpedo - McGeoch took Splendid inshore, where he could see two merchant ships under the escort of two destroyers. Picking the larger and more modern of the destroyers, he scored a direct hit.

Returning to Malta, McGeoch saw an RAF Wellington attack a convoy and disable a merchantman; he surfaced and shelled the straggler until she sank.

What the official record described as an "exhilarating" patrol was further enlivened the following night, when Splendid was forced to turn and dive to avoid the tracks of two torpedoes.

On his second patrol McGeoch and Splendid made a nuisance of themselves on the Axis convoy routes to North Africa, sinking another destroyer. On his third and fourth patrols he sank two anti-submarine vessels and another 19,000 tons of shipping. He was awarded a DSO.

Later McGeoch spotted a 10,000-ton tanker with a powerful escort off Sicily. The conditions were as unpromising as they could be (a flat calm and a bright sun), but he pressed home his attack to within 600 yards and "made a job of it" with three torpedoes. Two days later he sank a 3,000-ton tanker.

In April 1943 McGeoch was awarded a DSC for his bravery and skill in successive submarine patrols, but on April 21 his luck turned. He was in Splendid three miles off the south-east coast of Capri when he was puzzled to see through his periscope a British destroyer; it was in fact a British-built warship, formerly the Greek destroyer Vasilefs Georgios, but now under the German swastika as Hermes.

In good asdic conditions Hermes dropped three accurate patterns of depth charges and Splendid sank to the seabed, where the depth gauge stopped at 500ft. McGeoch blew all his air tanks to raise his submarine to the surface; the crew abandoned the boat through the gun and conning tower hatches while Hermes made direct hits with her main armament, killing 18 of Splendid's 48-man crew.

McGeoch himself was wounded, in the right eye, but stayed in the boat until he was sure that there was no one left alive and that it would sink before the enemy could board it. The entire action was over in 12 minutes.

As McGeoch was hauled from the water into a German motorboat he heard a guttural voice delivering the classic line "For you the war is over", and he thought to himself "No, it bloody well isn't". Thus began a year-long odyssey to reach Britain.

Although now blind in one eye, McGeoch made several escape attempts: he attempted to dig, during the siesta hours, a tunnel from an Italian hospital where he was being treated. He jumped from a train when he was being moved between camps, but was recaptured. After being taken to Rome for interrogation, he leapt from a moving car and made a vain attempt to enter the Vatican.

Later, after the Italian armistice, he was promised repatriation, but the train in which he was travelling was commandeered by the Germans; McGeoch was taken to a prison hospital, from which he simply walked away, eventually crossing the border into Switzerland after a 400-mile hike.

He chose Switzerland - more distant than the Allied front line - because he wanted medical attention, and he was conscious while Professor Adolphe Franceschetti used an electromagnet to draw a jagged sliver of rusty steel from his blind eye. 

He was also taken with what he called "the silken dalliance" of Geneva, but was impatient to get home and obtained false papers before walking into France in January 1944. Making contact with the Resistance, he travelled westwards by train and car, then skied across the Pyrenees and into temporary internment in Spain.

From Gibraltar he took passage in the dummy battleship Centurion, and his arrival in Britain was announced to the Resistance by the BBC with the cryptic words le tabac du Petit Pierre est dans la boîte. His reunion with his wife and the child he had not yet seen was delayed until two days later by a debriefing with MI9. He was mentioned in dispatches for his successful escape.

Ian Lachlan Mackay McGeoch was born on March 26 1914 at Helensburgh, where he was inspired to pursue a life at sea by messing about in boats on the Firth of Clyde. He was educated at Pangbourne, and entered the Royal Navy as a special entry cadet in 1931.

In 1933 he served as a midshipman in the battleship Royal Oak, the destroyer Boadicea and the cruiser Devonshire, but six years later began to specialise in submarines.

On the outbreak of war McGeoch was third hand in the submarine Clyde. He passed the perisher in 1940 and was sent to Malta as spare commanding officer. He commanded Splendid during the Allied landings in North Africa (Operation Torch) before embarking on the period in which he became a submarine ace. 

After his escape McGeoch attended the naval staff course in 1944 and was staff officer operations in the 4th Cruiser Squadron of the British Pacific Fleet.

In 1946-47 he commanded the frigate Fernie until being promoted commander and sent to work in the operations division of the Admiralty. In 1949 he commanded the 4th Submarine Division in Sydney.

He was naval liaison officer to RAF Coastal Command in 1955-56, Captain 3rd Submarine Squadron in 1957-58, then spent two years as director of the Underwater Warfare Division in the Admiralty. After a year as a student at the Imperial Defence College, McGeoch commanded the cruiser Lion from 1962 to 1964.

Promoted to admiral, he was successively Admiral President of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, Flag Officer Submarines, and Flag Officer Scotland and Northern Ireland. He was appointed CB in 1966 and KCB in 1969.

After retiring in 1970 McGeoch went to Edinburgh University to study Social Sciences, and in 1975 was awarded an MPhil for his study of the origins, procurement and effect of the Polaris project.

From 1972 to 1980 he was editor of The Naval Review, and contributed to many other service journals. He collaborated with General Sir John Hackett and other senior Nato officers in producing two editions of The Third World War (1978 and 1982), which predicted how a future war might be fought.

McGeoch wrote a wartime memoir, An Affair of Chances: a Submariner's Odyssey, 1939-44 (1991), and The Princely Sailor: Mountbatten of Burma (1996), an assessment of the service career of a leader with whom McGeoch had several times served and whom he had always admired.

Interested in all maritime affairs, but especially in safety at sea, McGeoch took an active interest in all his many nautical associations, including the Royal Institute of Navigation, the Nautical Institute and the Honourable Company of Master Mariners.

He was a member of the Queen's Body Guard for Scotland, the Royal Company of Archers and of the Royal Yacht Squadron.

Ian McGeoch died on August 12. He married, in 1937, Eleanor Somers Farrie (whom he always called Somers); she survives him with their two sons and two daughters.


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## ccheese (Aug 20, 2007)

Farewell, and following seas......

Charles


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## timshatz (Aug 20, 2007)

Pretty cool life. Good for him.


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## pbfoot (Oct 4, 2007)

I believe the story was posted earlier but I can't locate it but it deserves a follow up as they were buried today 


KRAKOW, Poland – The remains of Canadian and British crewmen of a Royal Air Force bomber shot down in the Second World War were buried Thursday in southern Poland with full military honours.

The Halifax bomber was shot down in 1944 by the Nazis while on a mission to drop weapons and other supplies to Polish resistance fighters, but was only recovered last year.

Relatives of the airmen attended a mass at the military church in the historic city of Krakow, near where the plane was downed, before the burial in the military section of the city's Rakowicki cemetery.

Two British and two Canadian pall bearers carried a single small wooden coffin for burial containing the remains of all the crewmen as a Polish Air Force honour guard stood to attention.

British and Canadian Air Force chaplains said prayers over the coffin before it was lowered into the ground while more than a dozen relatives of the crewmen looked on.

"This is a closure," said Cheryl Blynn, 52, of Paradise, Nova Scotia, whose father's brother piloted the plane on its ill-fated final flight. "We now know where they are."

The crew, all members of the RAF's 148 Squadron, included five Canadians: Flight Lt. Arnold Raymond Blynn, of Plympton, Nova Scotia, who was 26 when he died; Flying Officer Harold Leonard Brown, 20, of Huron County, Ont.; Pilot Officer George Alfred Chapman, 24, of Toronto; Flight Sgt. Arthur George William Liddell, 31, of Montreal and Flight Sergeant Charles Burton Wylie, 20, of Hazenmore, Sask.; and two Britons: Sgt. Kenneth James Ashmore, 32; and Sgt. Frederick George Wenham, 21.

The Halifax JP-276A took off on its final flight from the Italian city of Brindisi around 8 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1944, to drop weapons, ammunition and medical supplies for resistance fighters involved in the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis.

Resistance fighters took control of the capital but were eventually defeated by the Germans amid tremendous destruction and loss of life.

The plane was shot down by Poland's Nazis occupiers and crashed near the town of Dabrowa Tarnowska, in southern Poland.

Local residents at the time found some remains and buried them in a local cemetery, then later had them moved to the Rakowicki cemetery in Krakow – a burial site for some of Poland's most respected figures, including the parents of Pope John Paul II.

The aircraft stayed buried deep in the fields for 60 years, until the residents disclosed its existence to the Warsaw Uprising museum.

In November 2006, the museum's historians recovered the badly damaged wreckage of the Halifax, more remains, documents, maps, two revolvers and personal belongings including a pocket knife and an airman's gilded badge.

The historians also found containers with supplies that the crew did not have time to drop.

The museum opened an exhibition on the find on Aug. 4, the 63rd anniversary of the plane being shot down.

DNA from the relatives was used to identify the remains and a Canadian veterans' organization arranged for the burial


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## drgondog (Nov 28, 2007)

Col William "Wild Bill" Cummings, former PTO fighter pilot in Java before taking command of newly formed 355th FG. 

He was the first and longest wartime commander of the 355th FG and commanded it to number three position of 8th AF Fighter Groups in total number of German aircraft destroyed and damaged.

He personally led a Fighter Sweep to Munich area on 5 April, 1944 that navigated over complete cloud cover, brought the Group's Mustangs through a blinding snowstorm and wreaked havoc and destruction over 5 German airfields.

The 46 destroyed on the ground plus five in the air and two probables along with 81+ damaged aircraft (mostly NJG twin engine a/c) for the loss of 3 Mustangs and pilots earned the 355th their first DUC. 

This mission for number of enemy aircraft destroyed woul hold until September, 1944

His personal leadership style was was lead from the front and if the choice was go for the Luftwaffe or stick with the bombers, he made sure his group kept them covered.

Cummings passed away yesterday in San Antonio.

RIP


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## ccheese (Nov 28, 2007)

Charles


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## Gnomey (Nov 28, 2007)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Nov 29, 2007)




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## ToughOmbre (Nov 29, 2007)

TO


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## syscom3 (Dec 5, 2007)

Willard Sweetser, retired Navy admiral, dies at 105
Decorated officer was the U.S. Naval Academy's oldest living alumnus
The Associated Press

6:20 PM EST, December 3, 2007

Willard Sweetser, a retired Navy rear admiral who was the U.S. Naval Academy's oldest living alumnus, died Friday at the Maine Veterans' Home in Paris, Maine. He was 105.

Sweetser served aboard the gunboat USS Panay, which in 1937 was attacked by the Japanese while at anchor in the Yangtze River in China, and went on to command the destroyers USS Lardner and USS Hickox in the Pacific. His awards included the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars.

Sweetser, whose parents ran a grocery store in Gray, Maine, enrolled in the Naval Academy in 1922, his interest in life at sea mirroring that of ancestors who had been shipmasters.

"I guess, as young folks do, my father at a young age had a passion for the sea and wanted to serve his country," said Willard Sweetser Jr. of Annapolis, one of his two children.

After World War II, Sweetser served as naval attache at U.S. embassies in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, a posting that involved gathering intelligence on the Communist governments then in power.

"He would count smokestacks. He would count airplanes," his son said. "There was an awful lot of subterfuge going on in those days."

After his retirement in 1956, Sweetser earned a master's degree from Purdue University and went on to teach mathematics and statistics at LaSalle University in Philadelphia.

After his wife, the former Martha Callanan, died, Sweetser remarried. In 1972, he moved back to Gray, where he lived with his second wife, Barbara Bigelow, until her death. He co-authored a book about his hometown's history.

Sweetser's caretaker, Elaine Verrill, described him as an independent person who lived a full life. "When he turned 100, he made a conscious decision not to drive his automobile again. He put his license in a drawer," she said.

Sweetser's son said his father kept a positive outlook and remained vibrant, even at 105.

"He was reading the Wall Street Journal every day, and his memory was like the memory of an elephant," his son said.

A private funeral was planned.

Besides his son, Sweetser is survived by a daughter, Ellen Allen, of Stony Brook, N.Y.

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Dec 6, 2007)




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## Gnomey (Dec 6, 2007)




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## ToughOmbre (Dec 6, 2007)

TO


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## pbfoot (Dec 10, 2007)

From the local paper but sounds like he was an interesting guy

SCHELLINCK Anton Albert (Doc) (Lt. Cmdr, retired) died on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 in Fort Erie, Ontario, after a brief illness. Born in 1925 in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, he was a son of the late Henri and Lucy (Vandermoor) Schellinck. Doc was an extraordinary pilot. He managed to enlist in the RCAF and graduate as a pilot officer by age 17. He then served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Army in England. He then continued his career in the RCN. As an exchange pilot in the USN, he flew in elite squadrons, piloting the most advanced jet aircraft in the world at that time. He served aboard all three Canadian aircraft carriers: the Warrior, the Magnificent and the Bonaventure. A navy pilot to the end, he flew the last plane off the Magnificent. As one of the original pilots in the young Canadian naval air arm, he was frequently put in the role of test pilot. He piloted 27 types of aircraft including Seafires, Cougars, Seafuries, Vampires, Hellcats, Fireflies, the Bell 47G and the Consolidated PBY 5A converted for water bombing. He launched the first Banshee initial deck trials on the Bonaventure and was the first pilot to survive a carrier overshoot and ditching of a Seafury. He was squadron leader of the first Trackers to fly across the Atlantic. In, 1963-1965, he was the commanding officer of VU33 in Pat Bay, Vancouver Island. Following his retirement from the Canadian Armed Forces in 1972


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## Wildcat (Dec 10, 2007)




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## Bernhart (Dec 11, 2007)

DICK BRIMMELL 1928 - 2007 Richard Philip (Dick) Brimmell died suddenly at home while watching TV, of a massive heart attack, on Wednesday, November 28, 2007. He was the beloved husband of 56 years of Helen Bannerman-Brimmell: the dear father and father-in-law of Richard Chester Brimmell and his wife Andrea of Victoria B.C. and of daughter Louise Ellen Brimmell and her spouse Lynn Tripp of White Rock B.C., and cherished grandpa of Andrew and Marianne Brimmell of Victoria. Dick was born in Leicester, England, on August 4, 1928. The eldest child of the late Richard Dangar Brimmell and Phyllis Jones-Brimmell. The family moved to Ramsgate Kent where his father served as Borough Surveyor (City Engineer). Also surviving him are brothers, John of Mill Valley, California and Robert of Wimborne, Dorset, England and sister, Sheila Cole of Ramsgate. Dick apprenticed under the British Union of Journalists working on the Isle of Thanet Gazette in Margate, Kent. The Second World War soon drew him into the British army where he served in the Royal West Kent Regiment after training with the Irish Guards and the Officers short course at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He then moved to the Water Transport Division of the Royal Army Service Corp and spent the rest of the war at Memai Bridge, Wales. After completing his journalism training at the end of the war, he took a job with the Royal Gazette in Hamilton, Bermuda, where he met his future wife who was already a member of the staff. They were married April 14, 1951 at her family home in Owen Sound, Ontario. They both worked for a time at The Oshawa Times Gazette before Dick was moved by The Thomson Company, owner of both papers, to the Guelph Mercury in 1954. He covered the city hall and education beats and became news editor. In 1960 he changed careers and became Secretary-Treasury of the Guelph Board of Education where he oversaw the changes for it to become the Guelph District Board of Education and later the Wellington County Board of Education. He was active in the Ontario Association of School Business Officials and was president in 1970/1971. During this time he kept his journalist hand in by writing the editorials for the Guelph Guardian newspaper. In 1973 he returned to the Guelph Mercury, where his wife was then family editor, and became managing editor. He greatly enjoyed the world of journalism and one of his greatest pleasures was creating the front page pictures for the April Fool's day issue, which always caused a stir. In 1983 he returned to public administration as the city's purchasing officer, again changing jobs to stay in Guelph, the city that he dearly called home. He was very active with the Ontario Public Buyers Association and also served as its president. Again, moonlighting, writing editorials and anonymous columns for the Royal Tribune (as it was then known) upon retiring from the city he put his name to the column, Tribe Trivia. He and Tribune editor Chris Clark created an outstanding short history of Guelph for the city's 175th Anniversary in 2002. This was one of many historical pamphlets that he created. Having been a Master Marksman in the British Army, Dick joined Guelph's 11th Field Regiment Royal Canadian Artillery where he captained the 11th Field Shooting Team. Always packing a Sergeant's tunic when they traveled so he could join his teammates in the Sergeant's mess after competition (although he ranked as a Lieutenant). He was very proud of being made a life member of the 11th Field Sergeant's Mess. He was a highly enthusiastic member of the 11th Field Officers Mess poker club "the Tuesday night prayer meeting". When the regiment reorganized, the poker club moved to the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 234 and all players of the "prayer meeting" quickly became proud legion members. He served on the Guelph Public Library Board and also became its chairman and then served as chairman of the Mid-Western Ontario Library Board. He was appointed by St. George's Anglican Church to be their member on the Guelph Cemetery Commission and served as secretary. A sports lover, he was a member of the Oshawa Cricket Club and then of the Guelph and District Cricket Club. In addition he organized its history, which was presented to the Guelph Public Library Archives. Dick was a long time avid member of the Guelph Community Boating Club. Tennis, badminton and curling are just a few of the sports he enjoyed but his true love was golf. He was a member of the Guelph Country Club for fifty years and a recent member of the Senjan Club. In retirement, since 1992, he greatly enjoyed being a member of the Guelph Wellington Men's Club and the St. George's Church Men's Club, the Evergreen Centre and reminiscing with fellow city hall retirees at their monthly luncheons. In earlier days he had belonged to both the Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs. A memorial service to celebrate Dick's life will be held at St. George's Anglican Church, 99 Woolwich St. on Wednesday, December 12 at 2 p.m. Flowers are gratefully declined. Anyone wishing to honour Dick may make a contribution to St George's Anglican Church or the Salvation Army. Arrangements entrusted to the GILCHRIST CHAPEL - McIntyre Wilkie Funeral Home , One Delhi Street, Guelph (519-824-0031). We invite you to leave your memories and donations online at: Gilchrist Chapel-McIntyre Wilkie Funeral Home 


sounds like an intersting fellow, especially his involvement after the war


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## syscom3 (Dec 24, 2007)

Great Escape survivor dies aged 92

Article from: Agence France-Presse
From correspondents in Wellington
December 22, 2007 04:57pm

THE last New Zealander involved in the famous World War II Great Escape from a German prisoner of war camp has died aged 92.

Mick Shand, a Battle of Britain fighter pilot, died at his home in Masterton, near Wellington, according to a death notice in the Wairarapa Times-Age newspaper. 

A specialist in low-level attacks, Mr Shand was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in September 1942 after his 60th sortie, but the same month his Spitfire was shot down while trying to destroy a train in Holland. 

Imprisoned in the notorious Stalag Luft 3 at Sagan, southeast of Berlin, Mr Shand took part in the Great Escape of March 1943 when 76 RAF officers tunnelled their way to freedom. 

Almost all the escapees were recaptured and 50, including three New Zealanders, were then shot dead on Hitler's orders. 

Mr Shand, who spent four days on the run, said in a recent newspaper interview that it was only by the grace of God that he was not singled out to be shot after his recapture.


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## ccheese (Dec 24, 2007)

Charles


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## Njaco (Dec 24, 2007)




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## Wildcat (Dec 24, 2007)




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## evangilder (Dec 24, 2007)




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## Gnomey (Dec 24, 2007)




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## Micdrow (Dec 27, 2007)




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## ToughOmbre (Dec 27, 2007)

TO


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## v2 (Dec 28, 2007)

*Airmen Missing in Action from Korean War are Identified *

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office announced today that the remains of two U.S. servicemen, missing in action from the Korean War, have been identified and are being returned to their families for burial with full military honors. 
They are *Col. Douglas H. Hatfield*, of Shenandoah, Va., and *Capt. Richard H. Simpson*, of Fairhaven, Mich., both U.S. Air Force. Funeral dates have not been set by the families. 
On April 12, 1951, Hatfield and Simpson were two of eleven crewmembers on a B-29 Superfortress that left Kadena Air Base, Japan, to bomb targets in the area of Sinuiju, North Korea. Enemy MiG-15 fighters attacked the B-29, but before it crashed, three crewmembers were able to bail out. They were captured and two of them were later released in 1954 to U.S. military control during Operation "Big Switch." The third crewmember died in captivity. He and the eight remaining crewmembers were not recovered. 
In 1993, the North Korean government turned over to the United Nations Command 31 boxes containing the remains of U.S. servicemen listed as unaccounted-for from the Korean War. Four sets of remains from this group were subsequently identified as crewmembers from the 
B-29. 
In 2000, a joint U.S./Democratic People's Republic of Korea (D.P.R.K.) team, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) excavated an infantry fighting position in Kujang County where they recovered remains which included those of Hatfield and Simpson. 
Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used mitochondrial DNA and dental comparisons in the identification of the remains recovered in 2000.


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## FLYBOYJ (Dec 28, 2007)




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## evangilder (Dec 28, 2007)




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## Gnomey (Dec 28, 2007)




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## ToughOmbre (Dec 28, 2007)

TO


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## Glider (Dec 28, 2007)

Can I mention my Father in Law. An ordinary Private as many millions of other men of differing nations, doing what they could for their country. 
He died earlier this year and when we were going through his things we found a number of letters that he wrote to his girlfriend/wife they married in 1942. To follow this up we obtained a copy of his war records from the Ministry of Defence. Put the two together and you have quite a record.

He was in the Territorial Army before the war and was called up when war broke out. After training he was sent with his unit to France after the collapse started to act as a rearguard. He was in an anti tank battery and was injured in one of the early combats and hospitalised back to England. 
As it turned out this was his lucky break as he avoided Dunkirk and recovered. In the letters was one from a friend of his who survived the battle and described the evacuation in some detail. 
You had to admire his calmness as he described the evacuation as 'that picnic on the French Coast'. He also listed the men George knew who didn't make it back and the list was a long one. Two thirds of the men in his battery were lost or captured and the A/T units were quickly known as the Forlorn Hope or suicide squads. He complained about the lack of co-ordination between different arms and lack of understanding. One example being how AT guns should be used. In the AT Artillery units the gun commander normally a sergeant, decided when to fire and in detail where the gun was to be sited. In the confusion of the retreat the AT guns were assigned to infantry units to support them, but the infantry officers insisted on siting the guns resulting in them being exposed and decreasing their effectiveness. 

After George came out of Hospital he was assigned to a HAA unit with 3.7in guns and spent time in and around major targets until 1941. He was then posted to the Middle East where he worked in a number of different roles spending time with Medium Artillery and Field Artillery units and working in what we would now know as the motor pool. One claim to fame for a short time was driving Montgomery's Rolls Royce from place to place where it was needed, but the official driver took over when the man himself was on board.

When the fighting moved to Italy the losses in the infantry were such that A1 men who were not in vital jobs were transferred to the infantry. This happened to George and he was clearly in the thick of it for a while. It was something he never talked about but he had a bayonet scar on his left side. As you would imagine being an old hand he picked up a number of souvenirs along the way.
One of these is a clock from a Me109 that crash-landed close to his battery in the desert. It now belongs to is son who has mounted it on the dashboard of his messerschmitt car.
He continued to serve in the infantry until the end of the war.

During the war he was twice made acting Corporal and once acting Sergeant but on two of these occasions he requested than he be made back to a private as he didn't like being in command of his friends. The third time it was a little different. A new officer straight from school gave an order during an artillery barrage that was suicide and would have had no benefit. The officer was knocked out by a shell blast, luckily as George put it in his letter and soon after he was back to being a private. Nothing is on his official record but read into that what you want.
His favourite story was just after peace was declared. On one side of the river were the British and on the other side of the river were the Russians. George was on guard duty on a bridge crossing the river and so was a Russian soldier. The pair of them had 'found' some drink and were soon doing some serious damage to the alcohol when a Russian officer arrived and finding them the worse for wear started yelling at the Russian soldier. 
When the officer had gone the Russian went back to the river bank and started shouting at George who started shouting back. Things escalated and they were soon screaming insults at each other and then the Russian took a few pot shots at George, who started firing back.
Officers soon turned up thinking some form of attack was going on and they dragged George away. Luckily no one had been hurt but in the morning the CO was catatonic, shouting that wasn't one war enough for him, did he want to start another one to stop getting bored, what the hell was he playing at and so on.


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## v2 (Jan 23, 2008)

*Werner K. Dahm*- Huntsville has lost another one of the original team of German rocket scientists.

Werner K. Dahm, an internationally recognized rocket pioneer whose work in Germany and the United States made important contributions to the nation's ballistic missile programs and its manned and unmanned rocket programs, died late Thursday afternoon in Huntsville at an assisted living center.

He was 90 years old.

He was the aerodynamicist in the future projects group on the original team of German rocket scientists working at Peenemuende with Wernher von Braun during World War II, when supersonic and hypersonic aerodynamics were still in relative infancy.

He went on to make pioneering contributions in high-speed aerothermodynamics in the U.S. Army's ballistic missile development program, and in NASA's manned and unmanned space flight programs. 


He was chief of the aerophysics division at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and later chief aerodynamicist at Marshall.

When he finally retired in 2006, at the age of 89, he was the last of the original German rocket scientists at NASA.

Dahm was born on Feb. 16, 1917 in Lindenthal near Koeln, Germany, the son of Anton Dahm and Maria Morkramer.

As a result of his technical background, in late 1941 he was assigned to the German rocket development effort at Peenemuende, led by Wernher von Braun.

There, as the youngest member of the rocket team, he worked in the future projects division, a group composed mainly of physicists who needed a specialist in aerodynamics. 

His work on the Hermes II continued after he moved in 1950 with much of the von Braun team to Huntsville as part of the Army's ballistic missile program. 

After the Russian Sputnik launch, in July 1960, he moved with other von Braun rocket scientists from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency to the newly founded NASA.

Dahm married Kaethe Elizabeth Maxelon in 1955, who preceded him in death in 1976. He later married Nell Sheppard Carr in 1981, who also preceded him in death in 2000. 

He is survived by his sister, Hilde Semmelroth of Bonn, Germany, by four sons, Stephan Dahm of Huntsville, Werner J.A. Dahm of Ann Arbor, Mich., Martin Dahm of Huntsville and Thomas Dahm of Plano, Tex., and by two grandsons, Johann Dahm and Werner K.S. Dahm, both of Ann Arbor, Mich.


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jan 24, 2008)




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## ToughOmbre (Jan 24, 2008)

TO


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## Heinz (Jan 29, 2008)




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## Gnomey (Jan 30, 2008)




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## v2 (Feb 6, 2008)

*Cyril "Bam" Bamberger dead *

RAF Squadron Leader Cyril "Bam" Bamberger passed away on 03.00 Sunday morning.
Bamberger was one of the surviving members of "The Few", having flown Spitfires with No. 610 Squadron in the Battle of Britain. He scored five victories during the Battle. In November 1940 he volunteered for Malta. He flew a Hurricane off HMS Argus to the island on 17th November, joining No. 261 Squadron. He shot down two Junkers Ju 87 in successive days over Grand Harbour in January 1941. He was afterwards posted to No. 185 Squadron and returned to England in May.

The following year he joined No. 93 Squadron in Tunisia where he scored further victories. He returned to Malta in 1943 and shot down another Ju 87 on 13 July over Sicily. In August, No. 243 Squadron moved to Sicily, and he received the DFC on 28 September 1943. On 16 October he claimed a Bf 109, another on 25 May 1944 and a Mc 202 damaged on 15 June.

In July 1944 Bamberger returned to the UK. In November that year he was awarded the bar to his DFC. Released from the RAF in 1946, he was recalled during the Korean crisis. Hi finally retired from the RAF in 1959.

In his retirement, Bam became known as a great friend to many and remained active in the aviation circles to the very last, most recently with the Bentley Priory Battle of Britain Trust (BPBBT). He was 88 years old.


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## Njaco (Mar 3, 2008)

Guy R. "Moose" Campo, 82, decorated Marine Corps unit commander | Philadelphia Inquirer | 03/03/2008

By Sally A. Downey 

Inquirer Staff Writer

Guy R. "Moose" Campo, 82, of Wallingford, a retired facilities manager and decorated Marine Corps pilot, died of heart failure Wednesday at Crozer-Chester Medical Center. 
During his more than 30-year military career, Mr. Campo flew with a Marine attack squadron in the Korean War; flew a Marine helicopter as a member of the White House Executive Flight Detachment for President Dwight D. Eisenhower; flew F-4 Phantoms in the 1960s; and was a squadron commander and flew more than 100 missions in the Vietnam War. He was stationed at bases in the United States and in Okinawa, Italy and Thailand. He retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 1976.

Mr. Campo grew up in South Philadelphia. At 17, he dropped out of South Philadelphia High School to join the Navy during World War II. He was a gunner and mechanic aboard Navy bombers in the South Pacific.

After the war he earned his high school diploma, attended West Chester University, and served in the Naval Reserve. 

In November 1951, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps and received his pilot's wings. The next month he married Philomena Capozzoli, whom he had met at an ice cream counter in a drugstore in South Philadelphia. While in the military, Mr. Campo earned a bachelor's degree from Oklahoma State University.

In 1973 he assumed command, his last, of the Marine Corps Air Station in Quantico, Va. His list of military decorations includes a Distinguished Flying Cross; a Bronze Star Medal for Valor; and 13 Air Medals. 

After retiring from the Marines, he was director of facilities for the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District for 15 years. 

Wherever he was stationed in the Marines, he always considered Philadelphia home, his son Ralph said, and he often vacationed with family in Ocean City, N.J. In recent years he enjoyed winters in Pompano Beach, Fla. 

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Campo is survived by sons Guy Jr. and John; a daughter, Mindy Thomas; a sister; and nine grandchildren. 

A Funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. today at St. John Chrysostom Church, 617 S. Providence Rd., Wallingford. Friends may call from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. today at Carr Funeral Home, 935 S. Providence Rd., Wallingford. Burial will be in SS. Peter and Paul Cemetery, Marple Township. 

Contact staff writer Sally A. Downey at 215-854-2913 or [email protected]


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## Njaco (Mar 3, 2008)

Metro Ostash | Advocate for vets, 84 | Philadelphia Inquirer | 03/03/2008

Metro Ostash | Advocate for vets, 84

Metro Ostash, 84, of Rydal, a retired press operator and advocate for disabled veterans, died of cancer Tuesday at home. 
Mr. Ostash, the son of Ukrainian immigrants, grew up with 11 siblings in Centralia, Pa. At 17, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in the Pacific during World War II. In July 1944 he was wounded during the invasion of Tinian and was hospitalized for 16 months. He earned a Purple Heart. 

Though he had limited mobility in his left arm, he was a press operator for 35 years at Hews Manufacturing Co., said his wife, Anne Chemerys Ostash. He retired in the early 1980s to devote his time to veterans activities. 

He met his future wife at a church dance, and they were married in 1946. He joined the Disabled Veterans of America as soon as he was discharged from the Marines, she said, and for more than 60 years he was an officer in state and local chapters, including serving as past state commander. He was former chairman of the organization's committee on national legislation and served on its national finance committee. He was a member of the Ukrainian-American Veterans Post 1 and was past commander of the United Veterans Council of Philadelphia. 

In 1978, Mr. Ostash received a Liberty Bell Award from Mayor Frank Rizzo for his service to Philadelphia veterans and in 1992 he was named veteran leader of the year by the Philadelphia Veterans Multi-Service Center. 

He and his wife traveled to Hawaii for a Disabled Veterans of America convention but never took vacation trips, she said, because his time was always committed to veterans organizations. 

In addition to his wife, Mr. Ostash is survived by a daughter, Dorothy Eastlack; two granddaughters; two great-granddaughters; a brother; and four sisters. 

The viewing is from 9 to 10:30 a.m. tomorrow at Fletcher-Nasevich Funeral Home, 9529 Bustleton Ave., Philadelphia. A Requiem Liturgy will be said at 11 a.m. tomorrow at Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church, Old York and Valley Roads, Melrose Park. Burial will be in Lawnview Cemetery, Rockledge.


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## Heinz (Mar 3, 2008)




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## Wildcat (Mar 3, 2008)




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## syscom3 (Mar 23, 2008)

DOOLITTLE RAIDER DIES

Former Army Air Forces SSgt. Jacob DeShazer, one of the legendary Doolittle Raiders who staged a daring bombing raid on Tokyo in April 1942, died March 15 at age 95. DeShazer, then a corporal, was bombardier on the Bat out of Hell, the 16th and final B-25 bomber to take off from the USS Hornet April 18, 1942. After completing their bombing run, the crew of Bat out of Hell bailed out over
Japanese-held territory in China. DeShazer, like the rest of the crew, was captured by the Japanese. He was held as a prisoner of war for 40 months. He returned to Japan in 1948 where he spent 30 years
preaching and teaching Christianity.


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## Njaco (Mar 23, 2008)




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## wilbur1 (Mar 23, 2008)




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## v2 (Mar 23, 2008)




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## pbfoot (Mar 23, 2008)

Arthur C Clarke his work in Radar in WW 2 , he was the lead man in GCA/PAR
radar without which the Berlin Airlift would have failed, and the radar that guided millions of aircraft to safe landings prior to ILS


COLOMBO, Sri Lanka–Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died yesterday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.

Clarke, who had battled post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died after suffering breathing problems.

Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.

He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits. And he joined broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moon shots in the late 1960s.

Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment.

"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."

From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and non-fiction, sometimes publishing three books in a year. He published his bestselling 3001: The Final Odyssey when he was 79.

Some of his best-known books are Childhood's End, 1953; The City and The Stars, 1956; The Nine Billion Names of God, 1967; Rendezvous with Rama, 1973; Imperial Earth, 1975; and The Songs of Distant Earth, 1986.

When Clarke and Kubrick got together to develop a movie about space, they used as basic ideas several of Clarke's shorter pieces, including The Sentinel, written in 1948, and Encounter in the Dawn. As work progressed on the screenplay, Clarke also wrote a novel of the story. He followed it with 2010, 2061 and 3001: The Final Odyssey.

In 1989, two decades after the Apollo 11 moon landings, Clarke wrote: "2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined."

Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 and 1980, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989.

Born in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917, the son of a farmer, he became addicted to science fiction after buying his first copies of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories at Woolworth's. He began writing for his school magazine in his teens.

Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and wrote his first short stories and scientific articles on space travel.

In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar blind-landing system. But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications that led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications.

Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched.

Clarke married in 1953 and was divorced in 1964. He had no children.

Disabled by post-polio syndrome, the lingering effects of a disease that had paralyzed him for two months in 1959, Clarke rarely left his home in Sri Lanka. He moved there in 1956, lured by his interest in diving, which, he said, was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space.

"I'm perfectly operational underwater," he once said.


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## Njaco (Mar 27, 2008)

WOW! Can't believe I missed this! One of my favorite authors. Used to watch a sci-fi/fact show in the early '80s where he went over things like the Bermuda triangle and such. Gonna miss him.


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## Bernhart (Jun 12, 2008)

On a personal note my aunt recently passed at age 86. lived a long wonderful life, was as energetic as anyone I've ever met. She never drove her car under 100 KPH, stopped driving about 5 years ago as couldn't see very well. Reason I'm including her here is she was in the dutch East Indies in 1942 as a nurse/midwife. She didn't talk alot about the time there but did say she saw some awful stuff and some amazing courage and people during the 3 years she spent in the Japense camps.


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## trackend (Jun 12, 2008)

My condolances Bernhart


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## Njaco (Jun 12, 2008)

Same here Bernhart.


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## Wayne Little (Jun 13, 2008)

Sorry to hear of your loss...


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## RabidAlien (Jun 13, 2008)

To all who've gone before, . I always get a little misty-eyed when I read about a vet passing away...this thread has got me all tied up.


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## v2 (Jun 13, 2008)




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## v2 (Jun 14, 2008)

Tadeusz Wieslaw “Ted“ *Kotz*, (1913- 2008 ) D.F.C., V.M., K.W., Colonel, W.C., 303 Squadron Leader Polish Division R.A.F., Ace and Hero of the Battle of Britain Passed away peacefully on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at Sunset Manor Nursing Home, Collingwood, in his 95th year.


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## evangilder (Jun 14, 2008)




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## Njaco (Jun 14, 2008)




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## ToughOmbre (Jun 14, 2008)

TO


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## Wildcat (Jun 15, 2008)




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## Wayne Little (Jun 15, 2008)




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## RabidAlien (Jun 17, 2008)




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## syscom3 (Jun 19, 2008)

War Ace passes away
Bert Houle dies at 94
Posted By Rosalind Raby

Midnorth Monitor - Ontario, CA

He is now flying other, more peaceful, skies. A World War Two Ace who called Massey home has passed away at 94. Flying Officer and Group Captain Albert ‘Shorty’ Ulrich Houle Jr. of Massey was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and many other accolades for his war-time fighting pilot skills during the Second World War. 


He flew with Nos. 213, 145 and 417 Squadrons, and his score of enemy aircraft was 11 destroyed, one probable and seven others damaged. Houle and his Spitfire became a legend during and after the war. He was the most successful of the many Canadian pilots who flew with the squadron during the war. Like thousands of other men and women, he had not planned to be a hero, the war made him so. 

Born in Massey on March 24, 1914, he attended public and high school there before graduating from the University of Toronto with a Bsc (science) in 1936. He won the Canadian intercollegiate wrestling championship in 1936. 

Houle was the second son of Albert W. Houle Sr. of Massey. Before enlistment he was an electrical engineer with the International Nickel Company of Canada. For two years after graduation, he was a demonstrator of electrical engineering at the university. Houle enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force at North Bay in September, 1940, received his wings at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and went overseas in May, 1941. 

In September, 1941, along with five other Canadian pilots, he joined 213 Squadron at Nicosia, Cyprus. After a short period of tie as a test pilot with a maintenance unit in the Canal Zone, he remained with the squadron until 1942. During this time, he destroyed three enemy aircraft, damaged three others, had one probable and one shared. The Spitfire Ace was awarded the DFC on November 27, 1942. 

According to CP Press files, the official citation covering the award is as follows: “One evening in October, 1942, Flying Officer Houle was flying with his squadron on patrol over El Alamein when a formation of enemy dive-bombers was sighted. The enemy aircraft jettisoned their bombs and flew west in an attempt to avoid the combat. With great tenacity and determination Flying Officer Houle pursued them far over the enemies’ lines and in the rapidly failing light engaged and destroyed at least two of the hostile bombers, 

“This officer is a skilful pilot who has always displayed exceptionally cool courage in action. His fine example has been a great inspiration to all personnel in his unit.” 

This commanding officer served throughout the Sicilian and Italian campaigns. An excellent leader and skilful pilot, he has always evinced a fine fighting spirit, determination and courage.

Bert Houle (centre) was presented with this special commemorative painting of himself and his Spitfire upon his retirement in 1967. The City of Windsor also features a full scale replica of his plane in Jackson Park, which was unveiled in 2005.

According to the Public Record Office Air 2/9624 Report dated February 4, 1944, Houle flew 815 hours, 338 sorties (400 operational hours, of which 240 had been flown since previous award). He was the Commanding officer for No.417 Canadian Squadron since November 21, 1943. Previous to this appointment he commanded a flight in the same squadron, and fought throughout the Sicilian campaign and the Italian invasion. 

On February 7, 1944, the Air Officer Commanding the Desert Air Force at the time, added his remarks. “Squadron Leader Houle is a very gallant fighter pilot and has done magnificent work, particularly since he took over command of No.417 Squadron. I strongly recommend him for the award of a Bar to his Distinguished Flying Cross.” 

In another article written by Kenneth C. Cragg, Houle believed the Germans had the upper hand for a while. 

“From an airman’s view — and he had a lot of it leading the City of Windsor Spitfire Squadron over the Anzio Beachhead — Sqdn. Ldr. Albert Houle believes the limited success of Allied arms there was due to the speed with which the Germans moved supporting divisions into the threatened section. 

“Sqdn. Ldr. Houle and FLt. LT. George (Buzz) Beurling, Verdun Quebec, were two of 200 Royal Canadian Air Force officers and men repatriated for leave, to become instructors or ground crew who will train for air crew. Houle said, in as succinct comment as has ever come out of Italy, except what has been printed in the Eighth Army News, of the Anzio situation: “They never believed they could move in so many so fast.” 

He estimated the enemy moved in 12 divisions in 24 hours. By this time, Houle was considered something of an authority in assessing a position. “He had a lot of experience in helping to chase the Hun up into Europe, from the time as a pilot he fought at Solum and kept on fighting all the way to Tripoli. 

“In certain tangible ways ,he has left his imprint on the Middle East, not the least of them, by shooting down 11, getting a probable and damaging seven other enemy aircraft. He has a lot of other aircraft to his credit that he destroyed on the ground, but his record lumps them with a trail of wrecked motor transport and troop carrying trucks, which he knocked off during Rommel’s retreat from the gates of Alexandria. 

“The R.C.A.F. modestly knocks down Houle as one of its most outstanding fighters. It is not surprising, therefore, that the stocky, black-haired 1936 Canadian intercollegiate wrestling champion in his own weight, has built up a personal tradition. For example, he shot down two Jerries in 15 seconds. 

“That little feat he dismisses as just one of those things. As he tells it, he “squirted” at one, and he went down underneath him, and as No. One fell away, there was another Jerry.” 

He recalled the Rommel drive toward Cairo and remembered the final stand at El Alamein, when the British ordered everything that could fly to concentrate on frontline bombing and strafing operations, “Those were the days when an old model Hurricane was our first line fighter and when other types long since out of service made up our strength,” he said, “Those were also the days when we had orders not to waste ammunition and to make every shot count.” 

He told of the assembly of out-dated planes, of how they were loaded down with bombs, and of how they flew continuously over the Germans and Italians until they were stopped in their tracks. 

“When that time came we had exactly 250 bombs left,” Houle recalled. Houle said that he bad noticed varying changes in German tactics during the last year. “In the early days we were outnumbered and we used to have to fight our way out of some pretty tough spots,” he said. “But gradually as our power increased and German morale and pilot material seemed to fall away we used to spend our time chasing them. 

He said that lately the German strategy seemed to be to nurture dwindling strength. Pilots apparently had orders not to mix it with Allied airmen because they couldn’t afford losses. 

He said the only time that the Germans concentrated air support over their armies was when the ground forces needed support, such as during the Battle of Ortona. 

“They swarmed at us in fairly large numbers,” he recalled. “But we soon had the edge on them, and finally chased them out of the sky. Either our equipment had vastly improved or their pilots were becoming worse,” 

Houle said similar German strategy was employed at the Anzio Beachhead, where his squadron recently had been employed. 

“However, they seem to be using more experienced pilots in this area, and they are trying to make a fight of it and giving us some pretty tough battles,” he said. “However, our planes are better than theirs, and it’s only a question of time before we knock them out.” 

Upon his return home, Houle was met at the disembarkation port by his mother, who made her first flight to be there. A hero’s welcome awaited him at home, with a parade and accolades for their wartime hero. 

Following the war, he married Margaret Irvine, who he had met on a blind date, on June 19, 1945. The couple had two children, Donna and Craig. Houle went on to get his aeronautics degree and eventually rose to the rank of Deputy Commander of the NORAD Sector (Sault Ste. Marie) and Commanding officer of the Control Experimental Proving Ground, testing various new planes, in Uplands, Ottawa. 

His wife passed away on June 5, 2007. He passed away June 1 of this year. In an unusual move, the Canadian Forces will allow both their ashes to be buried in Beechwood Military Cemetery in Ottawa. Usually spouses are not given the right to do so, but due to his contributions to the Canadian military, the honour is being given for the first time. 

The two will be interned with full military honours on Friday, June 27 in Ottawa, which will also include a flyover of one of the few remaining Spitfires overhead, a fitting acknowledgement of one of Canada’s heroes.


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## Njaco (Jun 19, 2008)

Amazing!


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jun 19, 2008)




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## ToughOmbre (Jun 19, 2008)

TO


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## RabidAlien (Jun 19, 2008)




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## pbfoot (Jul 5, 2008)

How I missed this I don't know but will add a litlle bit

"During his North African service, he performed a bizarre attack by diving into and breaking up a German formation. He would be teased for it the rest of his life. It was called the "Houle attack."

Desert warfare was hard on pilots and aircraft. There was sand in everything, including cockpits. Hurricanes cruised with their canopies closed. The acrylic glass caused distortion, so

pilots opened the canopies when they went into action. With them open, the cockpit became like a sandblaster and goggles were a must.

When Houle started that memorable attack, his goggles blew off when he opened the canopy. Forced to clench his eyes shut, he didn't know he had flown through the enemy formation until after he did it. His faithful wingman was still on his tail, wondering if his leader had gone bananas.

Houle would earn many decorations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross -- twice. He quickly became a leader, and his first concern was always the welfare of those who served under him. Desert duty for combat pilots was particularly tough. There were no luxuries to return to, and losses were often high.

At one point, Squadron Leader Houle, aware his squadron had a morale problem, decided to fix it. He had all unnecessary weight removed from his Spitfire, including guns and seat. He sat on an empty wooden box and flew to Cairo. He came back sitting on a box of whisky and with every available space filled with booze. He threw a party. Morale improved
"Beurling was known as a hothead and a risk-taker. Houle was known for having little use for anybody not actively involved in the fight or directly supporting those who were. Being older than the average pilot and with more education, he was a natural leader. If he thought a superior officer was careless with the lives of pilots, he said so, regardless of rank.

Houle flew 338 sorties, many as squadron leader of 417, the first RCAF squadron in battle. He never boasted about kills, but was proud of the fact that, in command of Spitfires, he never lost a pilot in formation.


When 417 (City of Windsor Squadron) joined the war in the Mediterranean, it was said that other pilots, when selecting pilots to fly top cover, preferred six of any squadron to 12 of 417. After S/L Houle joined his fellow Canadians, the preference was reversed.

Houle was furious when, after two full tours, he was ordered back to training duties in Canada. His survival to that point defied odds. The life expectancy of a fighter pilot was six months, and in the early going, as little as three. He had skills that would save lives in battle, and not letting him use them where they were needed was unacceptable. He resigned. Beurling also rankled at the same treatment. He partied.


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## v2 (Jul 6, 2008)




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## Gnomey (Jul 6, 2008)




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## Bigxiko (Jul 6, 2008)

To those who fought and died
and for those who fought and live to be able to return home
I salute you


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## syscom3 (Jul 7, 2008)

Lieutenant John Perkins: coastal forces skipper

While commanding MTB683 and attached to a Norwegian flotilla based at 
Lerwick in Shetland, John “Polly” Perkins found himself alongside a 
jetty up a Norwegian fjord having completed a clandestine operation, 
landing agents and recovering refugees from the attentions of the 
Gestapo. As it was a few days before Christmas 1944, he sent one of his 
sailors ashore to root up some Christmas trees.

The MTB returned to Lerwick with three saplings which were displayed on 
the upper deck and in the officers’ and ratings’ messes. But the 
Norwegian admiral who had come aboard to be de-briefed on the operation 
begged for two, which were swiftly flown to London as gifts to King 
Haakon and the prime minister of the Norwegian government-in-exile.

Coastal Forces like to think that this incident is the origin of the 
annual donation from 1947 of a Norwegian tree to Trafalgar Square each 
Christmas, though an article in the quarterly Naval Review of October 
1993 suggests that the provision of royal Christmas trees began in 1940 
as a duty on the Norwegian Navy’s clandestine “Shetland Bus” operations. 
The Norwegian Embassy believes today that the annual donation was the 
independent idea of the Mayor of Oslo.

John Perkins’s career in coastal craft began with dangerous — if acutely 
tedious — sweeping for air-dropped acoustic mines in the Manchester Ship 
Canal. After a brief spell as second-in-command of a motor launch (ML) 
at Lowestoft, he was appointed, virtually untrained, to the destroyer 
Southdown on East Coast convoy duty.

As a temporary sub-lieutenant RNVR, thirsting for the excitement of the 
fast night-time actions against enemy convoys in the narrow waters of 
the Channel and North Sea, he bearded his appointing officer in the 
Admiralty and got himself transferred to coastal forces.

Commanding MTB230, he was awarded his first DSC and a mention in 
dispatches for actions against the enemy in the Nore area in October 
1942 and March and June 1943, the first being against a heavily escorted 
convoy off the Dutch coast where Perkins earned a reputation as an 
“eager and aggressive torpedo marksman”. The many difficulties of the 
MTBs’ early days included their unsilenced engines. Lacking starshell, 
radar and radio navigation aids, they were often unable to find the 
enemy or achieve the surprise necessary for the decisive close-in 
torpedo attack — sometimes becoming the hunted, not the hunter. His own 
lobbying helped to obtain the vital engine mufflers for the flotillas.

His second DSC was awarded for his part in another action off the Dutch 
coast while commanding MTB683 in June 1944. He remembered the campaign 
after D-Day as being one of “various bloody actions against flak ships”.

In command of MTB766 Perkins was engaged in offensive operations up the 
Scheldt river with the aim of opening up the port of Antwerp when his 
seagoing career was brought to an end by “the Ostend disaster”. Numerous 
MTBs were berthed at Ostend when a mechanic spilt a bucket of petrol 
into the water. This caught fire and the subsequent explosions, which 
included the large compressed-air vessels of torpedoes, caused the loss 
of 12 boats and the death of 68 sailors. Perkins was blown into the 
water with his navigating officer, who was never seen again. After 
survivors’ leave he was appointed to the coastal forces staff division 
of the Admiralty until his retirement.

Continuing his Cambridge-based education, Perkins qualified for the bar, 
but seeing little future as a barrister obtained a post as deputy 
company secretary with Rolls-Royce at Derby. In 1956 he moved to 
Manchester to work for Clayton Aniline, part of the Ciba chemicals 
company until 1967. He was for some years the managing director of 
Ciba’s pharmaceuticals division at Horsham until retiring in 1971 as 
Ciba merged with Geigy.

A keen leisure sailor of a number of power boats, Perkins was brushing 
up his navigation by taking the offshore skipper’s course at Brighton 
Marina sea school when his remarkable business skills were again 
recognised by the offer of the job of managing director of the marina 
construction project. The largest in Britain and formed mainly of 
massive concrete caissons on an unsheltered coastline, the Brighton 
Marina development started in 1971. By 1977 the infrastructure was 
complete, and the marina was opened in 1978.

The cost of constructing the marina had far exceeded the original budget 
and the backers were reluctant to commit more funding, so further 
development was halted. In 1985 the marina was taken over by Brent 
Walker, led by boxer-turned-businessman George Walker, and Perkins left 
the company.

He subsequently became a director of Windsor race course.

His wife Mary predeceased him; he is survived by their son and daughter.

*Lieutenant John Perkins, DSC and Bar, coastal forces captain and 
businessman, was born on January 1, 1920. He died on June 1, 2008, aged 88*


© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.


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## RabidAlien (Jul 10, 2008)




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## Njaco (Jul 10, 2008)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 10, 2008)




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## syscom3 (Jul 12, 2008)

Vice-Admiral Sir Tony Troup

Last updated: 9:44 PM BST 11/07/2008

Submariner who was given his first command at only 21 and won two
DSCs during the Second World War.

Vice-Admiral Sir Tony Troup, who died on July 8 aged 86, became the
youngest-ever submarine captain when he took command, at 21 years 10
months, of the training submarine H32 in June 1943.

Just a few months later he was given command of /Strongbow,/ based at
Trincomalee, Ceylon. Operations had been largely restricted to patrols,
air-sea rescue and the landing and recovery of agents; but Troup sank
the 800-ton coaster /Toso Maru/ off Phuket with a single torpedo on his
first eastern patrol. He then sank or drove ashore nine junks, a tug and
two lighters with gunfire and by boarding and placing demolition charges.

The next patrol, however, brought mixed results. On October 11, in the
Malacca Strait, Troup attacked a merchant ship which was being escorted
by two sub-chasers, firing five torpedoes at a range of 3,000 yards. Two
exploded prematurely and the others missed; then, before he could renew
the attack, he found himself in shallow water.

Next day Troup encountered two Japanese submarines in quick succession.
He fired four torpedoes at Ro113 from 2,500 yards; all of them missed.
Half an hour later two more were launched at Ro115 from 4,500 yards;
these too missed. Reloading his one remaining bow torpedo, Troup sank
the 1,185-ton cargo ship /Manryo Maru/ at close range.

A week later he was ordered to take up position off the Nicobar Islands
for air-sea rescue duties during a carrier-borne air attack by the
Eastern Fleet. As the raid ended, he fired his stern torpedo into the
harbour, where it was caught by torpedo nets.

In November Troup patrolled the west coast of Sumatra, sinking a tug and
a lighter by gunfire and carrying out a successful re-supply operation
to coast watchers. On the last day of the month he found and sank three
junks close inshore, claiming 33 hits with 36 rounds from his 3-in gun
while coming under shell-fire from shore batteries.

Troup made one last patrol in the same seas at the end of the year, then
sailed to the southern Malacca Strait. A couple of weeks later he sank a
junk and was depth-charged in response, though there was no damage.
Three days later he was less lucky: /Strongbow/ was trapped in shallow
water by several anti-submarine vessels and subjected to close and
effective depth charge attack.

When Troup took tea after the war with Commander Tetsunoke Moriama, his
Japanese opponent told him that after eight hours of continual
bombardment he was sure that /Strongbow/ had been sunk. Troup admitted:
"They gave me a very bad time, and I was considerably dusted up."

Many of /Strongbow/' s/ /rivets had popped and the pressure hull had
collapsed inwards; the main engines had been blown off their beds; the
air compressors had been smashed and the torpedoes jammed in the tubes.
He crept into a known minefield, where he knew he would not be pursued,
then nursed his boat for 1,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to
Trincomalee. There the base engineers pronounced the boat unfit for
further service. Troup was awarded a Bar to an earlier DSC.

John Anthony Rose Troup was born into a naval family on July 18 1921. He
was educated at HMS /Worcester/, the nautical training college on the
Thames, and entered Dartmouth in 1936. His father had been boxing
champion at Dartmouth and insisted that Tony should take up the sport
(he consented, but was regularly beaten and grew to hate it). After
service in the cruiser /Cornwall/ and the destroyer /Active/ in the Far
East and the Atlantic, Troup volunteered for submarines in 1941.

He joined the newly built /Turbulent,/ commanded by Commander "Tubby"
Linton, which was part of the Fighting 10th Submarine Flotilla. In 1942,
after 254 days in the Mediterranean, nearly half of them submerged,
/Turbulent /was estimated to have sunk a cruiser, a destroyer, a
U-boat, and 28 supply ships totalling 100,000 tons; it had been depth
charged more than 250 times.

Troup was mentioned in dispatches while in /Turbulent/, but had left to
do his "perisher" course for submarine commanders when Linton was lost
on its next patrol. His first DSC was announced on the same page of the
/London Gazette/ as Linton's posthumous VC.

After Troup had limped home in /Strongbow/, he commanded three more
submarines in the post-war years: /Tantalus/, /Trump /and /Tally Ho/. He
was second-in-command of the Royal Navy's first angled-deck aircraft
carrier, /Victorious/ , from 1956 to 1959, and then held three
influential appointments as naval assistant to the First Sea Lord,
captain of the 3rd Submarine Squadron, and Captain of the Fleet in 1964-65.

He returned to the Far East as captain of the amphibious assault ship
/Intrepid/, then became became Flag Officer Sea Training, demanding the
highest standards of efficiency in all the ships sent to him at Portland.

As Commander Far East Fleet Troup took the salute at a steam past to
mark the end of the Anglo-Malaysian defence pact and the start of the
Five-Power Defence Agreement in 1971. When he was appointed Flag Officer
Submarines, aged 50, he insisted on making an inaugural ascent in the
new underwater escape tower at Gosport. His last appointment was as Flag
Officer Scotland and Northern Ireland.

For his retirement Troup acquired a crofthouse at Portchuillin, which
enabled him to indulge his passion for golf at the Lochcarron club. He
also owned a series of boats called /Seil/, the last and smallest of
which was a Devon yawl which he sailed until his children banned him
after he fell overboard. He was elected
to the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1964.

Troup joined the board of the shipbuilder Vosper Thornycroft and, from
1979 to 1988, was defence adviser to Scicon International. He was
president of the Submarine Old Comrades' Association.

Tony Troup, who was appointed KCB in 1975, wanted no memorial service
and left no papers, but recorded an oral history for the Imperial War
Museum.

He married, in 1943, Joy Gordon-Smith. The marriage was dissolved in
1952, and the next year he married Cordelia Hope, who survives him with
two sons and a daughter of the first marriage and two sons and a
daughter of the second.

Story from Telegraph News:
Vice-Admiral Sir Tony Troup - Telegraph


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## RabidAlien (Jul 12, 2008)

From one submariner to another,


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## Gnomey (Jul 15, 2008)




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## ccheese (Jul 15, 2008)

Charles


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## Wayne Little (Jul 15, 2008)




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## syscom3 (Jul 15, 2008)

Toronto lawyer survived D-Day, defended Lord Haw-Haw in Old Bailey
Wounded during the Battle of Normandy, he was reassigned to defend a 
Nazi broadcaster accused of treason. After returning to Canada, he 
practised civil law for 60 years
GAY ABBATE 

July 15, 2008

TORONTO -- It was April 3, 1943, and Stanley Biggs was on the Queen 
Mary, the ship transporting him and other Canadian soldiers across 
the Atlantic to fight the Nazis. As he passed the time playing 
bridge, a familiar voice came across the shortwave radio, announcing 
the imminent demise of the ship and everyone aboard.

"There are 5,000 Canadians aboard the Queen Mary hoping to reach 
Southampton by sundown. There is no way this will happen. The 
Messerschmitts are on the way."

The voice belonged to William Joyce, nicknamed "Lord Haw-Haw" by the 
British. The American-born Joyce had moved to England but fled to 
Germany just before the war. There, he became part of the Nazi 
propaganda machine, broadcasting weekly to England and Allied 
soldiers from 1939 to 1945. Joyce warned that German fighter aircraft 
would destroy the ship, but it reached port safely.

That was Mr. Biggs's first introduction to Lord Haw-Haw. Seventeen 
months later, with Germany defeated, the two men sat just a few feet 
apart in an Old Bailey courtroom in London. Mr. Joyce was in the 
prisoner's box on trial for treason; Mr. Biggs, a trained lawyer 
recovering from war wounds, was attached to his court-appointed legal 
defence team.

For long weeks in September and October of 1945, he did nothing but 
research treason laws dating back to the 14th century. In the 
process, he became an expert on the subject, writing several articles 
and giving speeches on the subject after his return to Canada. Of his 
involvement in the trial, he wrote in his memoirs: "It was a most 
interesting and worthwhile experience for a young lawyer to do 
research and to hear the presentation of argument for the Crown by 
the Attorney-General. " The memoir, As Luck Would Have It In War and 
Peace, was released by Trafford Publishing (Victoria) earlier this 
year.

It was the duty of the defence team, Mr. Briggs wrote, "to research 
all of the relevant evidence we could find and to see that, if Joyce 
was guilty, he was not convicted except in full evidence with the 
law." During the trial, Joyce never spoke but kept looking around the 
courtroom as if expecting family or friends to show up, Mr. Biggs 
wrote. No one ever came. A jury convicted him of treason and he was 
hanged in 1946.

Stanley Champion Biggs was not, in his own words, "a religious 
scholar, a cosmic scientist, a World War II history professional, " 
areas of endeavour he considered beyond his abilities. The list of 
what he actually was is much longer: a combat infantry officer, a 
devoted lawyer for more than six decades, a poet, a school trustee, 
an environmentalist long before environmentalism was fashionable. He 
also devoted his life to the principle of doing good for its own sake.

He was born to the law, one of four children to solicitor Richard 
Atkinson Biggs and Gertrude Champion, the belle of Brantford, Ont. 
His grandfather, Stanley Clarke Biggs, founded the firm of Biggs 
Biggs.

Young Stan grew up on Roxborough Street in Toronto's Rosedale 
neighbourhood. He graduated from the University of Toronto Schools 
and then studied law at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1936 
and then enrolling in the three-year law program at Osgoode Hall Law 
School. In 1939, he joined the family law firm and was called to the 
bar that June.

To celebrate, he and classmate J. F. Barrett went to the world's fair 
in New York. A group of young ladies graduating from Bishop Strachan 
School in Toronto plotted to join them there. Among them was Mr. 
Barrett's younger sister, Barbara, who clicked with Mr. Biggs. The 
granddaughter of Sir Joseph Flavelle, a financier and meat packer who 
was well known for his philanthropy in Toronto, they became engaged 
by September and married the following June.

After the war broke out, Mr. Biggs volunteered with the Queen's Own 
Rifles, leaving behind his wife, who was pregnant with their second 
son. After months of training in England, he was among the thousands 
of Canadian soldiers who landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day - 
June 6, 1944. 

The regiment landed near Bernières-sur- Mer at about 8 a.m., only to 
enter a maelstrom. A storm had just passed through the area and rough 
seas meant that all-important support tanks had been delayed. Unable 
to wait, the infantry was forced to go ashore unprotected, with the 
result that the QOR suffered the worst casualties of any Canadian 
unit crossing the beaches that day: 60 men killed and another 78 
wounded.

Mr. Biggs, however, emerged without a scratch. He made it through 86 
days of continuous front-line combat during the Battle of Normandy, 
and the long struggle to deny Germany's bitter attempt to halt the 
Allied breakthrough, until finally he was shot in the leg. 

The machine-gun bullet that took him out of the fighting landed him 
in a courtroom. During and after his convalescence in England, the 
military decided to make use of his legal skills. Attached to the 
office of the Canadian Judge Advocates General, he prosecuted or 
defended soldiers accused of such crimes as assault or rape.

He returned home in December, 1945, with the rank of captain and 
resumed the life of a civilian lawyer. At first, he helped his father 
with his client list but also did pro bono work, defending accused 
who could not afford a lawyer. There was no legal aid system in 
Ontario until the 1960s.

Mr. Biggs continued to practise law until 2004. "He loved the law," 
daughter Dinny Biggs said. "He was passionate about the rule of law, 
about studying its background, the evolution of law and 
jurisprudence. "

One of the highlights of his career was his involvement in the 
creation of the broadcaster CTV. He handled the negotiations that 
brought together the original parties who acquired the licence for a 
second national television station.

His client, Joel Aldred, had originally sought the licence on his 
own. But with the Canadian Board of Broadcast Governors reluctant to 
grant one to a single entity, Mr. Biggs helped him form a partnership 
with Ted Rogers. 

The new partners entered into an agreement with another group, headed 
by newspaper owner John Bassett. The channel went on the air in 1961, 
but disagreements eventually arose between the two groups. Mr. Biggs 
came up with a solution that allowed Mr. Aldred to sell his shares 
while leaving Mr. Rogers as a partner.

Mr. Biggs continued his pro bono work throughout his career, 
providing free legal advice to numerous non-profit groups. 

That list included the Queen's Own Rifle of Canada Trust, the 
Canadian Opera Foundation and the Toronto School of Art, which his 
artist-wife used some of her inheritance to help establish in 1968.In 
1955, Mr. Biggs was named Queen's Counsel. In 1995, he received the 
Law Society Medal, which the Law Society of Upper Canada awards in 
recognition of distinguished service in the law profession.

Not content to write just briefs, Mr. Biggs also loved to dabble in 
poetry. During the war, he wrote The Queen's Own Rifles on D-Day, a 
poem that now hangs in the Canadian War Museum. He wrote the piece 
one day in 1944 when several dozen members of his regiment were 
killed and dozens more were injured during fighting.

Mr. Biggs was also a landowner. During his lifetime, he planted more 
than 150,000 trees, beginning in the late 1940s, when he bought his 
first piece of farmland. He eventually sold that and bought a 40-
hectare farm in Mono Township in Dufferin County, Ontario. The land 
was hilly and not suitable for crops, so he rented it out for cattle. 
For relaxation, he started planting seedlings, eventually turning the 
property into a managed tree farm. In 1991, he was recognized by the 
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources with an award for woodland 
improvement.

Humour was another important aspect of Mr. Biggs's life. His was not 
slapstick humour but rather a keen wit, said his long-time secretary, 
Marjorie Fogg. "He always had cute little answers to things," she 
said. 

Mr. Biggs wrote of the importance of humour in his life in his 
memoirs: "Without the humorous twists in my exposure to life ... I 
think I would have cracked up long ago. I have always felt that the 
therapeutic value of good humour should be gladly welcomed."

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Biggs prepared a final message for 
his family and friends summing up the philosophy by which he lived 
his own life: "Live fully, share extremes, stay well, keep chuckling, 
have the thrill of dedication to good causes, be good on Earth for 
its own sake."

STANLEY BIGGS

Stanley Champion Biggs was born in Toronto on Dec. 6, 1913. He died 
June 17, 2008, at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto after a brief 
illness. He was 94. He is survived by children Christopher, Barrett, 
John and Dinny, and seven grandchildren. His wife, Barbara, 
predeceased him in 2005.


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## RabidAlien (Jul 15, 2008)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 16, 2008)




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## ToughOmbre (Jul 16, 2008)

TO


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## evangilder (Jul 16, 2008)




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## Njaco (Jul 16, 2008)




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## Bigxiko (Jul 16, 2008)




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## v2 (Jul 19, 2008)

*Squadron Leader Frank Day died*

Squadron Leader Frank "Fearless" Day, who has died aged 91, came close to freedom during the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III; he was near the end of the tunnel when the exit was discovered, by which time 76 airmen had broken free, but he was forced to retreat and was soon in solitary confinement. 

In the spring of 1943 the escape committee decided to construct three tunnels and make a mass breakout. Day volunteered to assist but his health did not allow him to go underground as a digger. He became one of a large army of prisoners responsible for dispersing the excavated sand. They did this by filling bags, which they suspended inside their trouser legs, an encumbrance that made them walk in an ungainly fashion, attracting the codename "penguins". By pulling a drawstring inside their pockets to open the bags they were able to scatter the sand around the compound.

The first 40 men to go down the 330-foot tunnel "Harry" had the most realistic chance of success. They knew the language and had been well-equipped. Day was amongst the second batch of escapers known as the "hard arsers". They too had escape maps but a motley collection of clothing. In Day's case this included an Army greatcoat. The "hard arsers" planned to jump freight trains but Day had decided on an equally improbable method, and was going to head for the nearest airfield and attempt to steal an aircraft.

On the night of March 24 1944, the escapers broke the surface outside the prison fence much later than they had hoped and delays had built up. Day had reached one of the tunnel's holding areas, "Piccadilly Circus", with a few men ahead of him, when the tunnel exit was discovered. By the time he had managed to reverse to the entrance of the tunnel under the stove of Hut 104, the German sentries had arrived and Day was arrested as he emerged. With 10 others he was promptly marched off to solitary confinement, the "cooler", to a regime of two slices of bread in the morning and as much water as they wanted. A few days later, he learned that 50 of the escapers had been shot on the orders of Hitler. 

The son of a London wine merchant, Frank Barton Day was born on May 5 1917 at Chiswick and attended Uppingham School. In the late 1930s he was learning Arabic in readiness for a career with Shell when a legacy allowed him to learn to fly. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in December 1937 when he completed his pilot training and soon became a flying instructor.

During one flight in his Tiger Moth he spotted a courting couple in a haystack and decided to buzz them. He misjudged his height, hit the haystack and damaged the aircraft. He was summoned to his CO's office and officially reprimanded for "a careless act in the air". However, this misdemeanour produced a great benefit since it allowed him to meet an attractive WAAF cipher officer, Antoinette Kaye, who was working in the next office, and a few months later they were married.

Day converted to the Spitfire and joined No 122 Squadron, initially based in Scotland, before moving south to fly sweeps over France. In April 1942 he left for the Middle East and joined a photographic reconnaissance unit flying high-level Spitfires. On September 23 1942 he took off from an airfield near Alexandria on a solo reconnaissance over the Aegean Sea. Off the coast of Crete, Messerschmitt Bf 109s attacked him. His knee and right hand were badly injured, including the loss of his thumb. Using his left hand only, he had great difficulty opening the hood of his stricken Spitfire. Eventually he managed to bale out and he landed in the sea off the coast of Crete, where he spent the next 24 hours before being rescued by Italian forces who looked after him well. Taken to hospital on the island, he had to endure a bombing raid before travelling to Germany where, initially, he received rough treatment, which further aggravated the wound to his knee.

During his stay in Stalag Luft III, Rupert Davies (who later gained fame for his portrayal of Maigret) and Peter Butterworth staged plays and revues and Day became a proficient make-up artist. He also became adept at converting bread and potato into alcohol using a trombone tube "for special occasions, like Easter and Christmas". In January 1945, with minimal notice to the PoWs, the Germans evacuated the camp as the Soviet Army advanced.

The next few weeks, in the depth of one of the worst winters on record, the prisoners on the infamous "Long March" suffered great privations and many died. Eventually, in May 1945, the RAF flew Day and his fellow prisoners back to England.

Day's injuries prevented him from returning to flying duties and he left the RAF as a squadron leader. Initially he worked for the pharmacists Savory and Moores, becoming the company's managing director in 1955.

Five years later he bought an electrical firm supplying the military, before buying out a small cheese-making enterprise run by two grocers, Harvey and Brockless, which he and his sons built up into a major cheese wholesaler.

Day had many interests. He took part in the Cowes to Torbay powerboat race for a number of years and was particularly fond of his green parrot, his trawler and a 1934 Rolls Royce. He bought the dilapidated trawler and sailed it from Banff to Littlehampton in Sussex, where he overhauled it and used it for fishing and family trips. In his later years he gave much devoted voluntary service to a local hospice.

At his 90th birthday celebrations, during which a Spitfire gave a display for him, he commented "I might be the oldest surviving caterpillar", referring to the Caterpillar Club, founded for those whose lives had been saved by parachute. He added: "I might also be one of the last penguins too."

He could have gone on to point out that he was also probably the oldest goldfish – aircrew who survived after landing in the sea.

He received the Air Efficiency Award for his RAF service.

Frank Day died on June 29. His wife died in 1996 and their two sons survive him. 



source: Telegraph.co.uk, News, Sport, Business


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## RabidAlien (Jul 19, 2008)

Dang. His story would make for one INCREDIBLE biography!!!!


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## Wayne Little (Jul 20, 2008)




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## syscom3 (Jul 26, 2008)

Lewis Alexander Hopkins of San Antonio died of a heart attack on June 24, 2008 at the age of 89. Lew was born on June 10, 1919 in Luthersville, Georgia to Ernest Eugene Hopkins, Sr. and Fannie Bean Hopkins. He graduated from Luthersville High School in 1934 and from Berry College in Rome, Ga. in 1939. While in college he met Ruby Stevens and they married on September 26, 1941 in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Lew joined the Navy on July 1, 1940 as an apprentice seaman and retired June 30, 1974 as a Rear Admiral, Upper Half. During his Naval Career he served as a dive bomber pilot in World War II in the Pacific participating in the pivotal Battle of Midway and later in the Southwestern Pacific in the Battle of Santa Cruz in which his carrier, The U.S.S. Hornet was sunk. After World War II he earned a Master's degree in Aeronautical Engineering and was a pioneer in the development of jet engines and initiated the development of the jet engine which subsequently became the propulsion system for the SR-71 advanced reconnaissance plane. In the early 1970s he commanded the Naval Missile Center in Ventura, California, where various naval missiles, including the sidewinder, sparrow, and phoenix missiles were tested. His last duty station before retirement was the Assistant Chief of the Naval Air Command for Research and Development. He retired on July, 1974 and moved to Del Mar California where he became active in community affairs serving on the City Council and as Mayor. In June of 1994 he moved to The Towers in San Antonio, where he served as President of The Towers Co-Operative Association for over 7 years. Following the death of his wife Ruby in 2001, Lew married Mary Lokken. Lew's brother Eugene Hopkins Jr. and sister, Frances Chandler preceded him in death. He is survived by his wife, Mary; daughters, Betty Beason and her spouse, Nathan, Anne Hopkins and spouse, Howard Richmond, Linda Hawkins and spouse, Stephen. Also surviving are grandchildren, Glynnon Wiggins and spouse, Walter, Emily Beason, Allison McIntyre, Amy Britt, Richard Hawkins and spouse, Carol Appenzeller, Randy Hawkins and spouse, Lisa Regul; as well as three great-grandchildren , Elise and Jocelyn Wiggins and Ian Wiggins. MEMORIAL SERVICE MONDAY JUNE 30, 2008 10:30 A.M. THE TOWERS 1 TOWERS PARK LANE SAN ANTONIO, TX In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to the Lewis A. Hopkins Endowment Chemistry Scholarship Fund at Berry College, P.O. Box 490069, Mount Berry, GA. 30149. Interment will be in Arlington National Cemetery. You are invited to sign the guestbook at www.porterloring. com Arrangements with Porter Loring Mortuary.


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## Wayne Little (Jul 27, 2008)




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## Gnomey (Jul 28, 2008)




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## ToughOmbre (Jul 28, 2008)

TO


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## RabidAlien (Jul 28, 2008)




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## Njaco (Jul 30, 2008)

To both Day and Hopkins:


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## Bernhart (Aug 13, 2008)

Bert Houle another ace gone to the great beyond

globeandmail.com: 'Fabled fighter jock' was a rare double ace and was twice awarded the DFC


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## Njaco (Aug 13, 2008)

Tough Canuck!


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## Gnomey (Aug 13, 2008)




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## RabidAlien (Aug 13, 2008)




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## v2 (Aug 13, 2008)




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## pbfoot (Aug 13, 2008)

One of his claims was that he never held a parade in the Squadrons he servedbut my favourite thing is that when he took over 417 sqn morale was down so he stripped everything out of his spit including the seat and flew sitting on a crate to a place where he loaded up with booze including a full crate in lieu of a seat


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## Bearcat (Aug 19, 2008)

Monroe Q. Williams R.I.P. 

Below is a post by Hangman of the 353rd in Sturmovik on the UBI boards.



> Lt.Colonel Monroe Williams died 2pm sunday of inoprtable tumors he was 87, the world lost another hero and we at the 353VFG lost a close freind, mentor and farther figure. He is survived by his children and grandchildren and will always be remberd and never forgotten by his virtual freinds. He flew Janes WW2 fighters was consulted on Janes Attack Squadron and CFS3.
> 
> Below is a part of an interview RC Warbirds did on him years ago where he was a historical advisor
> 
> ...



Monroe Q. Williams Tribute Pt.1 W.I.P. By Snacky of the Virtual 353rd

Monroe Q Bio


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## RabidAlien (Aug 19, 2008)




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## Gnomey (Aug 20, 2008)




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## Wayne Little (Aug 20, 2008)




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## evangilder (Aug 20, 2008)




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## v2 (Aug 20, 2008)




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## Njaco (Aug 20, 2008)




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## syscom3 (Aug 24, 2008)

Brigadier General Homer G. "Hutch" Hutchinson, Jr. USMC (Ret), 91, died on April 24, 2008 in Tallahassee, Florida. He is survived by his wife Evie who told us that there will be a Memorial Service at 1400 on May 5, 2008 at Killearn United Methodist Church, 2800 Shamrock Street South, Tallahassee, FL.

As a Marine Corps aviator, Homer's thirty-year career spanned the era from fabric-covered biplanes to supersonic jets. During WW II he flew night fighter combat missions from England and in the Pacific. He later commanded the Marine Corps' first jet night fighter squadron during the Korean conflict.

Hutchinson's pioneering role in the development of aerial night fighting began in August 1942, pushed by Marines being subjected to regular night bombing attacks in the Pacific theater. No American capability then existed to defeat that threat, so the Marines adopted British ground and airborne radar techniques. After undergoing rigorous instrument flight training that was essential to controlling aircraft at night and in bad weather, Hutchinson was sent to England. There, in early 1943, he trained and flew night combat missions with the Royal Air Force. On one flight over the English Channel in a Bristol Beaufighter in late April 1943, he and his radar operator, Sergeant Pete Hales, attacked a German Focke-Wulf FW190 fighter-bomber, thus becoming some of the first Americans ever to engage in night aerial combat in a radar-equipped plane.

Returning to the U.S. he trained other pilots in the complex art of night fighting in a variety of stop-gap aircraft such as the bomber version of high-speed airliner, the Lockheed PV-1 Ventura. That aircraft became the first Marine night fighter to deploy to combat Hutch then became executive officer of Marine Night Fighter Squadron 533, operating the future mainstay Marine night fighter, the Grumman F6F-3N Hellcat. He deployed with the squadron to the central Pacific in 1944, where it became the most successful American night fighter squadron in any operation to date.

In 1952, Hutchinson took command of Marine Night Fighter Squadron 513 in Korea as the unit was being equipped with the nation's first purpose-built jet night fighter, the Douglas F3D-2 Skyknight. In addition to supporting Marines on the ground with its F7F-3N Tigercats and F4U-5N Corsairs, the unit was ordered to protect Air Force B-29s on long-range night bombing missions. In history's first night jet-to-jet combats, Hutchinson's Marines shot down a half dozen enemy Migs over North Korea. That success aside, Hutchinson and other combat-experienced night fighter leaders were committed to the idea of protecting and supporting Marines on the ground in the challenging hours of darkness. It was from this depth of experience that came present-day Marine aviation's ability to operate at night and in adverse weather as part of an expeditionary, combined arms, air-ground team. In all, Hutchinson's logbooks recorded 116 combat missions in three theaters of war as well as more than 5,500 hours of flying.


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## Gnomey (Aug 24, 2008)




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## RabidAlien (Aug 24, 2008)




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## ToughOmbre (Aug 24, 2008)

TO


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## v2 (Aug 24, 2008)




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## v2 (Sep 4, 2008)

Col Don Blakeslee, USAAF fighter ace extraordinaire, died on 3 September 2008. 

Don Blakeslee WWII Ace of the 4th Fighter Group and Eagle Squadrons


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## Gnomey (Sep 4, 2008)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 4, 2008)




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## Wayne Little (Sep 5, 2008)




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## pbfoot (Sep 5, 2008)

Blakesee was a reluctant member of the USAAF the article enclosed doesn't mention that he was transferred reluctantly to the USAAF the other option was getting brought up on charges for bagging 2 enlisted RAF women at the same time


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## RabidAlien (Sep 5, 2008)

pbfoot said:


> ...the other option was getting brought up on charges for bagging 2 enlisted RAF women at the same time



....so....he deserves a medal?  

Reluctant or no, he did his job. Quite well.


Man....am I the only one who both looks forward to and dreads this thread? Love reading about these hero's lives, but hate hearing that they've passed away.


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## pbfoot (Sep 6, 2008)

Erik Neilson was deputy Prime Minister probably better known as
the older brother of Leslie Nielsen of Naked Gun/Police Squad fame, passed away.
Please note I couldn't find one Obit that mentioned his war record so I added a little of it at the bottom

Erik Nielsen, who served as deputy prime minister in Brian Mulroney's Conservative government, died Thursday at his home in Kelowna, B.C. He was 84.

Nielsen's son Rick told the Canadian Press that his father died suddenly after a massive heart attack.

Known best as "Yukon Erik," Nielsen was the territory's longest-serving MP. He represented the Yukon for the Progressive Conservatives for three decades, from 1957 until he resigned in 1987.

Longtime Yukon political organizers attributed Nielsen's political longevity to his knowledge of his constituents.

"I used to campaign in the Watson Lake when we lived there. … I didn't know anybody, but he knew everybody," Don Cox, a former party president, told CBC News on Friday.

"He knew everybody in Ottawa, and he had everybody know him, and everybody respected him, and some feared him."

In addition to being Mulroney's deputy between 1984 and 1986, Nielsen also held ministerial portfolios in defence, public works and fisheries and oceans. He was also president of the Privy Council.

A disagreement over the way Mulroney managed the government prompted Nielsen to write his 1989 autobiography The House is Not a Home.

While he was often dubbed "Velcro Lips" in Parliament, Nielsen has been described as sharing a sense of humour with his younger brother, comedian and actor Leslie Nielsen.

"Erik has got a fantastic sense of humour," Leslie Nielsen said in a 1991 interview alongside his brother on CBC Radio's Morningside program.

"He is capable of 'mum's the word' and all that, but, you know, at least I hear a lot of laughing from his side."

In that same interview, Erik Nielsen revealed that their father had a stint in the circus before he immigrated to Canada to work as an RCMP officer.

"It's in our genes," he said. "Our father was a clown in a circus, for heaven's sake."

In reference to the "Velcro Lips" moniker, Nielsen said, "Hey, it wasn't a name that was given me.

"It was a name that I was dubbed by you-know-who," he added, making a reference to the media.


.

*Erik flew over 50 missions for the RCAF *during the war in a Lanc and others.

Flight Sgt Leslie Temple recalls the mission where Erik was awarded the DFC:

(the) worst moment was over Kiel on 23 July 1944, ‘a date that will live in my mind forever … . We took off from Ludford just before midnight, at 2355, for the heavily defended German naval base at Kiel. The Lancaster was blown slightly off course over the North Sea, so the bomb aimer had to ask that they fly round for a second time over the target to ensure accuracy – which was always extremely hazardous. As we did not jam over the actual target I could watch everything from the astrodome. There was a solid curtain of bursting, hellish flak, a wall of searchlights across the sky, other bombers all around waiting to release their bombs and predatory German night-fighters spitting cannon fire. Finally we dropped our bombs on target, but were suddenly nailed by a master searchlight on the way out. Immediately a dozen others “coned” us at 20,000 feet, extremely heavy German flak opened up and we were showered with shrapnel which simply passed through the airframe; our two port engines burst into flames … . I feared the worst, as we could not bale out over the North Sea at night … . Our quick-thinking Canadian skipper (Eric Nielsen, who was given the DFC for this operation) nosed the Lancaster down and pulled out of the beam at 5000 feet. The pilot and flight engineer managed to extinguish the flames over the North Sea, using the internal extinguishers, and despite no power for the directional equipment because of the two cut engines, our skilled navigator used his sextant and stars training to get us home on two engines. We crash landed at Woodbridge in Suffolk, a special crash-landing base, at about 4 am, with over 100 holes in our Lancaster. After debriefing I laid on my bed and could not stop shaking for twelve hours. The MO said the best cure was simply to get back up again soon – and of course we did. No counselling in those days.’

A great, great Canadian...


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## Gnomey (Sep 6, 2008)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 7, 2008)




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## v2 (Sep 9, 2008)

Flight Lieutenant *Doug Turner DFC *has sadly passed away after a short illness.

Doug flew the Mosquito variant with the 6-pounder gun with 618 Squadron, and sank a U-976 with it in March 1944 - the first person to do so. His story is in the long out-of-print book "Most Secret Squadron" which was written by his navigator Des Curtis.



Mosquito Bomber/Fighter-Bomber Units ... - Google Book Search


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## ToughOmbre (Sep 9, 2008)

TO


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## Gnomey (Sep 9, 2008)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 9, 2008)




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## Ramirezzz (Sep 9, 2008)

...


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## evangilder (Sep 10, 2008)

Medal of honor recipient passes 


> Nathan Green Gordon dies at 92; *Medal of Honor* recipient, Arkansas politician
> As a Navy pilot in the Pacific in WWII he rescued 15 downed airmen under enemy fire. He later served 20 years as lieutenant governor of his home state.
> From the Associated Press, From the Associated Press
> September 10, 2008
> ...


[URL="http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-gordon10-2008sep10,0,6319145.story"[/URL]


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## Gnomey (Sep 10, 2008)

A hero passes.


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## RabidAlien (Sep 10, 2008)

Man, I love that story.


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## Njaco (Sep 10, 2008)




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## v2 (Sep 11, 2008)




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## Wayne Little (Sep 12, 2008)




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## syscom3 (Sep 13, 2008)

Obituary: Ian Fraser, VC | World news | The Guardian

*He led a midget sub mission that sank a key Japanese warship*

The largely indifferent story of the Royal Navy's role in the far east during the second world war is lit up like a beacon by the extraordinary exploits of Ian Fraser, who won the VC for leading a midget submarine attack that sank a Japanese heavy cruiser off Singapore harbour in the last days of the war.

Fraser, who has died aged 87, commanded XE3 as a lieutenant, supported by a sub-lieutenant, an engineer, and leading seaman James Magennis, frogman and diver, who also won the VC. The mission was part of Operation Zipper to recapture Singapore and Malaya. But within a week came the stroke that ended the war, the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima. The planned invasions of Malaya and Singapore, and of Japan itself, could therefore be called off, an irony Fraser appreciated as much as anyone else.

The Royal Navy, by December 1941 already heavily engaged in Atlantic convoys while suffering massive losses in the Mediterranean, was forced to open a third front after the devastating Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the British, Dutch and French empires in south-east Asia. Two British warships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, were quickly dispatched by Japanese naval aircraft off Kuantan, eastern Malaya, on December 10, the first of a long string of defeats. They had been given no air cover.

The sinking of the cruiser Takao, however, stands out as one of the bravest individual attacks of the entire war. As part of the invasion preparations, six XE-type midget submarines, supported by conventional submarines, were deployed to disable Japanese warships around Singapore and the Malayan mainland. Among their main targets were the cruisers Takao and Myoko, against which XE3 and XE1 were launched on the evening of July 30 1945. Each was towed by a larger submarine to a point off the eastern end of the Singapore channel and then left to its own devices.

Had a thriller-writer invented the story of what happened next on board XE3, readers would have had difficulty in suspending their disbelief. The little craft had to pass through 40 miles of dangerous waters to reach its target. There were shallows, minefields, hydrophones (underwater sound detectors), anti-submarine defences and naval patrols to contend with. To overcome a lack of navigation aids, Fraser perched on the awash hull with binoculars for two hours.

To avoid the hydrophones, XE3 chose to sail through a minefield on the surface rather than stick to the swept channel. Then the craft had to crash-dive to avoid an enemy tanker with naval escort. On the final approach at periscope depth, Fraser had to dive again to avoid a launch, completing the advance by sightless guesswork and only realising he had found the Takao when he collided with it.

XE3 then positioned herself under the cruiser's hull in shallow water. Magennis left the craft through the escape hatch, which was so close to the enemy's hull that it could not be fully opened. He had to take off his breathing apparatus to get out, pulling it and several limpet mines after him. Marine growth on the hull and weak magnets made it difficult to attach the limpets.

The next move was to attach two larger bombs to the hull like saddlebags, one of which got jammed, so Magennis insisted on leaving the submarine again to release it with a spanner. Meanwhile, the tide was ebbing and the cruiser began to settle on her attacker. It took nearly an hour for XE3 to wriggle free, but she rejoined her mother sub and got clean away. The Takao succumbed to a series of explosions at 9.30pm on July 31 with a 60-foot hole in her hull, and settled on the bottom.

Fraser was born in Ealing, west London. He entered the merchant navy as a cadet and in 1938, joined the Blue Star line, also becoming a midshipman in the Royal Naval Reserve. When war broke out in 1939, he saw service on several destroyers before volunteering for the submarine arm. There he won the Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry aboard HMS Sahib in the Mediterranean in 1943. Around this time he married Melba Hughes, his childhood sweetheart.

The following year he volunteered again, for service on X-craft, officially described as highly dangerous. XE3 was his first command. He left the service in 1947 (retiring as a lieutenant-commander, RNR, in 1966) and went into the diving business, carrying out exploration work ahead of the North Sea oil and gas boom. He openly exploited his VC, to the chagrin of the navy which had decided to dispense with his services. His memoirs, Frogman VC, appeared in 1957.

His wife, four sons and one daughter survive him. Another daughter predeceased him.

Ian Edward Fraser, submariner, born December 18 1920; died September 1 2008


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## B-17engineer (Sep 13, 2008)




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## Gnomey (Sep 13, 2008)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 13, 2008)




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## Bernhart (Sep 14, 2008)

JOHN GREY FAIR 

The death of John Grey Fair occurred at Stratford General Hospital on September 11, 2008. Born at Saint John, New Brunswick on March 27th, 1922, he was the youngest son of the late Andrew Grey Fair and Ida Campbell Harper. He served from 1940 to 1945 with the Royal Rifles of Canada and was captured by the Japanese at the Fall of Hong Kong and was imprisoned in various labour camps in China and Japan from 1941 to 1945. Settling at Stratford in 1948, he first worked for Canadian National Railways and later in the construction trades as an electrician before retiring in 1980. John was a lifetime member of the Royal Canadian Legion the Hong Kong Veterans Association, the Masonic Temple and the Ontario Electrical League. His wife was the late Martha Sarah MacKenzie who died earlier this year after a sixty-one year marriage. He is survived by two sons: Barry of London and Ron of Mississauga, one sister-in-law Dorothy MacKenzie of Ottawa and many nephews and nieces across Canada. He was predeceased by his parents; one brother: Cameron; two sisters: Catherine and Jean and two brothers-in-law: Allan Price and Roger Keays. Funeral arrangements are in the care of the W.G. Young Funeral Home, 430 Huron Street, Stratford where friends may call on Monday September 15, 2008 from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. A private funeral service will be held on Tuesday September 16, 2008 followed with interment at Avondale Cemetery, Stratford. As expressions of sympathy, memorial donations may be made to the charity of one's choice through the funeral home.


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## RabidAlien (Sep 14, 2008)




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## pbfoot (Oct 2, 2008)

Robert Bracken 
I had read Roberts books when one day we were flying the Spit and the others for a Japanese magazine photo shoot and I noticed this really frail guy lurking in the parking lot so i went over to him and was going to explain he could come a little closer but show him the limits , it turns out it was Robert he was pretty shaky so I got the ATV and drove him right up to where the aircraft were sitting , he just soaked in the atmosphere of the aircraft and pilots . The man lived 5 blocks from my house and he invited me over to see his collection of photos 
This guy had a picture of just about every Spit the RCAF ever flew and there pilots this guy was a fountain of knowledge on the Spits here is one example of an 2 Email 's he sent me 


" One of the biggest perks of my books, is that I reunited at least 3 pilots with aircraft they flew. In one case, the RAF did not believe me - told them a Mk V AB 910, one of the best known , still flying Spitfires, was flown by a Canadian on D-Day operationally. They said I was all wet, so I responded with the fact that I had a copy of the logbook, the pilot, and the official record. I think they flew the pilot - George Lawson, to England, but I had to find my own way over"

and from another

"The story of KH-T, (403 Sqn, RCAF), being lifted by a crane after a crash landing, is in my first book. It was flown by Stu Tosh, and he landed in a minefield ! The aircraft seems to have been in the process of having its D-Day stripes reduced, as they are on one side of the fuselage, but not the other."

Good luck Robert I wish I known you lived so close earlier
Spitfire: The Canadians volumes I II by Robert Bracken


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## RabidAlien (Oct 2, 2008)




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## Wildcat (Oct 2, 2008)




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## Njaco (Oct 2, 2008)




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## v2 (Oct 3, 2008)




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## Wayne Little (Oct 3, 2008)




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## trackend (Oct 4, 2008)

A Civilian worthy of mention. Dorothy Arscott (Nurse)
My wifes professional mentor passed away at the age of 86 last month.
She was born in 1921 and at the outbreak of WW2 joined the Red cross serving in London as a nurse throughout the war she worked in East End docks area during the height of the blitz risking her safety to care for others. 
A member of the red cross for over 60 years she was a stalwart fund raiser and champion of the nursing profession.


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## RabidAlien (Oct 4, 2008)

Most definitely worthy of mention!


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## pbfoot (Oct 18, 2008)

http://www.ww2aircraft.net/forum/aviation/pilot-who-strafed-rommel-7872.html
Honorary Colonel Charley Fox carrying the torch at 87 | The Maple Leaf - Vol. 10, No. 34 | National Defence and the Canadian Forces

Charlie Fox was killed today in a motor vehicle accident not many details are known 
Charlie flew Spits with 412 Sqn was the guy acknowledged as the the one who bagged Rommel and was also tail end charlie in the last operational flight in the ETO in may 45. Charlie was Honorary Colonel of 412 sqn and very much of an advocate for acknowledgement of Polish Veteran deeds in the Northwest Europe and Italy. He was the colour man for our airshow and will be missed by me
A painting of the last patroll in the ETO


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## RabidAlien (Oct 18, 2008)




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## Wayne Little (Oct 19, 2008)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Oct 19, 2008)




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## Airframes (Oct 19, 2008)

So sorry to hear this sad news, Neil. I know you were a friend of his, and it is hard to know he went that way.


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## ToughOmbre (Oct 19, 2008)

TO


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## Njaco (Oct 19, 2008)

Sorry to hear this Neil.


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## v2 (Oct 19, 2008)




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## pbfoot (Oct 20, 2008)

Private Leo Major
MONTREAL–Family and friends of Leo Major describe him as a humble man who wore his battle scars with grace.

The residents of the Dutch city of Zwolle remember him as a hero.

Major is the only Canadian to have received two Distinguished Conduct Medals, the second highest award for gallantry in action after the Victoria Cross, for accomplishments in World War II and the Korean War.

He died in Montreal on Oct. 12 at age 87. His funeral was yesterday.

In 1940, at 19, the French-Canadian from a tough Montreal neighbourhood joined Le Régiment de la Chaudière.

After losing an eye to a grenade on D-Day on the beach in Normandy, he refused a medical evacuation. He claimed he could still sight a rifle with one eye.

But it was his bravery on a cold, rainy April night in 1945 that won him his first medal and the lasting respect of the people of Zwolle.

*On that night, Major single-handedly liberated the city.*

It was April 13, 1945, when Pte. Major and another French-Canadian soldier, Willie Arsenault, were sent to scope out the German presence in the town, about 120 kilometres northeast of Amsterdam.

Arsenault was killed by German machine-gunners. But Major, using a combination of luck, cunning and guts, was able to capture Zwolle from the Germans by killing them when he could and setting off enough grenades to create the impression a large Canadian force had entered the city. By early morning, they had fled the town.

Since Major died, the town hall flag in Zwolle has been flying at half-mast, a register has been opened so townspeople can record their condolences, and Lt.-Col. Henri J.L. Schevers from the Dutch embassy attended his Montreal funeral yesterday.

Betty Redemeyer's stepfather, Hendrik van Gerner, met Major that night. It began a lifetime of friendship as Major, in his later years, frequently travelled back to Holland to speak to schoolchildren about his experiences.

"Because of Leo, (the Allies) knew they didn't need to bomb the city, the Germans were gone," she said.

Redemeyer recalled Major's visits back to Zwolle with fondness.

"He could have been my grandfather," she said. "He was so sweet."

She added: "He will never be forgotten. To us, he really is a hero."

Major's son, Denis, said his father rarely spoke of his exploits. In fact, he only told his family in the late 1960s about some of what he'd accomplished.

"Even my mother didn't know," Denis said.

In the Korean War, Major won his second medal for bravery after leading a company to capture a key hill.


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## RabidAlien (Oct 20, 2008)

Rest well, Soldier.


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## Njaco (Oct 20, 2008)

The Associated Press
Article Last Updated: 10/20/2008 06:08:49 PM EDT

COLUMBUS, Ga.—Col. Robert B. Nett, who won the Medal of Honor for heroism in combat in the Philippines during World War II and later served in the Korean War and Vietnam, has died at 86. 
Fort Benning spokeswoman Elsie Jackson said Nett died Sunday after a brief illness. 

Nett, a New Haven, Conn. native who enlisted in Connecticut National Guard in 1940, was sent into combat on Christmas Island shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was soon sent to Fort Benning and graduated from Officer Candidate School in 1942. 

Nett was a company commander in December 1944 when he led an assault on a Japanese stronghold. He was seriously wounded three times during the attack but killed seven enemy soldiers with his rifle and bayonet. He later rejoined his unit and fought on Okinawa. 

He helped train South Korean soldiers during the Korean conflict and was an adviser to Vietnamese troops during the war in Vietnam. 

After 33 years of military service, Nett retired and spent 17 years as a teacher in the Columbus school system. 

He is a member of the Army Ranger Hall of Fame and received the USO's Spirit of Hope award. 

Nett was inducted into the Connecticut Veterans Hall of Fame in 2007 and the leadership hall at Camp Rell, built in 2004, bears his name. 

"Colonel Nett served bravely and honorably throughout his distinguished career," Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell said. "His contributions to his fellow soldiers and community are the hallmarks of dedication. Connecticut is justifiably proud of this native son." 

Nett is survived by his wife, Frances, and a son, Dr. Robert Nett Jr. 

A funeral service is scheduled for Thursday at 10 a.m. at Fort Benning's Follow Me Chapel, with burial at the post cemetery. 

There are now 99 living reciepients of the MoH, the lowest total since the Civil War.


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## Njaco (Oct 20, 2008)

to private Leo Major.


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## Bernhart (Oct 21, 2008)

Obituaries
• Obituary Archive
• Funeral Home Directory Obituaries - Oct. 21, 2008


FOX, Charles - Suddenly as the result of an accident, on Saturday, October 18, 2008. Charles "Charley" Fox DFC, CD of London, Honorary Colonel of 412 Squadron of the Canadian Air Force, in his 89th year. Beloved husband of the late Helen (Doughty) (1995) and dear father of Jim (Cheryl) of Kitchener, Sue (Doug) of Thamesford and Adrienne (Bruce) of Budd Lake, N.J. Dear grandfather of Kristi, Todd, Steven, Ryan, Amy, Katie, Travis, Jeff and Jen, their spouses and step-grandfather of Dominique, Frank and Veronica. Also loved by six great-grandchildren. Sadly missed by three sisters-in-law, Mary, Barb and Christine; many nieces, nephews, and some very special ladies who were additional daughters to Dad. Predeceased by two brothers, Ted and George. Charley served his country as a decorated Spitfire Pilot during the Second World War. He ended his tour of duty in January, 1945 but became active in the London-based 420 Reserve Squadron after the war. On April 30, 2004, he was named Honorary Colonel of 412 Squadron, passionately devoting his time and energy to honour the veterans, past and present. Throughout his working career, Charley contributed 30 years to the success of Tender Tootsies and Lyons of London. He will be missed by family, friends and everyone whose lives he touched. Visitation will be at the Harland B. Betzner Funeral Home , 177 Dundas Street, Thamesford, on Wednesday from 7 - 9 p.m. and on Thursday from 2 - 4 p.m. and 7 - 9 p.m. Funeral service will be held at East London Anglican Ministries, 2060 Dundas Street East, London on Friday, October 24, 2008 at 11 a.m. Rev. June Hough officiating. Interment will be at Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens. As an expression of sympathy, memorial donations may be given to the Canadian Harvard Aircraft Association, Stevenson Children's Camp, or the Children's Hospital Foundation of Western Ontario.

Believe he is the one creditted with shooting up Rommel


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## v2 (Oct 21, 2008)




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## RabidAlien (Oct 21, 2008)

To both Col. Nett and Mr. Fox, rest well, soldiers, you've earned it!


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## Bernhart (Oct 22, 2008)

another article same gent

Second World War fighter pilot Charles "Charley" Fox, the Guelphite who wounded one of Nazi Germany's most feared and respected military officers, will be laid to rest Friday.

A London resident for years, Fox was killed last Saturday in a car crash near Tillsonburg. He was 88.

Fox strafed and seriously injured the infamous Erwin Rommel during the Allied invasion of Nazi-held Europe in 1944. The field marshal was called the "Desert Fox" for his battle successes in Africa before defending fortress Europe from Canadian and other Allied warriors in the summer of 1944.

That's where fate brought him into the gunsights of the other Fox.

The spitfire pilot, raised in Guelph, let loose with a barrage of cannon and machine gunfire on Rommel's convertible car, which careened into a ditch, badly wounding him.

Rommel later died by his own hand after a plot to kill Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler surfaced and it was revealed he was involved.

Fox went on to earn the Distinguished Flying Cross for valour in the skies, including more than 150 strafing missions supporting Allied troops during the war.

His exploits included air support for the Allied fight to free occupied Holland, fierce fighting portrayed in the movie "A Bridge Too Far."

"Certainly the tributes are flowing in. It's somewhat overwhelming," son Jim Fox of Kitchener said yesterday.

It's ironic, he said, because his father never wanted the limelight, preferring to play a background role on history's stage.

The veteran pilot and his late wife Helen (nee Doughty) had three children: Jim, Sue Beckett of Thamesford, and Adrienne Black of New Jersey.

Born and raised in Guelph, Fox returned here after the war. He worked as a store manager and vice-president of a manufacturing company. The family moved to London in 1952.

He was writing a book called "Why Not Me" at the time of his death. Jim said his father believed he survived the many dangers of his war missions because he was destined to tell the story of Canadian veterans who sacrificed so much to defeat the enemy.

Jim said all his life, his father praised the efforts of Canadian soldiers in the Second World War, the current United Nations mission in Afghanistan and Canadian peacekeeping efforts around the world.

The family intends to complete the book.

Visitation at the Harland B. Betzner Funeral Home in Thamesford is 7 to 9 p.m. tonight and 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. tomorrow.

The funeral service is scheduled for 11 a.m. Friday at the East London Anglican Ministries, 2060 Dundas St. E. in London. Interment follows at London's Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens


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## RabidAlien (Oct 22, 2008)

...wonder....is there any way to keep tabs on that book's progress? I'd LOVE to read it once its published...


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## Airframes (Oct 23, 2008)

I reckon PB might be able to keep tabs, Rabid.


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## pbfoot (Oct 26, 2008)

For Charleys Foxs Funeral they managed a 9 Ship Harvard Formation for a graveside flypast I'd be lucky to get a kid holding a balloon and luckier if it was inflated for mine

_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOulrT536oE_


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## GrauGeist (Nov 28, 2008)

Lincoln F. "Babe" Broyhill died Nov. 21 of congestive heart failure at his home in Oakton. He was 83.

He initially served with the 8th Air Force, based in England. He later was assigned to the 15th Air Force, 840th Bomb Squadron, before joining the 483rd Bombardment Group, based in Foggia, Italy.

From the Washington Times:


> On a March day in 1945, 20-year-old Babe Broyhill found himself sitting exposed as the tail gunner on "Big Yank," a B-17 Flying Fortress in the skies over Berlin.
> 
> The plane was in the tail-end Charlie position, bringing up the rear in a 28-plane formation. Near the mission target, the Daimler-Benz tank works, young Mr. Broyhill watched Luftwaffe ME-262 jet fighters swarm like hornets toward Big Yank's tail.
> 
> ...



washingtonpost.com - obituaries

Thanks to RedBeard for the headsup.

* Also wanted to add a link to some good history regarding "Big Yank" and Broyhill's buddies:
warbirdsresourcegroup - Big Yank


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## Airframes (Nov 28, 2008)

Another good guy lost. R.I.P.


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## RabidAlien (Nov 29, 2008)

Rest in Peace.


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## v2 (Nov 30, 2008)




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## evangilder (Nov 30, 2008)

Another Doolittle Raider has passed:


> Edwin Weston Horton Jr., 6139178, Master Sergeant
> Gunner Crew 10
> 
> Graduated from High School in 1934 and entered service on September 30, 1935 at Providence, Rhode Island. Served overseas with Field Artillery as Schofield Barracks, Hawaii from 1935 to 1938 before re-enlisting and serving with the 95th Bomb Squadron at March Field, California. Completed Gun Turret-Maintenance School, Aircraft Armorer and Aircraft Mechanics Schools. Remained in China-Burma-India Theater after Tokyo Raid until July, 1943. Held various Stateside assignments in Oklahoma and Florida. Served overseas at Wheelus Field, Tripoli, Libya and retired from the service in 1960. Decorations include Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Chinese Army, Navy, and Air Corps Medal, Class A, 1st Grade.
> ...


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## Gnomey (Nov 30, 2008)




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## ToughOmbre (Nov 30, 2008)

TO


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## RabidAlien (Nov 30, 2008)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Nov 30, 2008)




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## syscom3 (Dec 31, 2008)

Lt. Gen. William Pitts, war hero

Lt. Gen. William Pitts, war hero | Inland News | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California

OBITUARY: He was born at March Air Force Base and later commanded the 15th Air Force from there. He was 89.

10:00 PM PST on Wednesday, December 31, 2008

By DAVID OLSON
The Press-Enterprise

Lt. Gen. William Pitts, a World War II hero who was born at March Air Force Base and later commanded the 15th Air Force from the base, died Tuesday at his Riverside home.

Lt. Gen. Pitts was 89. He died from cancer and complications from a broken pelvis suffered in a September fall, said his daughter, Dale Cowgill.

"If there is one word to sum him up, it was that he was a patriot," said Paul Gill, a former wing commander at March and close friend of Lt. Gen. Pitts. "He loved his country and put that love into action."
Story continues below

Longtime friend Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, said Lt. Gen. Pitts was an institution in the Inland area.

"People trusted him and a lot of people looked up to him, as I did," Calvert said. "He was a great man and a great friend, and he did great service to our country."

Lt. Gen. Pitts had deep family roots in both the military and the Riverside area.

Lt. Gen. Pitts' father was a career military officer, and Lt. Gen. Pitts was born at March Field Hospital on Thanksgiving Day 1919, a year after the March base opened. The Pittses lived on Larchwood Street in Riverside until they became the first family to live in newly built base housing.

In a 2005 oral history recorded at March, Lt. Gen. Pitts recalled how he delivered newspapers and sold magazines on the base as a kid. When he was 10, he took his first airplane ride. When the plane landed, he vowed to become an Air Force pilot.

Lt. Gen. Pitts graduated from West Point in 1943. He flew 25 World War II missions against Japan in a B-29 Superfortress.

In his last mission in the bomber, then-Capt. Pitts was shot down off the Japanese coast. He parachuted seconds before the plane exploded and was rescued by a submarine.

In the decades that followed, Lt. Gen. Pitts rose up the ranks and earned three stars. He served a tour of duty as a NATO commander in Turkey, four tours at the Pentagon, and stints as a diplomat in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, England and Taiwan.

In 1972, he returned to his birthplace as commander of the 15th Air Force.

"For him to come back as March Air Force commander was the ultimate thrill," Gill said. "It was home like no place was home."

After retirement in 1975, Lt. Gen. Pitts and his wife, Doris, moved to Washington, D.C. In the early 1990s, they bought a home in Riverside, where he lived until his death.

Lt. Gen. Pitts continued his close relationship with March during retirement, helping to keep the base open. It was closed as an Air Force base in 1993 and is now an air reserve base. A stone post honors Lt. Gen. Pitts at March's parade grounds.

In 2000, Lt. Gen. Pitts hammered a pair of his copper wings on the Famous Fliers Wall of the Mission Inn in Riverside, joining famous aviators such as Amelia Earhart, Chuck Yeager and Charles Lindbergh.

While raising money as a board member of the March Field Air Museum, Lt. Gen. Pitts met donor Dick Alden, former CEO of Bloomington-based Empire Oil Co.

The two became friends and golfed regularly at Riverside's Victoria Club.

"I was a lowly enlisted man, but he always said to me, 'You're a 5-star corporal,' " Alden, an Air Force veteran, recalled.

"We've got colonels at the Victoria Club who swagger around and are rather obnoxious," Alden, 77, said. "But he was never one to be boastful. He was a grand old man."

Cowgill, 62, said her father never looked down on people. He empathized with and cared about those he led, she said.

"He loved people and loved the men he worked with," Cowgill said. "He would never have asked people to do something he wouldn't do himself. He never had to earn respect. It was something given freely. He just had that magnetism."

Although Lt. Gen. Pitts was well-loved, he was stern when he needed to be, both to his three daughters and to his men, Cowgill said.

"He believed in discipline, but discipline with a great deal of love," Cowgill said.

Lt. Gen. Pitts celebrated his 60th anniversary with Doris on Dec. 22. Theirs was a love that never waned, Cowgill said.

"My mother was the great love of his life," she said. "They were together for 60 years and in love. That's how he died: holding my mother's hand."

Lt. Gen. Pitts is survived by wife, Doris; daughters Cowgill, of Oak Park; Alisha Pitts, of Encino, and Linda Terrie, of the Sacramento area; sister Nanetta Atkinson, of Oklahoma City; and four grandchildren.

There will be no services, Cowgill said. The family is planning a memorial service at West Point, she said.


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## Gnomey (Jan 1, 2009)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 1, 2009)




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## ToughOmbre (Jan 1, 2009)

TO


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## v2 (Jan 1, 2009)




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## Njaco (Jan 1, 2009)




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## Wildcat (Jan 1, 2009)




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## v2 (Jan 11, 2009)

*Elzbieta Zawacka, Poland's top WWII female messenger, army general, dies at 99 * 

*Elzbieta Zawacka*, known also by her war-time nom de guerre Zo, (March 
19, 1909 - January 10, 2009) was a Polish university professor, 
scouting instructor, and a freedom fighter during World War II. She 
was also a Brigadier General of the Polish Army (the second and last 
in the history), promoted by President Lech Kaczynski on May 3, 2006. 
The only woman among the Cichociemni, she served as a courier for the 
Home Army, carrying letters and other documents from Nazi-occupied 
Poland to the Polish government in exile and back. Her regular route 
ran from Warsaw through Berlin and Sweden to London. She was also 
responsible for organizing routes for other couriers of the Home Army. 

Awards for Zawacka include: Virtuti Militari, Order of the White Eagle 
and Krzyz Walecznych. 

*Biography *
Zawacka was born in Thorn (Toruń), West Prussia and graduated from 
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznañ with a major in mathematics. In 
the late 1930s she worked as a teacher at several high schools, 
simultaneously working as an instructor for the paramilitary 
organization Przysposobienie Wojskowe Kobiet (Female Military 
Training). During the Polish September Campaign, she was the 
commandant of the Silesian District of Przysposobienie Wojskowe 
Kobiet, participating in the defence of Lwów. 

In October 1939 she joined the Silesian branch of Zwiazek Walki 
Zbrojnej under the nom de guerre "Zelma", which later was changed to 
"Zo". In late 1940 she was moved to Warsaw and began her courier 
trips. She was also a deputy of Zagroda--the Department of Foreign 
Communication of the Home Army. In February of 1943 she traveled 
across Germany, France and Spain to Gibraltar, where she was 
transported by air to London. In Great Britain she went through 
parachute training, and on September 10, 1943, dropped into Poland, as 
the only woman in the history of the Cichociemni. 

In 1944 Zawacka fought in the Warsaw Uprising, after its collapse 
moved to Kraków, where she continued her underground activities. In 
1945 she joined the anti-Communist organization Freedom and 
Independence (WiN), but quit soon afterwards and took up the job of a 
teacher. 

In 1951 she was arrested and tortured by Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa 
(Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs). She was 
sentenced to 10 years in prison for treason and espionage, but her 
sentence was shortened and she was released in 1955. After her release 
from prison, she earned a doctorate degree from Gdansk University. She 
was a tenured professor at the Institute of Pedagogy at Mikolaj 
Kopernik University in Torun where she established department of 
Andragogy. She retired from teaching in 1978 after Sluzba 
Bezpieczeñstwa repressively closed that department. She was active 
member of the World Union of Home Army Soldiers and cooperated with 
Solidarnosc in the 1980s.


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## Wayne Little (Jan 11, 2009)




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## Airframes (Jan 11, 2009)

A remarkable and very brave woman. R.I.P.
Thanks for posting V2.


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## RabidAlien (Jan 11, 2009)

I have nothing but respect for the women in all countries who shrugged off the stereotypical role of the day and stood up against the Nazi regieme.


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## Gnomey (Jan 11, 2009)

Remarkable woman. RIP


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## ToughOmbre (Jan 11, 2009)

TO


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## v2 (Jan 13, 2009)

*Air Vice-Marshal Aleksander Maisner, CB, CBE, Polish war veteran, was born on July 26, 1921. He died on December 21, 2008, aged 87*



Having survived the rigours of the Soviet Gulag system after being captured by the Russians in the wake of their invasion of Poland in September 1939, Aleksander Maisner was desperate to do his bit in the war. After a long odyssey, he reached England, joined the Air Force and learnt to fly. But he was just too late to get a combat posting before the war ended. He nevertheless became a fine pilot and went on to achieve higher rank in the RAF than any of his compatriots. 

Aleksander Maisner was born in Hamburg of Polish parents in 1921. He was brought up in Poland, and went to school in Czestochowa, graduating in May 1939. The outbreak of war found him in Warsaw, where he was about to begin studies at the Polytechnic. He joined the Citizens’ Guard and fought with it until the fall of Warsaw at the end of September 1939. 

With the country overrun by the Germans and the Soviet Union, Maisner decided to make his way to France, where the Polish forces were re-forming. He was caught by the Russians while trying to cross the border into neutral Romania, and was sent to a labour camp in the far north of the Soviet Union, where he spent the next two years. 

The German attack on Russia in June 1941 and the subsequent Polish-Soviet agreement brought an amnesty for the hundreds of thousands of Polish prisoners and the formation of a Polish army there under General Anders. Maisner joined this, and left the Soviet Union with it. He trained as an artillery officer in Iraq, but then volunteered for the Royal Air Force and was brought over to England in May 1943. He obtained his pilot’s wings in November 1944 and from then until the end of the war served as a staff pilot at various navigator training schools. 

When the Polish air force units were disbanded, he found himself in a quandary. He had not seen his family since September 1939, but he dared not return to communist-dominated Poland, so he settled in Britain. 

The RAF were looking for officers, and Maisner was offered a permanent commission. He was posted to Transport Command, serving in various parts of the UK and overseas, and taking part in the Suez operation. Each of his flying assessments, on completion of his first two extended tours of duty, was marked “exceptional”, and in 1955 he was awarded the Air Force Cross for distinguished service. He was not only a very fine pilot, but an inspiring instructor as well. Having been transferred to Bomber Command, he was involved in the introduction of versions of the Canberra and Vulcan. In 1960 he was sent on a tour of duty with the Royal New Zealand Air Force, and was Officer Commanding Flying Wing, RNZAF Ohakea, where he introduced the Canberra B1-12 into service. 

In 1962 Maisner went to the RAF Staff College at Andover, Hampshire, and in 1965 came his first tour of duty at the Ministry of Defence. As Deputy Director of Air Staff Plans, he was involved in planning the contraction of the RAF presence overseas. In this connection came a posting as Officer Commanding RAF Seletar in Singapore, which ended with the difficult task of closing it down and handing it over to the Singapore authorities. 

On his return to Britain in 1969, Maisner was appointed CBE, and appointed Assistant Commandant (training) at RAF College Cranwell. His arrival there coincided with the introduction of the RAF Graduate Entry Scheme, and Prince Charles was one of his students. Maisner’s combination of a quiet and gentle manner with a very strong character made him a good teacher and manager of men. He spent his last four years in the service back at the Ministry of Defence in a succession of senior personnel posts, culminating in that of Director General of RAF Personnel Management, responsible for the careers of some 20,000 officers and 65,000 other ranks. 

In the year of his retirement from the RAF in 1977, Maisner was appointed CB. He took up a post at Reed International as personnel executive responsible for management development, succession planning and career counselling. In 1982 he became director of the Industry and Parliament Trust, an organisation devoted to increasing understanding between industry and MPs, which provided a fascinating challenge for the last four years of his working life. He was also an active president of the Polish Air Force Association. 

After the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War he received a number of decorations from a new, democratic Government of his native country. These were the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1990; the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit (Poland) in 1992; and the Order of Merit with Star (Poland) in 1998.

source: Times Online


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## ToughOmbre (Jan 13, 2009)

TO


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## Gnomey (Jan 13, 2009)




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## Airframes (Jan 13, 2009)

Another good man has said his last farewell. R.I.P.


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jan 13, 2009)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 13, 2009)




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## v2 (Jan 13, 2009)

*William Stone- British WWI veteran dies aged 108 *

One of only four surviving British veterans of World War I has died at the age of 108. 

William Stone, from Watlington in Oxfordshire, was the last British serviceman to have seen active duty in both world wars. 

Mr Stone, who was known as Bill, joined the Royal Navy on his 18th birthday in September 1918 and served on HMS Tiger. 

In 2004 he was presented with the National Veterans' Badge. He died at a care home in Sindlesham, Berkshire. 

Born in Ledstone, Kingsbridge, South Devon, on 23 September 1900, he followed his brothers into the navy, serving as a stoker. 

During World War II he was a chief stoker on HMS Salamander and took part in the evacuation of Dunkirk, making five trips to pick up troops from the beaches. 

Mr Stone also served in the Sicily landings of 1943 with HMS Newfoundland and was mentioned in despatches after a torpedo attack as the ship made its way back to Malta. 

In an interview with the BBC in 2007, Mr Stone said: "Dunkirk was the worst part of my life. 

"One of our sister ships, Skipjack, was bombed, and 200 soldiers and all crew were killed. 

"During our trips to Dunkirk, I was often stationed on the quarterdeck helping men get aboard Salamander as they swam out from the beach. 

"Those were awful days but one just carried on as if nothing had happened - there was nothing else that you could do." 

Mr Stone married Lily in 1938 and their daughter Anne was born the year after. 

He went on to run a tobacconist and hairdressing shop in Devon, retiring in 1968 to move to Oxfordshire. 

Mrs Stone died in 1995. 

In a statement, Mr Stone's daughter said: "[He] had a remarkable, long, healthy and happy life. 

"He thoroughly enjoyed going to events, meeting people and, whenever possible, regaling those around him with his fund of naval stories and jokes. 

"He was a very determined character both in his naval career and in civilian life and, no doubt, this contributed greatly to his longevity. 

"He was a man of great faith and his recipe for long life was: clean living, contented mind and trust in God. His motto - 'keep going'. 

"William will be sadly missed by his family and many friends". 

The other known remaining British veterans of World War I are 112-year-old Henry Allingham and 110-year-old Harry Patch, who both live in Britain, and 107-year-old Claude Choules who lives in Australia. 

Minister for Veterans Kevan Jones MP paid tribute to Mr Stone. 

"We owe a great deal to the men and women who served this country with such distinction during those wars to protect our liberty," he said. 

"[Mr Stone] was a man who represented the courage, spirit and determination of his generation. He was an inspiration to us all." 

Mr Stone died on Saturday at the Masonic Care Home at Sindlesham near Wokingham, where he lived for the past two years. 

A funeral will be held later in the month at St Leonard's Church in Watlington.

source: BBC News


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## Gnomey (Jan 13, 2009)

RIP


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## RabidAlien (Jan 13, 2009)

Rest well, sailor.


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## Wayne Little (Jan 14, 2009)




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## syscom3 (Jan 19, 2009)

January 16, 2009

Vice-Admiral Sir David Clutterbuck

David Clutterbuck’s naval career included front-line service throughout the whole of the Second World War, and he took part in several of its significant battles. 

His career began at the hard school of the training ship Conway, moored in the Mersey primarily for the education of young Merchant Navy officers. On graduation, he was awarded the King’s Gold Medal and won the Torr Prize. Promoted to midshipman in January 1931, he served in the cruiser Sussex in the Mediterranean and, after the normal progression of courses, examinations and promotions, was appointed as a watchkeeping lieutenant in the cruiser Dunedin in the Royal New Zealand Navy. 

Defying the dictum that early promotion depended upon “paying attention to detail and marrying late”, Clutterbuck, below the age of entitlement to “marriage allowance”, met his wife Rose Mere Vaile in Auckland and they were married in London in 1937. 

After commanding a motor torpedo boat at Portsmouth, he qualified as a specialist navigator and was appointed to the sloop Deptford based at Bombay on the East Indies station, arriving in March 1939. When war broke out, Deptford was recalled and deployed from January 1940 to Liverpool for the defence of Atlantic convoys in the Western Approaches. 

Clutterbuck joined the light cruiser Ajax as the navigating officer in May 1940, the ship having been repaired after the close-fought victory over the pocket battleship Graf Spee at the River Plate. In the Mediterranean, Ajax was first engaged with the Italian navy in October when, surprised at night by three torpedo boats, she suffered damage and 35 casualties including 13 killed, her defensive fire sinking two of the opposition. Four Italian destroyers arrived on the scene, Ajax so damaging the Artigliere and Aviere that Artigliere later sank. The C-in-C, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham was full of praise for Ajax’s resolution and skill, “as this was the first night action by a newly-commissioned ship”. 

Ajax then took part in virtually all the major engagements of the Eastern Mediterranean, escorting several convoys to beleaguered Malta, bombarding shore targets at Tobruk, Bardia and Benghazi, landing and then evacuating troops from Greece, including Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC, commander of the New Zealand Division. 

The cruiser fought fierce night actions against Italian convoys and during the German seaborne invasion of Crete. In March 1941 her radar was useful in Cunningham’s famous night victory off Cape Matapan which resulted in the sinking of three Italian heavy cruisers and two destroyers. She escorted the important “Tiger” convoy of May 1941 to Alexandria with tanks for the Middle East. Ajax was twice damaged by near-misses from the Luftwaffe at the end of May during the inevitable evacuation of Crete, an operation which in Cunningham’s words was “a disastrous period in our naval history” with a terrible toll of sinkings, damage and casualties. But the rescue of 18,000 British and Imperial troops prompted him to remark that it only took two or three years to build a ship but three hundred to build a tradition. 

At one point Ajax was one of only two serviceable light cruisers in the theatre. She was withdrawn for a well-earned refit at Chatham, arriving in June 1942. 

There was little rest for Clutterbuck, however, who, now a lieutenant-commande r, was appointed in October as the navigating officer of the new heavy cruiser Newfoundland. On completion of trials and work-ups, she was deployed in February 1943 to the Mediterranean, where the tide had definitely turned. 

Her actions included the bombardment and landings on the island of Pantelleria and the subsequent invasion of Sicily that involved several attacks on towns and coastal installations. Clutterbuck was awarded a mention in despatches for his contribution. 

While on passage in July she was torpedoed by the Italian submarine Ascianghi, causing her to have to make for the United States and repairs in the Boston Navy Yard, steering all the way on main engines as her rudders were unusable. 

Newfoundland emerged in February 1944 and, having returned to Britain for radar updates, proceeded to the eastern Mediterranean and eventually to Sydney as part of the British Pacific Fleet. Thereafter, awed by the immense size, professionalism and logistic expertise of the US Navy, he assisted in the capture of New Guinea by the Australians in May 1945, the pre-invasion bombardment of Truk and, finally, bombardments of the Japanese mainland of Honshu, Tokyo and Yokohama. 

After the dropping of the two atom bombs, he was present at the signing of the Japanese instrument of surrender aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. Newfoundland was then employed collecting and succouring prisoners of war. Clutterbuck was awarded a second mention in dispatches. 

Promoted to commander, he commanded the modern Battle-class destroyers Sluys and Cadiz. As a captain, he was appointed naval attaché in Bonn in 1954 and also commanded the 3rd Training Squadron in HMS Zest, based at Londonderry. His final sea command, from 1960 to 1962, was the newly commissioned cruiser Blake with its fully automatic 6in and 3in gunnery armament, the last conventional cruiser to be built for the Royal Navy. 

Blake was the flagship of the admiral commanding the Mediterranean flotillas, and a contemporary remarked on Clutterbuck’s sharp intellect, his high standards and his solid but unostentatious professional self-confidence. His courtesy and his gentle good humour made him easy company afloat and ashore. Promoted to rear-admiral in 1963, Clutterbuck was chief of staff to the C-in-C Home Fleet, which subsumed the Nato post of C-in-C Allied Forces Eastern Atlantic. He was appointed CB in 1965. 

His final tour as a vice-admiral was deputy to the Nato Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic based in Norfolk, Virginia. As this American admiral was also C-in-C of the US Atlantic fleet, Clutterbuck’s role was primarily to make sure that Nato interests, strategies and war plans — especially those of European nations — were not neglected. He was appointed KBE and retired in 1968. 

He became the first director-general of the Association of Masters of Business Administration. He was noted as a talented watercolour painter and played the piano beautifully. In his youth he was tried for the navy rugby team. He skied, and sailed his boat, Starsight, annually until he was 85. 

His wife, Mere, died on January 12. Their two daughters survive their parents. 

Vice-Admiral Sir David Clutterbuck, KBE, CB, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, 1966-68, was born on January 25, 1913. He died on December 13, 2008, aged 95


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## RabidAlien (Jan 19, 2009)




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## v2 (Jan 19, 2009)




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## Gnomey (Jan 19, 2009)




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## ToughOmbre (Jan 19, 2009)

TO


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## Njaco (Jan 19, 2009)




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## syscom3 (Feb 2, 2009)

Honolulu Advertiser
Sunday, February 1, 2009 

By William Cole
Advertiser Columnist 

Bruce Matheson, 87, member of famed WWII unit | HonoluluAdvertiser.com | The Honolulu Advertiser

The legends of the air from World War II have one fewer name on their rapidly dwindling rolls.

Retired Marine Brig. Gen. Bruce J. Matheson, who lived in Kailua, died on Thursday from a combination of lung cancer and a heart attack, his family said. He was 87.When he was sent to the South Pacific in 1943, Matheson was the youngest member of the famed "Black Sheep" squadron under the command of Maj. Greg Boyington — who was later awarded the Medal of Honor, and whose exploits inspired the 1970s TV show "Baa Baa Black Sheep."
On Oct. 17, 1943, Matheson shot down a Japanese Zero in the Solomon Islands. He was hit with shrapnel in his legs but was able to land his damaged F4U Corsair.
By the end of his second Black Sheep tour, Matheson had three confirmed kills and one-and-a-half "probable" kills, his family said. Matheson also confirmed Boyington's final aerial victory before Boyington was shot down.
The Black Sheep brought down 97 Japanese aircraft — 95 of which were fighters — and received a Presidential Unit Citation, said the Marine pilot's son, Scott Matheson.
Out of 51 in the squadron, only 10 are still alive, Scott Matheson said.
It's a similar story for other famous units of World War II.
When navigator Thomas Griffin made a visit to Hawai'i for the recent 67th anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, he did so as one of only nine surviving members of the "Doolittle Raiders."
The Raiders flew 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers off the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet to attack Japan.
The Black Sheep's Boyington, an ace with the Flying Tigers in China, pulled together unassigned pilots in the South Pacific to form Marine Fighter Squadron 214, or VMF-214.
Scott Matheson said his father didn't talk much about his combat exploits, but he did talk about and have respect for Boyington.
"He was quite a colorful figure and had lots of foibles," Matheson said of Boyington. "He drank heavily and he brawled, but he was an absolute terror in the sky. He was very, very proficient, and these guys loved him. He kept them alive. He taught them how to do it, and what to do."
Matheson said it was a misconception that Boyington was called "Pappy."
"That was something they put together after the war and the TV series," he said. "They called him Gramps or Skipper."
Bruce Matheson later flew night escort for Air Force bombers in an F3D Skyknight in Korea, and had about 400 missions flying Huey helicopters in Vietnam.
He received three Legions of Merit, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, more than 30 Air Medals and a Purple Heart.
He was stationed in Hawai'i in the early 1950s and late 1960s, and he and his wife, Mary Jo, bought a house here. After a 34-year Marine Corps career, Matheson sang with the Barbershop Society, the Honolulu Symphony Chorus and Hawai'i Opera Theater Chorus, and was vice president and treasurer of Windward Realty Inc.
For 25 years, Bruce Matheson ran and later walked the beach in Kailua, notching five miles a day. "He walked me into the ground," said Scott Matheson. " ... He was fit. He was tough — those Marines."
Scott Matheson said his father didn't want to have any funeral services. Bruce Matheson also is survived by his wife, Mary Jo, and another son, Kerry.


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## ToughOmbre (Feb 2, 2009)

TO


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## evangilder (Feb 2, 2009)




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## Gnomey (Feb 2, 2009)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Feb 2, 2009)




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## Airframes (Feb 2, 2009)

Farewell, R.I.P.


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## v2 (Feb 2, 2009)




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## Vassili Zaitzev (Feb 2, 2009)

R.I.P. sir.


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## Wildcat (Feb 3, 2009)




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## Heinz (Feb 3, 2009)




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## RabidAlien (Feb 3, 2009)




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## v2 (Feb 7, 2009)

Legendary Polish soldier is dead...

Stanisław Frączasty, who was one of the best known Polish soldiers and couriers died on Saturday in his house in Chochołów. He was famous for trespassing Marshall Edward Rydz-Śmigły from Hungary to Poland via illegally boarder.

Frączysty was born in Chochołów in 1917. He joined army as a young boy. In 1942 the hero was arrested by the Germans, who placed him in Gestapo’s place of torture in Zakopane and then in Auschwitz (number 27235). After World War II Frączysty spent many months in communistic prison.

He was awarded Virtuti Militari order for his bravery and service.




Frączysty ( in centre ) with Pope Benedict XVI in Auschwitz:


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## RabidAlien (Feb 7, 2009)




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## syscom3 (Apr 3, 2009)

He was an officer with the 2nd Escort Group, commanded by the legendary Captain Johnnie Walker

NORA RYELL

Special to The Globe and Mail
April 3, 2009

In 1943, a young naval officer from the Royal Military College in Kingston, found himself hunting U-boats in the treacherous waters of the Atlantic. After being seconded to the Royal Navy as a Lieutenant, William Chipman served on the Wild Goose, one of the vessels that was part of the 2nd Escort Group commanded by the legendary Captain Johnnie Walker.
Capt. Walker was a hard taskmaster but his phenomenal success hunting U-boats made him one of the early heroes of the Battle of the Atlantic. In the space of only 10 days, 2nd Escort Group managed to sink six U-boats.
London newspaper reports flooded across the Atlantic praising the exploits of the group. For William Chipman it was the adventure of a lifetime. When he was interviewed by a British reporter, the exhilaration and excitement was
unmistakable. "What a party that was!" He exclaimed.
William Pennock Chipman was born in Ottawa, the only son of Marjorie Cowan Pennock and Kenneth Gordon Chipman. His father was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the topographic engineering program and worked for the federal government.
William went to Lisgar Collegiate Institute before enrolling at the Royal Military College in 1936. During the next three years, he spent several summers of naval training in Halifax or aboard the training schooner, Venture.
War was declared in September, 1939, and Mr. Chipman and his classmates were hastily graduated a year early. After naval training, he served on Royal Navy ships on North Atlantic convoy escort duty.
In 1943 an opportunity for real adventure presented itself.
For the first three years of the war, the battle for the Atlantic had not gone well. The Germans were deploying more and more submarines, had learned to fight in groups - the dreaded wolf pack - and increasingly under the cover of darkness. The new tactics were stunningly successful, so by 1943
the Admiralty was open to suggestions even from a maverick like Capt. Walker, a career anti-submarine officer who had been slated for early retirement until war broke out.
Capt. Walker had had some success in fending off U-boats as part of a convoy escort in the Western Approaches, but he was frustrated that the escort ship's main priority was to protect the convoy itself.
He proposed that a second support group be commissioned to hunt U-boats in vulnerable areas, such as the Bay of Biscay and the far Atlantic. His ships were modified Black Swan class sloops and were naturally given the names of birds. While the Wren, Woodpecker, Cygnet, Wild Goose, Kite and Starling were free to roam the Atlantic with the sole purpose of hunting and destroying U-boats, the regular escort groups remained with the convoys.
Each vessel was equipped with ASDIC, the precursor to sonar, which became the essential tool in the underwater detection of U-boats. Mr. Chipman was assigned to the Wild Goose as senior watchkeeper and later as Lieutenant. Hunting U-boats was often likened to a big-game hunting expedition, but there were tedious days when the group patrolled the Atlantic, occasionally enlivened by rough weather when the wind reached Force 10 and the sloops, originally designed for service in the Mediterranean and Pacific, "endured some fierce bumping," as Lt. Chipman
recorded. Under those circumstances, it was felt that the U-boats were in a better situation while they remained submerged. If a U-boat captain was wily enough, the hunt could go on for hours or even days. The one consolation was that the submarine would eventually have to surface for air. When Capt. Walker's group sank the six U-boats in 10 days. Lt. Chipman was mentioned in despatches for "distinguished service." When the ships returned to Liverpool they were given a heroes' welcome. Lt. Chipman later described the reception: "Starling, Wild Goose, Magpie, and Wren arrived in Liverpool on the 25th of February. The four ships were cheered into the harbor in the best traditions of the Royal Navy. The First Lord made a speech to the assembled ships' companies in which he said that the patrol just ended had been "the most outstanding cruise undertaken in this war by an escort group." Meanwhile, Lt. Chipman had received glowing reports from his superior officers. He was promoted to acting Lieutenant-Commander and was now to command his own vessel after a much-needed four-month shore leave.
During his time at sea, LCdr. Chipman corresponded regularly with his high school sweetheart, Beatrice Kemp. He returned to Ottawa and they were married on Oct. 7, 1944. The Chipman's first child, Jill, was born in 1945
when he was once again at sea, in command of the sloop, HMS Weston. As the war wound down, he continued to escort convoys on cross-channel forays. In August, 1945, he was discharged in Ottawa after spending a total of 5½ years of almost continuous sea time.
His first order of business was to finish his BA at Queen's University, and he and Beatrice completed their family when a son, Kenneth, was born in 1947. In 1953, he was promoted to Commander, but found his niche when he joined the CBC in 1955. As an administrator, he was sent to various places throughout the country until his retirement in Toronto in 1970.
Beatrice died in 1985 and two years later, Cdr. Chipman surprised his family by eloping to Palm Springs with a close family friend, Marnie Taylor. They travelled together for many years and the commander was particularly
fond of rejoining his naval comrades at various reunions.
On one occasion, he was asked to speak at a reunion of Capt. Walker's Old Boys Association. "In the Battle of the Atlantic, under Capt. Walker's command, we did it all," he said. "Remember."

WILLIAM CHIPMAN
William Pennock Chipman was born in Ottawa. He died in his sleep in Oakville, Ont., on Jan. 25, 2009. He was 91. He was predeceased by his first wife, Beatrice, and by his second wife, Marnie. He leaves daughter Jill and son Kenneth and numerous stepchildren and extended family.


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## syscom3 (Apr 3, 2009)

From The Times

April 3, 2009

Squadron Leader Richard Muspratt: wartime photographic reconnaissance pilot

As a photographic reconnaissance pilot flying over enemy occupied France in 1941 and 1942, Richard Muspratt flew numerous sorties in 140 Squadron, notably in a Spitfire high-level reconnaissance aircraft. Lacking the camaraderie in the air that is available to the squadron fighter pilot, the PR pilot developed, as he penetrated enemy territory on his own, a certain lone-wolf mentality, knowing that he was always waiting for the enemy to pounce.

With the expulsion of the British Expeditionary Force from France in the spring of 1940 it became an RAF priority to find out for the British high command exactly what was going on in the enemy-occupied French harbours that faced the coasts of southern Britain. With the countryside of the Pas de Calais a veritable nest of German fighter fields, venturing alone into this heavily defended airspace was a perilous business.

Accurate navigation was also essential if the pilot’s photographs were to have any value (and if he needed to flee for home in a hurry). A thoroughly self-reliant pilot, Muspratt was very much at home in the lone-wolf (or as he preferred to put it “hare” ) role, and this quality subsequently made him a fine test pilot on the new, powerful single-engined aircraft types that were emerging in the second half of the war.

Richard Vivian Muspratt was born the son of an Indian Army major in 1917 and educated at Oundle, which he left in 1935 to take a diploma at Chelsea College of Aeronautical Engineering.

He had just emerged with a first-class pass when the war broke out and he enlisted in the RAF, to be commissioned in 1940. After a first posting to 53 (Army Co-operation) Squadron, he was posted in 1941 to 140 Squadron, where he embarked on a series of reconnaissance sorties, mainly taking photographs of French harbours from an altitude of just under 30,000ft.

On one occasion, in May 1942, while photographing the docks at Cherbourg, he was intercepted by a Focke-Wulf Fw190, a fighter that had demonstrated its superiority over the Spitfire when it had first come into action the previous year.

Having obtained his photographs Muspratt put his Spitfire into a steep diving turn which prevented the Fw190 from getting on to his tail at close range. He then used the PR Spitfire’s just superior speed to draw steadily away during a chase that lasted for 30 miles, with the despairing German pilot firing bursts at him from 600 yards astern as he drew away. “Chalk one up to the hare!” he recorded in his log book on landing later that day.

Among Muspratt’s most important sorties were the two that he flew over Dieppe on August 5 and 6, 1942. His large-scale photographs were to be part of a valuable intelligence resource for what nevertheless turned out to be the disastrous Dieppe raid of August 19, which at least demonstrated conclusively that an assault on a heavily defended harbour town could be no blueprint for any serious Allied landings on the German-occupied littoral (and when they eventually came in June 1944 it was over open beaches).

On being rested from operations Muspratt was awarded the DFC for his skill and leadership as a flight commander. The citation noted: “He never hesitates to undertake a difficult operational task himself rather than detail a less experienced pilot.”

In 1943 Air Marshal Sir Ralph Sorley, the controller of research and development, became increasingly concerned by the rising number of fatalities in test flying and a lack of standardisation of flying techniques. The result was the founding of the Empire Test Pilot’s Training School at Boscombe Down for whose No 1 course Muspratt was selected. He is its last survivor.

On passing through the school and being promoted to squadron leader he was invited to join Hawker, then developing a new generation of powerful piston-engined fighters, the Tempest and the Fury (and Sea Fury). Muspratt flew intensive testing flights in these superlative aircraft — the ultimate expression of the piston-engined fighter — with various weapon loads. With its level-flight top speed of 450mph the Tempest was to become highly effective in the role of intercepting V1 rockets, while the Navy’s Sea Fury, flew right through the Korean War where it scored a number of combat victories over the Russian MiG15. It served with the Royal Navy until it was replaced by the turbojet Sea Hawk.

After leaving Hawker in 1948 Muspratt joined the Ferguson tractor company and spent 13 years in Australia, where he greatly boosted the firm’s sales. Back in the UK after 1960, he bought and ran a business at Leamington Spa, Witney Welding and Engineering, which he ran until his final retirement in 1985.

His wife Jane, whom he had met and married during his time in Australia, died in 2003. He is survived by his two daughters.

Squadron Leader Richard Muspratt, DFC, wartime photographic reconnaissance and test pilot, was born on November 16, 1917. He died on January 15, 2009, aged 91


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## syscom3 (Apr 3, 2009)

From The Times
April 3, 2009
Squadron Leader Ted Wass
One of the dwindling band of aircrew who served with the celebrated 617 “Dambusters” Squadron during the Second World War, Ted Wass also rendered sterling service to the Squadron Association as its secretary for a dozen years from the early 1990s onwards.
In this his early experience with the RAF’s supply branch, in which he served before joining 617 as an air gunner in 1944, stood him in good stead. He was highly valued for his meticulous record-keeping, which enabled the association to function effectively in keeping its membership together in those years.
Joining the squadron in the year after the Ruhr dams raid, Wass took part as rear gunner in Flight-Lieutenant Tony Iveson’s Lancaster, in attacks on the Dortmund-Ems canal and the Tirpitz, including the attack of November 1944
that finally sank the battleship in a Norwegian fjord. He became a POW after bailing out during a raid on Bergen in January 1945.
Born in 1920 Edward Wass enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve as an equipment assistant four months before war broke out, and from June 1941 operated a mobile stores unit in the Middle East, supporting fighter squadrons and repair units. When the chance came he volunteered for aircrew in 1943, and in July 1944 was posted to 617 Squadron.
Flying as rear gunner to Iveson he took part in a number of 617’s destructive attacks on U and E-boat pens using the 12,000lb “Tallboy” deep penetration bomb designed by Barnes Wallis (author of the “bouncing bombs” which had ruptured the Möhne and Eder dams).
The crew next set off with 617 for Russia, flying to Yagodnik airfield on an island in the Dvina River, from where, on September 15, 1944, they attacked and severely damaged — but did not sink — Tirpitz, then berthed at Kaa Fjord high inside the Arctic Circle. November 11 was a different story. By that time the damaged Tirpitz had been brought south to Tromsø Fjord, where she was within reach of Lancasters based at Lossiemouth, in Scotland.
For this raid, in order to carry the extra fuel required, the mid-upper turret was removed to save weight, placing the onus for defence against fighters on the rear gunner. No fighters were encountered and Tirpitz was sunk.
Wass’ last operation with 617 was an attack on U-boat pens at Bergen on January 12, 1945. The Mustang fighter escort that had been expected failed to materialize and two Lancasters were shot down. Iveson’s Lancaster was attacked by an Fw190, its controls, port fin and tail plane were severely damaged by cannon fire and its port inner engine was set on fire. With the aircraft barely controllable the order was given to bail out. Wass and two other crewmen got ready to jump, and on receiving what they took to be an affirmative order, bailed out, Wass landing in a snowdrift. Taken to Germany he was eventually liberated from a PoW camp at Moosburg in April. Iveson had in fact managed to nurse his damaged Lancaster home and received the DFC.
After the war Wass returned to the supply branch and was commissioned, retiring as a squadron leader in 1975. In his work as secretary of the squadron association he was stalwartly supported by his wife, Isabel, who died in 1999. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

Squadron Leader Ted Wass, 617 Squadron veteran, was born on October 8, 1920.
He died on February 20, 2009, aged 88


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## syscom3 (Apr 3, 2009)

Dunlop: his plan for promoting officers put an end to 'Buggins's turn'
At the end of the Second World War, the Royal Navy's peacetime reductions generated problems in personnel structures and career management. A prime problem was how to create a modern, less class-based Navy with fairer
promotion opportunities as well as dealing with excessively old-fashioned approaches to the welfare of sailors. Many had observed an American navy well able to combine massive firepower and creature comforts.
Colin Dunlop's career as a supply and secretariat officer (determined by his defective eyesight) held innovations in opportunity for which he was either personally responsible or played a major role. He himself was appointed to
posts previously reserved for the mainstream executive (ie, "seaman") branch.
Born in 1918, the son of a naval engineer officer who also rose to rear-admiral, Colin Charles Harrison Dunlop was educated at Marlborough College from where he joined the Royal Navy in 1935. His first operational ship was the cruiser Shropshire, in which, alongside in Barcelona during the chaos of the Spanish Civil War, he witnessed the lawlessness of Spanish government forces, their summary executions and other atrocities.
He joined the cruiser Kent in March 1938 and was appointed secretary to the captain while still a midshipman. After war was declared, he took part in
Kent's China Station patrols against German shipping and commerce raiders until transferred to the Mediterranean fleet. While bombarding the port of Bardia, in modern Libya, in September 1940, Kent was torpedoed by an Italian aircraft and disabled. She returned to the UK where Dunlop joined the battleship Valiant, in which he served in the Indian Ocean and at the Salerno landings. He also saw the surrender of the Italian fleet. Back in the UK, he passed out top of the naval staff course and in March 1945 was appointed to the cruiser Diadem and then secretary to the commodore of the 15th Cruiser Squadron in the Orion which supported the American advance in Italy. For Orion, the end of the war in Europe was followed by involvement in Marshal Tito's aggressive aspirations towards Trieste. He then served in Palestine.
Dunlop was appointed secretary to the Naval Secretary, having hitched his wagon to the star of Rear-Admiral Robert Mansergh whom he served for seven years. The Naval Secretary is responsible for the appointment of all senior officers; it quickly became apparent that only a rigorous approach to promotion given the number of posts and length of tenure would work and be fair. Dunlop's plan (evolved with Captain Deric Holland-Martin) was accepted and its principles still apply today. "Dead men's shoes" and "Buggins's turn" ceased. Dunlop followed Mansergh to sea in charge of a carrier squadron and then in August 1949 to the Admiralty as 5th Sea Lord overseeing naval aviation during a difficult period of shortages of aircrew. Dunlop's innovative idea that supply branch officers should be allowed to qualify somewhat eased the situation. Mansergh was appointed Flag Officer Plymouth with Dunlop accompanying him.
After Mansergh retired Dunlop was given a humdrum supply job in Portsmouth barracks. When a high-level officer structure committee was formed and authorised anyone to write directly to it with ideas, Dunlop, believing that the navy undervalued its non-executive officers and that Admiral Lord Fisher's pre-First World War engineer officer reforms had been allowed to wither, wrote a long paper setting out the problems and his solution.
These were virtually identical to the celebrated Admiralty Fleet Order No 1 of 1956, which removed specialists' coloured stripes (which had immediately identified them as being non -"seaman" officers) from their sleeves, opening some higher posts to all specialisations. It also opened avenues for advancement from the lower deck. As a member of the committee on officer structure and training, Dunlop moved to align an obsolete structure with modern practice.
Early in 1957 Dunlop joined the cruiser Sheffield which had been fitted with a dining hall for junior ratings, an improvement intended to do away with ancient messing systems notorious for waste and malnutrition. Dunlop's
innovations included multi-choice menus, previously unheard of, and these were finally introduced Navy-wide.
In 1960 he was asked for by the formidable Sir Caspar John, Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff, and resumed his career at the higher levels of naval policy, continuing to serve John when he became First Sea Lord later that year.
In May 1964 Dunlop was appointed to his first command, the Chatham barracks and the Naval Supply School - the former until then an executive officer's post. He served in the MoD until 1969, first for the Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, on an important resource planning committee and then as a director of the tri-service Defence Policy Staff - a "first" for a supply officer.
Promoted rear-admiral, he was appointed commander of the British Navy Staff in Washington, where his ebullient and cheerful personality clicked with the iconic Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the USN's Chief of Naval Operations. His final tour, another supply "first", was as Flag Officer Medway and Port Admiral, Chatham, during which he was also Chief Naval Supply and Secretariat Officer, father of the branch. He was appointed CBE in 1963 and CB in 1972. Retiring in 1974, he was for ten years the director-general of the Cable TV
Association and the National TV Rental Association. Playing for naval teams around the world, Dunlop was a fanatically keen cricketer. Noted for his accurate and analytical mind, his warm and enthusiastic personality made him many friends.
His wife Pat, whom he married in 1941, died in 1991; in 1995 he married Commandant Elizabeth Craig-McFeely, formerly Superintendent of the WRNS. He is survived by her and the two sons of his first marriage.

Rear-Admiral Colin Dunlop, CB, CBE, Flag Officer Medway and Chief Naval Supply and Secretariat Officer 1971-74, was born on March 4, 1918. He died on March 8, 2009, aged 91


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## syscom3 (Apr 3, 2009)

He helped develop the G-suit during WWII
Top-secret work on centrifuges was transformed after the war into life-saving cardiovascular research

SANDRA MARTIN

March 25, 2009

As an aerospace medical researcher, Earl Wood spanned the era from fighter pilots to astronauts.

The version of the G-suit that he helped develop for bomber pilots flying at high altitudes and fighter pilots who were blacking out in dogfights with the Japanese during the Second World War, made a successful transition to peacetime. In a modified and advanced form, these pressurized suits were used by the test pilots who broke the sound barrier and the astronauts who circled the globe and landed on the moon.

"As both a physician and researcher, Dr. Wood provided nearly five decades of outstanding leadership to Mayo Clinic and scientific advancements to the world," Denis Cortese, Mayo Clinic president and CEO, said in a news release. The author of more than 700 scholarly articles and several book chapters, Dr. Wood's research was also instrumental in modifying an air pressure gauge from an aircraft into the standard tool for measuring arterial blood pressure; developing the first diagnostic cardiac catheterization in humans; refining the heart-lung bypass machine to enable Mayo to perform open-heart surgery as a routine procedure; formulating indo-cyanine green dye to measure heart pump function in diagnosing congenital heart disease; and creating advanced X-ray imagery of the heart, lungs and circulation leading to an X-ray-based computed tomography machine that evolved into CT scanner technology.

Well into extreme old age, Dr. Wood continued to work and consult with colleagues around the world. "He was a giant as a person," said Jan Stepanek, a Swiss internist who is now medical director of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. Dr. Stepanek credits Dr. Wood with sparking his own interest in researching aerospace medicine. "Many things are called mentorship today, but one key ingredient is a dedicated presence when people have time together," he said. "When you were sitting with Dr. Wood, nothing else mattered. He was there with you and for you and he was going to give you the most in-depth answers to your questions that you could ever hope for."

Born in the American Midwest before the First World War, Earl Wood was the second youngest of six children of William G. Wood and his wife Inez. Both his parents were teachers, despite their lack of secondary education, and his father also worked as a farmer and a real estate salesman. After attending local schools, he attended Macalester College, a liberal arts institution in St. Paul, Minn., graduating in 1934. Two years later, on Dec. 20, 1936, he married Ada Peterson, his college sweetheart. Together they raised four children.

"He was there for the individual, as an advocate for his graduate fellows, his students, his technicians and his family," said his youngest son Andrew (Andy) Wood, a wellness facility entrepreneur. "He was the ultimate in a leader because he emphasized people's strengths and leveraged those strengths," said Mr. Wood, explaining how his father took time to help him, "a severe dyslexic," learn to read and do math problems. "He basically got me through high school and into college and eventually graduate school. He was never critical, but he would come up with a plan and pose it in such a way that it seemed like it was my idea so I took ownership of it."

Dr. Wood earned postgraduate degrees, including a PhD and an MD at the University of Minnesota and a National Research Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, before being hired to teach pharmacology at Harvard University. That is where he met Charles Code, the Canadian-born physiologist who had set up an Aero Medical Unit in the late 1930s at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., researching the deleterious effects of high acceleration on pilots of civilian and military aircraft.

A few months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Dr. Code hired Dr. Wood to help solve a deadly problem affecting American pilots. Some of them were blacking out because blood was rushing from their heads and pooling in their legs as they climbed and swooped in bombing runs and dogfights with the enemy. Dr. Wood and other members of Dr. Code's research team turned themselves into human guinea pigs by building a human centrifuge in the lab.

The researchers took their experiments aloft in an Army A-24 plane, a Dauntless dive-bomber they called the G-Whiz, which made dives and loops over the Minnesota cornfields. These experiments in gravitational pull led them to develop a G-suit, with pouches or bladders around the legs that the wearer could pump full of air, thus blocking an excessive downward flow of blood and obviating the tendency for pilots to lose consciousness from a lack of blood in the brain.

This top-secret work on centrifuges was transformed after the war into internationally recognized cardiovascular research that extended to heart, lung and blood physiology and cardiac catheterization.

"Dr. Wood was absolutely instrumental in the development of cardiopulmonary bypass, a technology that saves hundreds of thousands of lives every year," Thoralf Sundt III, a Mayo Clinic surgeon, said in a statement.

Dr. Wood's academic career proceeded apace with his medical research. He became a professor in the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine in 1951. Seven years later, the U.S. Air Force and NASA asked Dr. Wood to continue his G-forces research with the result that he and his team began testing prototypes of the Project Mercury astronaut couches on the Mayo centrifuge.

By the early 1960s, Dr. Wood, who was head of Mayo Clinic's Cardiovascular Laboratory, was hosting research fellows, visiting scientists and clinicians who came to study in his lab and learn new techniques.

Even though he retired from the Mayo Clinic at age 70 in January, 1982, Dr. Wood continued to correspond and consult with researchers and colleagues from around the world. One of them was Dr. Stepanek, who, in the late 1990s, was investigating the differences between air- and water-pressured G-suits. The two men, one in his mid-80s and the other in his early 30s, began an e-mail and fax conversation. "It was probably the time in my life when I looked the smartest," said Dr. Stepanek, who would send questions in the late afternoon from Switzerland and stand by the fax machine the next morning to receive reams of technical reports and documents dating back to the Second World War from Rochester.

"He was sharp as a tack," Dr. Stepanek said. "I would never have gotten some of the ideas and some of the thought processes without the interaction with him."

Two years later, the two men met in Rochester. "He had grey hair and a sparkle in his eyes, he was minimally hunched over and slightly hard of hearing, but he was an extremely attentive listener," said Dr. Stepanek. "In everybody's career and life there are these moments when you have the opportunity to spend time with somebody who is not just talented and a scientifically brilliant person, but somebody who manages to influence your life," he said. "He was brilliant, humble and a gentleman. What a wonderful human being."

Earl Wood

Earl Wood was born on Jan. 1, 1912, in Mankato, Minn. He died March 18, 2009, in Rochester, Minn., of pneumonia following surgery for a broken hip. Predeceased by his wife Ada in 2000, Dr. Wood, who was 97, leaves four children and four grandchildren.


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## Njaco (Apr 3, 2009)

to them all.


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## Gnomey (Apr 4, 2009)

to all of them.


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## ToughOmbre (Apr 4, 2009)

to all.

TO


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## v2 (Apr 4, 2009)




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## RabidAlien (Apr 5, 2009)

to all.


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## v2 (Apr 21, 2009)

*Bazyli Henryk Chmaruk died*... 

Bazyli was born in March 28, 1918 in Potapowicze, Poland, and graduated in 1938 from Polish Air Force Academy. In 1939, he flew against advancing Germans, disbanded because they could not compete with what was coming at them from the west. He was on his way home to rescue his family in the east to escape to England. The Polish Government in exile was located there. He was captured by the advancing Soviets. He was a head of Catyn and other massacres of Polish military, government and intelligencia. Bazyli became a prisoner of war and survived a Soviet concentration camp where few survived. He was transported to England and flew 60 missions (dropping agents and supplies to underground forces) in Polish RAF "special duty" squadron #138. In August 1944, he was shot down over Hungary returning from supplying Warsaw Uprising, was captured by Hungarians. He again became a prisoner of war. He was transferred to Germany, survived the Nazi-forced Death March for 700 miles through Winter 1944-45 through northern Germany and was liberated by British commandos. Bazyli was awarded Polish order Virtuti Militari and many other distinctions. 
As Poland fell behind the Iron Curtain, Bazyli was blacklisted by the communist regimes and could not return home to Poland. He remained in England, became a licensed aircraft engineer and test pilot, and in 1957 plotted German commercial aviation flight paths converting from Marshall Plan (used Collins Radio meters in flying laboratory to plot flight paths used today). In 1959, he joined Collins Radio International Division London as an avionics system engineer to leading aircraft manufacturers and operators (chiefly concerned with design, installation and flight tests of autopilots, flight systems, gyro stabilized compass, NAV/COMM and accessory Apparatus). He represented Collins at Paris and Farnborough Air Shows, setup Collins field service offices throughout Europe, and immigrated to the United States in 1966 through the State Department to conduct autopilot research at Collins, Cedar Rapids. He was a pre-eminent Collins avionics troubleshooter, autopilot certification expert, and installed the autopilot on Air Force One during Nixon administration. He traveled to Poland each year since 1978. In 1994 he built a wonderful gravesite for his parents near his childhood hometown, now located in Belarus as of Yalta Agreement. (Polish border shifted west thus his childhood home was no longer in Poland.)
Memberships: Polish Air Force Veterans Association Chicago Wing, Warsaw '44 Club, Caterpillar Club (saved life by parachute, silk manufacturer).

source:The Kalona News.


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## Gnomey (Apr 21, 2009)




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## RabidAlien (Apr 21, 2009)




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## syscom3 (Apr 22, 2009)

Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Sherman

Geoffrey Sherman’s activities as a Royal Marines officer during the Second World War were remarkable for their variety, very much “soldier and sailor too” as Rudyard Kipling once remarked.

While in the heavy cruiser Berwick, he was part of the extraordinary and largely forgotten Operation Fork; the sequestration of Iceland in May 1940. In April, after the Germans had launched their invasions of Denmark and Norway, the British feared that Iceland, strategically well placed to threaten Atlantic convoy routes, might be next. Accordingly, a scratch force of 746 Royal Marines, nearly all of whom were raw recruits, were embarked in the cruisers Berwick and Glasgow and, suffering acutely from seasickness, shipped to Iceland, where they transferred to two destroyers and landed at Reykjavik. Surprise had been lost when Berwick’s Walrus seaplane overflew Reykjavik by mistake when on anti-submarine patrol.

Sherman was in command of the Berwick’s Royal Marines detachment who, well trained and immune to seasickness, were the spearhead of an under-equipped force which nevertheless secured the post office, the broadcasting service and the German consulate without difficulty, salvaging a substantial number of documents found burning in the consul’s bath.

This was a flagrant violation of Icelandic neutrality, but Britain ignored the very proper diplomatic protests. Shortly afterwards the Royal Marines were relieved by 4,000 British soldiers and in July 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, a large US occupation force.

Berwick arrived in the Mediterranean in November 1940 and took part in operations which included supporting the brilliant Fleet Air Arm attack on the Italian fleet in Taranto. She was the only ship to be damaged at the battle of Cape Spartivento, Admiral Somerville’s inconclusive action against the Italians. As was widely the custom, the Royal Marines manned the after eight-inch gun turret and this was hit by two shells. Commanding the turret, seven of Sherman’s people were killed and he, with eight others, was wounded.

In December Berwick was slightly damaged by the German commerce raider, the heavy cruiser Hipper, while defending a convoy. After repairs and equipment upgrades, Berwick escorted several convoys to Russia, Sherman leaving her in 1942 for the army staff course at Camberley.

He was then appointed to the Eighth Army headquarters in Egypt under General Montgomery. In September 1943 he took part in Operation Baytown, the first landing on the Italian mainland near Reggio di Calabria. In 1944 he was sent to Ceylon as GSO1 or chief staff officer to Lieutenant-General “Boy” Browning, chief of staff to Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia. Mountbatten’s pet plan, Operation Zipper, the invasion of the Malayan mainland, was negated by the atom bombs and the Japanese surrender.

Arriving in Singapore, Sherman was one of the first to relieve the half starved inmates of Changi jail. He was assigned under the watchful eye of Lady Edwina Mountbatten to set up suitably imposing ceremonies for the surrender of the regional Imperial Japanese forces by General Seishiro Itagaki on September 12, 1945. Sherman’s family came to possess the Union and Malayan flag that were used at that event and which were flying in Tanglin Barracks when the Japanese invaded in 1942.

After the war Sherman served in the Cabinet Office until 1950 when he was invalided as a result of his war injuries. He then joined John Holt’s, a West African trading company, and worked in Nigeria until independence in 1958. He was also a superintendent in the Nigerian Special Constabulary. Returning to England, he was managing director of Rodex and subsequently joined British Aerospace in 1970.

A considerable sportsman, Sherman played cricket for the MCC. He played for Nigeria as a bowler and wicketkeeper. At rugby football, he played for Wasps and the Royal Navy. In retirement his many charitable activities included establishing the Blackpool branch of the Samaritans under Chad Varah, their founder, and chairmanship of the Yeovil Alzheimer’s Association. He was president of the Surrey Small Bore Rifle Association at Bisley.

He is survived by his wife, Evelyn, whom he was married to in the fateful month of November 1939, and their two sons and a daughter.

Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Sherman, Royal Marines, organiser of the Japanese surrender of Singapore in 1945, was born on April 6, 1915. He died on March 22, 2009, aged 93


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## RabidAlien (Apr 22, 2009)




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## syscom3 (Apr 27, 2009)

> *With the passing of the last of the junior officers that participated in the early battles of the war, we're now losing the last of the living memories of the participants of the prewar armed services. RIP sir!*



From The Times
April 7, 2009
Commander Norman Tod: Naval officer on the cruiser Ajax

Norman Tod was awarded the DSC for his courage and efficiency when navigating officer of the light cruiser Ajax at the Battle of the River Plate. This celebrated engagement, which took place on December 13, 1939, resulted in the scuttling in Montevideo of the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee and was a timely tonic early in the war when national morale had been lowered by inactivity punctuated with disasters.

Tod’s charts of the preliminary part of the action, now with the Imperial War Museum, show that Commodore Harwood and his staff initially believed that their opponent was the sister ship Admiral Scheer. As navigator of the flagship of Harwood’s small force of three cruisers — Exeter, Ajax and
Achilles — Tod would have contributed to Harwood’s shrewd appreciation that Graf Spee, having found and sunk only nine merchant ships, might gravitate towards the traffic node at the River Plate.

Graf Spee’s 11-inch guns soon inflicted grave damage to the 8-inch gunned Exeter, which had to retire in a near-sinking condition with many casualties, leaving the two 6-inch cruisers to continue the battle. Both were hit by 11-inch shells and damaged by splinters; Ajax losing the use of half her armament and Achilles her gunnery control system. But Graf Spee had also been damaged. Trammelled by Hague Convention legalities regarding combatants in neutral ports, lack of fuel and ammunition, the arrival of the heavy cruiser Cumberland and the threat of further reinforcements, her captain, Hans Langsdorff, ordered her scuttled and committed suicide. To his credit, no merchant seamen were killed during his operations; all were captured.

Tod was navigator of the cruiser Norfolk when she and Suffolk, both radar-fitted, intercepted, reported and shadowed the battleship Bismarck and the cruiser Prinz Eugen as they broke out through the Denmark Strait in May 1941. Witnessing the subsequent action with the battleship Prince of Wales
and the battlecruiser Hood, Tod saw the Hood destroyed in one mighty explosion. Although losing contact next day, Norfolk was present at the final sinking of the Bismarck.

Tod’s subsequent war service included navigating the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the East Indies campaign against the Japanese and, promoted to commander in 1944, a post on the staff of the fleet commander at Colombo.

Norman Kelso Tod was born in Quetta, now in Pakistan, his father serving in the Indian cavalry. Taken “home” to live with grandparents at 3, he joined the Navy at 13 and throughout the 1920s and early 1930s enjoyed a colourful time around the Mediterranean and the Baltic, at one time crewing for the
King’s yacht Britannia. Having qualified as a navigator, he served for two years in Gulf sloops, helping to establish the Bahrain naval base and showing the flag to the still medieval parts of the region. He joined Ajax in 1938 in the West Indies.
After the war he was assistant naval attaché in Shanghai followed by command of the frigate Loch Glendhu in the East Indies, a tour at the naval tactical school and as naval attaché in Lisbon. He retired in the rank of acting captain based at Karachi and as naval adviser to the High Commission in
Pakistan. Being averse to office work he became a courier for upmarket travel agencies, escorting groups of the more determined type of tourist and in some 24 years visited many countries in North Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia. His travels were terminated by a stroke in Thailand in
2002. Commander Norman Tod, DSC, naval officer, was born in India on November 12, 1910. He died on March 6, 2009, aged 98


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## RabidAlien (Apr 27, 2009)

Fair winds and following seas, Shipmate!


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## Gnomey (Apr 27, 2009)




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## ToughOmbre (Apr 27, 2009)

TO


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## Ferdinand Foch (Apr 27, 2009)




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## evangilder (Apr 27, 2009)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Apr 27, 2009)




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## v2 (Apr 30, 2009)

Jewish boxer *Salamo Arouch*, survivor of Auschwitz, dies age 86.

Salamo Arouch, a Jewish boxer who survived the Auschwitz death camp by fighting exhibition bouts for Nazi officers and inspired a Hollywood movie about his life, has died in Israel. He was 86.
The Haaretz newspaper did not give the cause of death of the Greek-born fighter, but quoted his daughter Dalia Gonen as saying he had been unwell since suffering a stroke 15 years ago.
It said he died on Sunday but did not say where.
Born in the Greek town of Saloniki, Arouch became middleweight champion of the Balkans, but his professional career was cut short by World War II and the German invasion of his homeland.
Like thousands of other Saloniki Jews, he and his family and friends were deported to Auschwitz.
Arouch, ordered by the Nazis to fight other prisoners for their entertainment, survived the camp. At the end of the war he immigrated to British-ruled Palestine and saw the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.
His story was the basis for the 1989 movie 'Triumph of the Spirit,' starring Willem Dafoe.
Much of the film was made on location in Auschwitz, with Arouch on site as an adviser, Haaretz quoted his widow Martha as saying.
'He stayed there for three months, going through the process again with the actors,' she told the paper.
'He was happy that something would remain of him after he passed on.'

source: Dailymail


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## RabidAlien (Apr 30, 2009)

Rest in peace.


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## Gnomey (May 1, 2009)




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## v2 (May 8, 2009)

*Mosquito design team member passes *

In Telegraph Deaths column: *Ralph Marcus Hare * on 4th May 2009, aged 94, aircraft engineer and member of Mosquito prototype design team. Thanksgiving Service at St Andrews Church, Cuffley, Herts, on Thursday 21st May at 12 noon


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## RabidAlien (May 10, 2009)




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## vikingBerserker (May 10, 2009)




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## Wayne Little (May 11, 2009)




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## Vassili Zaitzev (May 11, 2009)




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## Gnomey (May 11, 2009)




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## syscom3 (May 14, 2009)

From The Times
May 12, 2009
Captain Terrence Herrick: wartime destroyer captain

Herrick took command of various ships in the Mediterranean and Far East
As a 13-year-old New Zealander, Terry Desmond Herrick had no clear answer as
to why he wanted to join the Royal Navy except that Dartmouth naval college
didn't teach the hated Latin. After training, his early years at sea
included service in the battleship Resolution in the Mediterranean and the
coal-burning fishery protection trawler Colne, rising to second-in-command
as a sub-lieutenant.
In 1934 he was appointed to the sloop Laburnum in the New Zealand Division
of the Royal Navy, based in Auckland. He had been away from home for nine
years, never having met his youngest sister. His family was hardly ever
together. Of his four brothers who joined the Armed Forces, three were
killed flying for the RAF and the fourth was awarded the DSC while captain
of the submarine Uproar.
Herrick married his wife, Janet, in late 1937. "What a wonderful wedding
present," he noted, "to be appointed second-in-command of a fleet destroyer
- Decoy - on the China station". An idyllic period finished when war was
declared and Decoy went to the eastern Mediterranean, Janet returned home
via Canada.
During the next two and a half years as second-in-command of Decoy and
captain of the destroyer Hotspur, Herrick took part in many of the desperate
and bloody battles of the eastern Mediterranean. In his memoir Into the Blue
(1997), he describes the arrival of the German air force in support of the
Italians on January 10, 1941, and the relentless dive-bombing that inflicted
so many sinkings and casualties upon the Royal and merchant navies,
particularly during the evacuations of Greece and Crete.
Receiving a bomb hit while in Alexandria, Decoy was able to steam as a
convoy escort to a Malta dockyard for repair. The aircraft-carrier
Illustrious, badly damaged by the first of the Luftwaffe attacks, was
berthed near Decoy while being patched up for transit to the Suez Canal.
Twelve days of intensive air attacks ensued, fortunately missing Decoy but
scoring one hit on an ammunition ship near by which had to be unloaded in a
hurry by all available sailors. Herrick was full of praise for the courage
of the Maltese dockyard workers: "Amazing how they managed to get on with
the repair work. Great men."
He was awarded his first DSC for his gallantry and resource on Decoy. While
commanding the Hotspur, his second DSC was awarded for his part in sinking
the submarine U79 with the destroyer Hasty after a prolonged cat-and-mouse
search.
Hotspur fought against the Vichy French in Lebanon, ran a series of perilous
convoys to besieged Tobruk and, with a feeling of relief, was transferred to
the East Indies station. Hotspur returned to take part in Operation
Vigorous, a Malta convoy that failed to get through with heavy loss of ships
and lives.
Herrick left for England in October 1942 and was appointed to command the
brand new Hunt-class destroyer Brecon which took him back to the
Mediterranean under vastly altered circumstances - with air superiority the
Allies invaded North Africa and subsequently Sicily and the Italian
mainland. Brecon's guns duelled effectively with German shore batteries at
Salerno and Anzio.
After five years at sea, Herrick was appointed in May 1944 to a training
post in Portsmouth until appointed captain of the large new destroyer
Cockade, arriving in Hong Kong after the Japanese surrender and being
"bounced" into being the secretary of the Hong Kong Yacht Club. He visited
both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was able to arrange a voyage to New Zealand
with his wife to visit the parents he had not seen for ten years.
His subsequent postwar appointments included second-in-command of the naval
barracks at Devonport, promotion to commander and command of the
Battle-class destroyer Corunna, followed by a tour in naval intelligence
where he met a German businessman who had been an officer captured from U79.

In June 1954 he was promoted to captain and was delighted to be sent to New
Zealand as naval officer in charge at Auckland. The fledgeling Royal New
Zealand Navy was now generating senior officers of its own.
Despite being told that he could expect no more sea duty, Herrick's
trademark cheerful enthusiasm and enjoyment of all that he did took him
through a tour in the Admiralty, captain of the dockyard at Gibraltar and
finally Captain of the Fleet in Singapore - personnel manager and ombudsman
for the Far East fleet.
Leaving the Royal Navy in 1963 after 38 years, Herrick was offered the post
of Assistant Chief of Naval Staff RNZN for a year in Wellington followed by
regional commissioner for civil defence until 1970.
His wife, Janet, predeceased him. Their two sons and a daughter survive him.

Captain Terrence Herrick, DSC and Bar, wartime destroyer captain, was born
on November 12, 1911. He died on April 15, 2009, aged 97


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## syscom3 (May 14, 2009)

Lieutenant Peter Goodfellow, who has died aged 90, flew with the Fleet Air Arm throughout the Second World War, scoring several victories and once ditching into the sea; he also witnessed the drama of aircraft being hurled into the air and sliding beneath the waves when the carrier Ark Royal was torpedoed amidships just as he was preparing to land on her.

Last Updated: 6:39PM BST 07 May 2009

Lieutenant Peter Goodfellow

Goodfellow learned to fly in Tiger Moths, and in December 1940 he joined 808 naval air squadron in Ark Royal to fly antiquated Blackburn Skua fighter-bombers. Routine operations included patrols over the Atlantic in all weathers; he was once forced by low oil pressure to make a forced landing at North Front, Gibraltar.

He then flew Fairey Fulmar fighters in intense operations in the Mediterranean against superior numbers of Italian, German and Vichy French land-based aircraft. Between July and August 1941 Ark Royal's aircraft shot down 15 enemy planes; Goodfellow was credited with a share in downing two Italian three-engined Savoia-Marchetti SM79 bombers and damaging a third on July 23.

In September he engaged an Italian SM84 bomber which was shot down by his section of aircraft, but he was forced to ditch and was rescued by a destroyer. When Ark Royal was torpedoed on November 13, Goodfellow was forced to fly off, short of fuel, to Gibraltar.

Having shown himself a superior pilot, he was rested as a flying instructor for six months, then sent to the merged remnants of 807 and 808 squadrons in the escort carrier Battler. These provided air defence for the North African landings, and two Vichy aircraft were shot down, two more damaged and others destroyed on the ground.

After learning the techniques of close air support, Goodfellow gave cover for the Sicily landings. He was then again appointed an instructor, this time in the advanced flying section of the Naval Air Fighter School at Yeovilton. On July 27 1943 he was practising deck landings in a Sea Hurricane on the training carrier Argus when he snagged his tailhook and spilt into the water.

Finally he attended No 2 test pilots' course at Boscombe Down, where he was involved in the development of different aircraft types. He retired from the Navy at the end of the war.

Alan Peter Goodfellow was born on January 19 1919 at Bideford, Devon, and educated at Aldenham before being apprenticed at AV Roe's aircraft factory. Preferring the outdoor life, however, he went to work on an uncle's farm in Oxfordshire, and started to fly gliders with his father.

A member of the Royal Flying Corps as a teenager, his father had shared a tent with Albert Ball, the fighter pilot VC, and was a founding member of the RAF in 1918. He, his sister and brother held pilot's licenses in the 1930s; and on the outbreak of war young Peter, his brother Norman (who flew in 804 and 880 squadrons) and their father all volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm.

After coming out of the Navy Peter Goodfellow studied agriculture at Reading University, then managed a farm in the Waveney Valley before starting work as a buyer for Walls Meats, covering the east of England from a base at Saxmundham, Suffolk. When Walls was reorganised, Goodfellow quickly found a similar job dealing with fruit farmers for the banana company Geest.

His keen interest in wildlife led him to start collecting books on the subject, a hobby which consumed the last 40 years of his life, and he used his business travels as an opportunity to haunt the bookshops of East Anglia. He acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of books about birds and corresponded widely with other collectors. In 2000 he displayed rare items from his private collection at an exhibition in Norwich.

Goodfellow dealt in books, under the name Carlton Books, and the Inland Revenue twice accused him of running a business rather than pursuing a hobby. On each occasion he was able to show that on ordinary accounting principles he was making a loss, and that – were he a business – they would owe him money. No lover of bureaucracy or officialdom, he was rather pleased with these victories.

Goodfellow lived modestly, surrounded by his books, and continued to fly, first with the London Gliding Club. Then, in 1959, he helped to found the Norfolk Gliding Club, based at Tibenham. He owned an Olympia 2b and then a Skylark 4.

A life member of the Spitfire Association, he was a guest at Duxford for the fighter's 70th anniversary, having flown most of its marks. On his 80th birthday he flew his 80th aircraft type.

Peter Goodfellow died on April 11. He married, in 1945, Brenda Stevens, who died in 1969. Four years later he married Jill Thompson (née Nicholls), who survives him with a son and two daughters of the first marriage.

Published May 7 2009


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## RabidAlien (May 14, 2009)

Rest well, soldiers. You've earned it.


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## Gnomey (May 14, 2009)




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## Wildcat (May 15, 2009)

Today Australia lost a screen legend in the passing of Bud Tingwell. Apart from being a famous actor, Bud flew PR Spitfires over the Med in WWII. 


> Despite the stellar career veteran actor, director and writer Charles 'Bud' Tingwell developed, he always considered his success accidental.
> 
> Born in Sydney in 1923, Charles Tingwell was nicknamed 'Bud' before his birth.
> 
> ...


Bud Tingwell: Accidental star - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Charles 'Bud' Tingwell


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## parsifal (May 15, 2009)

I will miss Bud Tingwell, hes like family to many Austraqlians, hes been around forever, and was always known as a gentleman.

Well done Mr Tingwell


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## RabidAlien (May 15, 2009)




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## syscom3 (May 20, 2009)

From The Times
May 20, 2009
Captain Frank Gregory-Smith: destroyer captain and D-Day beachmaster

Frank Gregory-Smith landed in the assault phase on the morning of D-Day,
June 6, 1944, as Principal Beachmaster on Gold Beach. It was little more
than four years since his destroyer had almost been sunk as it evacuated
British troops from Dunkirk harbour in May 1940. 
As senior staff and training officer for Force G he helped to plan the
landings on Gold Beach in Normandy, and then landed with his beach commando
as Principal Beachmaster to ensure the constant stream of men and materials
landing on the beach did not turn into a vast traffic jam. 
For his professionalism under fire on Gold Beach he was awarded a bar to his
Distinguished Service Cross, and he also earned a reputation as an expert on
amphibious landings. But at heart he was always a destroyer man and it was
as such, as the captain of HMS Eridge, that he fought through 1941 and 1942
in the bitter struggle between the Royal Navy and Axis forces for control of
the Mediterranean. In this theatre he served at the Battle of Sirte, sank a
U-boat, sailed in four Malta convoys and numerous Tobruk convoys. 
For his services in the Mediterranean he was awarded two Distinguished
Service Orders and the first of his two Distinguished Service Crosses. 
At the Battle of Sirte, March 22, 1942, HMS Eridge was one of five
destroyers that stayed with the four vital Malta-bound supply ships as the
Royal Navy’s fleet destroyers and cruisers jousted with the powerful Italian
fleet led by the battleship Vittorio Veneto. While the surface battle raged,
the escort destroyers engaged a relentless stream of high-level bombers,
torpedo bombers and dive bombers, all intent, like the Italian fleet, on
destroying the supply ships bound for Malta. 
The attacks were so intense that by nightfall HMS Eridge had almost
completely run out of ammunition. The Italian fleet was beaten off and the
convoy was still intact but it was now well off course. The British cruisers
and fleet destroyers all turned back for Alexandria, leaving the supply
ships and their escorts alone and unable to reach Malta under cover of
darkness. 
The convoy dispersed leaving Eridge with the slowest and most vulnerable of
the supply ships, and Captain Gregory-Smith knew that the next day the
bombers would be back and Eridge would be reduced to firing blanks at them
to protect Clan Campbell. As the rest of the convoy reached Malta in the mid
morning of March 23, Clan Campbell was attacked one last time and sunk,
Eridge’s blanks having little effect on the attacking German JU88 bombers.
Eridge was left alone in a minefield to pick up survivors for three long
hours under constant watch but, thankfully, without further attack. 
Gregory-Smith received the Distinguished Service Order for his part in the
Battle of Sirte. The citation read: “For outstanding services in the
successful defence of the convoy against heavy and sustained air attack
without the support of the Fleet Cruisers or Destroyers.” 
William Frank Niemann Gregory-Smith was born in 1910 in Ashtonunder- Lyne,
Cheshire. He entered Dartmouth Naval College in 1922 and served as a cadet
on his first warship, the Battle of Jutland veteran battlecruiser HMS Tiger,
in 1927. As a midshipman he served on the cruisers HMS Cumberland and HMS
Suffolk on the China station and in 1932 he was promoted lieutenant on
another Battle of Jutland veteran, the battleship HMS Warspite. A further
period in the Far East followed, this time as first lieutenant on a Yangtse
gunboat, HMS Cricket. 
By 1936 the situation in Europe was deteriorating, and Gregory-Smith served
as first lieutenant on HMS Foresight patrolling off the north Spanish coast
during the civil war. At the outbreak of war in 1939 he was first lieutenant
on the fleet destroyer, HMS Jaguar. 
Jaguar was stationed in Immingham, Lincolnshire, and almost immediately
began escorting coastal convoys and sweeping the North Sea for signs of
enemy naval activity. She also acted as an escort for the aircraft carrier
HMS Ark Royal during the Norwegian campaign. 
However, for Gregory-Smith and the rest of the crew, the war started in
earnest in May 1940 when they were ordered to northern France with three
other fleet destroyers to evacuate troops directly from Dunkirk harbour. It
was a measure of the desperation of the situation that such valuable ships
should be used in such a dangerous role. Almost as soon as they left Dover
the four ships were attacked by JU87 Stuka dive bombers and one ship was
crippled. The other three made it to Dunkirk, and Jaguar embarked troops
while under fierce air attack. As she left the harbour a further air attack
destroyed her fellow fleet destroyer HMS Grenade and crippled Jaguar killing
25 soldiers and crew. The ship did eventually manage to limp back into Dover
but the Admiralty did not use destroyers in this role again during the
evacuation. 
Towards the end of 1940 Gregory-Smith was appointed as captain of HMS
Eridge, a Hunt Class destroyer being built by Swan Hunter on the Tyne. After
some convoy work Eridge sailed for the Mediterranean in May 1941. Her first
Malta convoy was Operation Substance, bound from Gibraltar in July 1941.
When another destroyer, HMS Firedrake lost power after air attack, Eridge
was ordered to tow her back to Gibraltar as the rest of the convoy proceeded
east. The 36-hour tow under constant threat of air attack was successful,
and Gregory-Smith was awarded his first Distinguished Service Cross, the
citation reading: “The safe arrival of Firedrake at Gibraltar can be
attributed largely to the fine seamanship, courage and determination shown
by Lieutenant-Commande r Gregory-Smith.” 
In August 1941 Eridge transferred to Alexandria where the British fleet was
being slowly whittled down by enemy action. Constant convoys to keep the
besieged port of Tobruk open were punctuated by further perilous Malta
convoys. Despite the dangers her crew believed she was a lucky ship, a
feeling confirmed when she sucessfully hunted down U568. Gregory-Smith
received a Bar to his Distinguished Service Order for the sinking of the
submarine. 
However, on August 28, 1942, Eridge’s luck ran out. Gregory-Smith was
commanding a force of four destroyers conducting a night bombardment of Axis
land positions off El Daba. An Italian motor torpedo boat slipped through
the darkness, and Eridge was hit by a single torpedo amidships, killing five
of her crew and crippling the ship. By daybreak Eridge was still afloat but
could only return to Alexandria under tow, all the while under constant air
attack. The force was only a mile off shore so also suffered bombardment
from shore-based artillery. Despite this the force made it safely back to
Alexandria under Gregory-Smith’ s command, and for this he was mentioned in
dispatches. By 1943 he was back in London, appointed to Combined Operations
Headquarters at Norfolk House, where planning for the invasion of Europe was
under way. 
After months of detailed planning, including close knowledge of the high
level of expected casualties, Gregory-Smith was somewhat shocked to be
appointed Principal Beachmaster. 
He subsequently returned to Combined Operations and attended the Yalta
Conference in 1945 as part of the British delegation. 
He remained with the Royal Navy until 1960 but, to his disappointment, his
postwar career was mostly in staffs and not at sea. Among other roles he was
naval attaché to the Non-Arab Middle East in Ankara and Chief Staff officer
(Intelligence) to the Commander-in- Chief of the Mediterranean in Malta.
After leaving the Navy he served as the warden of Wilson House Hall of
Residence, St Mary’s Medical School. 
Gregory-Smith’ s wife, Jean, whom he married in October 1940 in her native
city of Dundee while HMS Jaguar was undergoing urgent repairs, predeceased
him in April 2006. He is survived by their daughter and son. 
Captain Frank Gregory-Smith, DSO and Bar, DSC and Bar, destroyer captain and
D-Day beachmaster, was born on January 24, 1910. He died on May 4, 2009,
aged 99


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## RabidAlien (May 20, 2009)




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## v2 (May 20, 2009)




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## vikingBerserker (May 20, 2009)




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## ToughOmbre (May 20, 2009)

TO


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## Gnomey (May 21, 2009)




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## wheelsup_cavu (May 24, 2009)

Wheelsup


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## syscom3 (Jun 23, 2009)

We all know who he is. But few know this:

*After the U.S. entered World War II, McMahon joined the Marine Corps and graduated to fighter pilot training. He served as a flight instructor and test pilot during the war.*

and

*But as he had remained in the Marine Reserve upon his discharge, the worsening Korean War called him back to the service, and he shipped off to Korea in 1953, flying unarmed O-1E Bird Dog air reconnaissance and artillery spotting planes on 85 missions. *

Ed McMahon - Yahoo! TV

RIP Mr. McMahon. Thanks for your service!


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## wheelsup_cavu (Jun 23, 2009)

I did know that but I had only found out recently.






May Johnny have a cold one waiting for him on his arrival.


Wheelsup


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## Gnomey (Jun 23, 2009)




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## v2 (Jun 24, 2009)




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## RabidAlien (Jun 24, 2009)




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## syscom3 (Jun 24, 2009)

On the outbreak of the Second World War, Tommy Somerville was working at the Aerodynamics Department of the Royal Aeronautical Establishment Farnborough. At that time he was concerned with testing high-speed aircraft, including the battle-winning Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire. Later in the war he was to switch to low-speed techniques, in particular the precision landing of troop-carrying gliders in strictly confined areas.

He was on honeymoon camping alongside the Wye in Wales when urgently recalled to Farnborough to address the glider problem. The invasion of Sicily in July 1943 had taught the Allies some harsh lessons over the use of gliders for delivering troops close to their objectives. These were to be applied for the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, but the coup-de-main operations to capture two bridges over Caen Canal and the River Orne, on the left flank of the Allied bridgehead, and the Merville coastal gun battery facing Sword landing beach all called for exceptionally precise landings.

Somerville devised and tested a system for the release of two 14-feet parachutes from a container under a glider’s tail just before touchdown. A Horsa glider carrying 29 infantrymen could land within 100 yards using this device. The six Horsas that delivered the coup-de-main parties of Royal Engineers and the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry within a few yards of the Caen Canal and Orne bridges were fitted with parachute arresters. They landed at 0016 hours on D-Day — June 6, 1944 — for what was to prove a totally successful surprise operation.

Less fortunately, high winds disrupted the glider approach to the Merville gun battery and five tow ropes snapped over the Channel, causing the heavier weapons and explosives required for the operation to be lost. This did not reflect on the efficiency of Somerville’s parachutes. The battery was taken by elements of the 9th Parachute Battalion dropped outside the perimeter.

While the parachute arrested-landing device was being tested, Somerville would fly aboard the Horsa as an observer. One burst a tyre on landing at Blackbushe airport, swerved off the runway and came to an abrupt halt in soggy ground. The stop was so abrupt that the wooden wings of the glider maintained their forward momentum, separating from the fuselage. D-Day was the first operational use of the arrester-parachute system with UK aircraft. It was later adapted to slow the landings of high-speed jet fighters, such as the Hawker Hunter, the Tornado and the Eurofighter Typhoon.

Thomas Victor Somerville was born in Ewell, Surrey, the son of Thomas Somerville, who worked for the Royal Mint. He was educated at Dorking High School, where he excelled academically, also on the sports field, and King’s College London, from where he graduated with a BSc in mathematics in 1936. He stayed on for a physics degree while representing his college at athletics, cricket and football.

During his early years with the Wind Tunnel Division at Farnborough he was concerned with research and development of the DH98 Mosquito aircraft. Much of this work was done with Chrystelle Fougère, whom he later married.

Together, they reduced the vibration and tail buffeting that plagued early versions of the Mosquito by extending the Merlin engine nacelles beyond the trailing edge of the wings. Somerville’s younger brother, Group Captain Keith Somerville, an experienced Mosquito pilot with the Pathfinder force, considered the aircraft “man’s finest achievement in wood engineering”.

In 1946 Somerville joined the Project Division of Aerodynamics, which was responsible for research on future aircraft designs and assessment of operational requirements, principally for the RAF. He continued research on landing parachutes and the comparison of fighter and unarmed bomber performance at high supersonic speeds, working with J. R. B Illingworth in 1947 and with K. C. Moore on engine and aircraft drag in 1950 and with A. L. Courtney on the importance of profile drag in modern aircraft in 1951.

He was promoted to head the Project Division in 1954 and pursued the factors affecting the general design and performance of supersonic aircraft working with J. R. Collingbourne in 1955. Further studies in 1960 on vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and short take-off and landing (STOL) paved the way for the introduction of the world’s first VTOL fighter, the Hawker Harrier (P1127).

On appointment to Director of Future Aircraft Systems (Ministry of Aviation) in 1964, he became more involved with international co-operation on aeronautical research and development, frequently representing the British Government at meetings with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa). He served on the Aerospace Applications Studies Committee of the Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development of Nato from 1971.

He was highly regarded nationally and internationally for his contribution to understanding between the armed services and industry. He became the Director of Future Aircraft Systems with the MoD (Procurement Executive) before his retirement in 1976, when he was appointed CBE for his services to aeronautical research.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and a member of the Performance, Civil and Propulsion Committees of the Aerodynamics Research Council. Although reserved, possibly because of a lifelong stammer, he had a wry sense of humour and a wide range of friends.

He married Chrystelle Fougère in 1943. She survives him, with a son and two daughters.

Thomas Somerville, CBE, aeronautical engineer, was born on March 8, 1916. He died on April 30, 2009, aged 93


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## Wayne Little (Jun 26, 2009)

To Ed and Thomas...


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## RabidAlien (Jun 26, 2009)




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## vikingBerserker (Jun 26, 2009)

Did not know that about Ed.


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## diddyriddick (Jun 27, 2009)




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## Gnomey (Jun 27, 2009)




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## wheelsup_cavu (Jun 27, 2009)

Wheelsup


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## ToughOmbre (Jun 27, 2009)

TO


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## gumbyk (Jul 8, 2009)

Another WW2 veteran gone, but not forgotten:
Decorated NZ WW2 airman dies - National - NZ Herald News


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jul 8, 2009)




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## vikingBerserker (Jul 8, 2009)




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## wheelsup_cavu (Jul 8, 2009)

One heck of a career Gumbyk. Thanks for posting.
Ditching into the water just outside a minefield without any fuel. 







Wheels


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## gumbyk (Jul 8, 2009)

Yeah, not my idea of an ideal landing. But, I suppose, any landing you can walk (or swim) away from.
Especially given that they had been flying for over 12 hours.


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## RabidAlien (Jul 8, 2009)

...AND managed to put down next to a patrol boat that "just happened to be there".


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## Njaco (Jul 9, 2009)




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## trackend (Jul 9, 2009)

sad to see him go


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## Gnomey (Jul 9, 2009)




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## syscom3 (Jul 13, 2009)

It was reported he died on June 27th. I havent seen anything official though.

Ernst Barkmann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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## Catch22 (Jul 27, 2009)

I got this as a facebook message from a group I'm in.

Chris Shubert (Spokane, WA) wroteon July 19, 2009 at 3:02pm
Another World War II veteran gone.



Worth sharing. Kind of puts a perspective on what is really important in life.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



We're hearing a lot today about big splashy memorial services.

I want a nationwide memorial service for Darrell "Shifty" Powers.

Shifty volunteered for the airborne in WWII and served with Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Infantry. If you've seen Band of Brothers on HBO or the History Channel, you know Shifty. His character appears in all 10 episodes, and Shifty himself is interviewed in several of them.

I met Shifty in the Philadelphia airport several years ago. I didn't know who he was at the time. I just saw an elderly gentleman having trouble reading his ticket. I offered to help, assured him that he was at the right gate, and noticed the "Screaming Eagle", the symbol of the 101st Airborne, on his hat.

Making conversation, I asked him if he'd been in the 101st Airborne or if his son was serving. He said quietly that he had been in the 101st. I thanked him for his service, then asked him when he served, and how many jumps he made.

Quietly and humbly, he said "Well, I guess I signed up in 1941 or so, and was in until sometime in 1945 . . . " at which point my heart skipped.

At that point, again, very humbly, he said "I made the 5 training jumps at Toccoa, and then jumped into Normandy . . . . do you know where Normandy is?" At this point my heart stopped.

I told him yes, I know exactly where Normandy was, and I know what D-Day was. At that point he said "I also made a second jump into Holland, into Arnhem." I was standing with a genuine war hero . . . . and then I realized that it was June, just after the anniversary of D-Day.

I asked Shifty if he was on his way back from France, and he said "Yes. And it's real sad because these days so few of the guys are left, and those that are, lots of them can't make the trip." My heart was in my throat and I didn't know what to say.

I helped Shifty get onto the plane and then realized he was back in Coach, while I was in First Class. I sent the flight attendant back to get him and said that I wanted to switch seats. When Shifty came forward, I got up out of the seat and told him I wanted him to have it, that I'd take his in coach.

He said "No, son, you enjoy that seat. Just knowing that there are still some who remember what we did and still care is enough to make an old man very happy." His eyes were filling up as he said it. And mine are brimming up now as I write this.

Shifty died on June 17 after fighting cancer.

There was no parade.

No big event in Staples Center.

No wall to wall back to back 24x7 news coverage.

No weeping fans on television.

And that's not right.

Let's give Shifty his own Memorial Service, online, in our own quiet way. Please forward this email to everyone you know. Especially to the veterans.

Rest in peace, Shifty.

"A nation without heroes is nothing."
Roberto Clemente


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## RabidAlien (Jul 28, 2009)




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## ccheese (Aug 16, 2009)

*Otis C. Ingebritsen*
Yorktown, VA - Otis Carroll Ingebritsen, 91, passed away August 12, 2009. Otis was a native of Wisconsin. He served his country during WW-II in the U.S. Air Force as a B-17 pilot. He was decorated for extraordinary achievement on 25 heavy bombing missions. His awards include and Air Medal with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters and a Distingushed Flying Cross with one Oak Leaf Cluster. He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Josephine, a son, Kris, of Seaford, VA and a daughter Anne Morse of Ohio.

This from today's Virginian Pilot.



Charles


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## RabidAlien (Aug 16, 2009)

25 missions completed in a B17....dang.


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## vikingBerserker (Aug 16, 2009)

That is amazing.


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## ToughOmbre (Aug 16, 2009)

TO


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## wheelsup_cavu (Aug 16, 2009)

Wheels


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## drgondog (Aug 19, 2009)

Yesterday afternoon, August 18th, AVG Ace Major General Charlie Bond passed away

Cavanaugh Flight Museum: Major General Charles R. Bond, Jr.

I think only three or four AVG vets are still with us. EDIT [Ken Jernstedt, "Bus" Keeton, and Dr. Carl Brown}

Bond and Erik Shilling are generally credited with the Tiger Shark motif 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers


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## vikingBerserker (Aug 19, 2009)




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## Gnomey (Aug 19, 2009)




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## trackend (Aug 20, 2009)

Respect


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## diddyriddick (Aug 20, 2009)




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## FLYBOYJ (Aug 20, 2009)




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## v2 (Aug 20, 2009)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Aug 20, 2009)




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## ToughOmbre (Aug 20, 2009)

RIP 

TO


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## wheelsup_cavu (Aug 21, 2009)

Wheels


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## drgondog (Aug 21, 2009)

For those of you in Dallas area here are details about the Services. There will be a missing man formation

The Obit

Restland Funeral Home and Cemetery

The details

Services for Charlie Bond will be held at the Restland Funeral Home in Dallas. Visitation will be from 6 to 8 p.m. on Monday, August 24, with the Funeral on Tuesday, August 25th, at 12:30 p.m. Burial will follow at Restland, with a planned fly-over and missing man formation.

My father is also at Restland along my mother and oldest daughter. His services were unusual in that it was the USN that flew the Missing Man formation instead of USAF


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## RabidAlien (Aug 21, 2009)




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## pbfoot (Aug 27, 2009)

If it was anything even remotely connected with Niagara’s daredevils, Riverman Ken Sloggett would be the first person I would turn to for information. 

He was so much more than just a news contact who had a wealth of information at his fingertips. 

Above all, he was a dear friend and we shared many memories over the past 25 years. 

Ken died Thursday morning at the Greater Niagara General Hospital. He just turned 93 and his family had celebrated his birthday in the cafeteria at the hospital last Friday. 

Ken was also a very proud Canadian. He always had a Canadian flag flying in front of his home and never missed the Canada Day festivities held at Optimist Park. 

In 1944, he was a private with the Lincoln and Welland Regiment, and that August was part of the Allied forces fighting desperately to close what was known as the Falaise Gap. 

Legion Magazine interviewed Ken back in 1999 when he took part in a 12-day pilgrimage marking the 55th anniversary of D-Day. The tour organized by Veterans Affairs Canada took 60 Canadian veterans and 10 youth and cadet representatives to France and England. 

While overlooking the battlefield, Ken recalled that when they arrived friendly tanks encircled Polish troops in a defensive stockade and the Poles were cooking their supper on fires. 

“We had a you-scratch-my-back and I’ll-scratch-yours arrangement,” he told the magazine. “We were glad to help them,” he added, noting he was proud to be a D-Day soldier. “Once we got in and we went all the way to Falaise, but we left a lot of men on the field. If you lived for 24 hours you were a soldier; if not, you were dead.” 

Ken had a love for the Niagara River and knew it like the back of his hand. 

He was related to members of the Hill family, who also have a significant history and connection with the Falls and the Niagara River.

Advertisement

As a young man, Ken and his cousin, Wesley Hill, would often be called upon to retrieve a body if there had been a drowning or if someone had gone over the Falls. In those early days, he was paid $10. 

His one daughter recently told me, her father did it for the families of those victims. He wanted them to have a proper burial. 

On July 2, 1984, Karel Soucek brought back the age of daredevils to Niagara. He became the first person in 23 years to survive a plunge over the famous cataract in a barrel. 

That story was carried around the world, but Soucek didn’t live long enough to really enjoy his new found fame. He died in January of 1985 while trying to re-create the stunt in the Houston Astrodome. 

Soucek was placed in a barrel and it was dropped 55 metres, the approximate same height as the Falls, into a pool of water. The barrel hit the edge of the pool and Soucek, 37, suffered massive injuries and died the next day. 

Soucek, who was originally from Czechoslovakia and lived in Hamilton, didn’t have any immediate family in Canada. 

Ken knew that Soucek wanted to be buried close to the Falls when he died. Ken made that happen. 

Historic Drummond Hill Cemetery is the closest one near the Falls. Several members of Ken’s family are buried there and they also owned an empty plot. Ken donated the plot so that Soucek would get his final wish. 

Ken would always see to it that Soucek’s monument, the top of which is in the shape of a barrel, always had plenty of flowers. It’s located near the back parking lot close to the gate. Any time I happen to be at Drummond Hill Cemetery, I always stop in to say hello to Soucek, who I interviewed by telephone just days before he headed out to Houston. 

When daredevil John David Munday of Caistor Centre was building his barrel getting ready to go over the Horseshoe Falls around 1985, Ken knocked on his door and asked if he could take a look at it. 

The two men started talking and at one point during their conversation, Ken let him know that if he ever did go over the Falls and needed his help he would be there for him. 

Munday, who always referred to Ken as Mr. Sloggett, didn’t give it much thought because Ken was in his 70s at the time. Ken proved to be true to his word. 

As some readers might recall, Munday made four attempts at going over the Horseshoe Falls. He was stopped by police on his first attempt on July 28, 1985, but made good on his second try on Oct. 5, 1985. 

After the barrel when over the Horseshoe Falls, it became stuck near some rocks near the base and Munday couldn’t get out. 

Ken’s daughter, Dawn Tarrant, was at the Maid of the Mist listening as the Niagara Parks Police gave updates to their officers. 

This is how she recalls it: “My heart went in my throat when I overheard someone say that my dad was going to climb down the bank to get Dave from his barrel. I did a lot of praying that day. I wanted them both to be all right. Dad never thought about himself. He just wanted Dave to be safe and on dry land. He knew Dave was deathly afraid of water and he didn’t want him to panic.” 

Munday talks about that rescue in a video he put out after his first successful attempt. 

On July 15, 1990, Munday tried going over the Falls again in a “no frills” barrel during the early morning hours. The barrel became stranded on rocks right at the brink of the Falls due to the low level of the water. 

Review photographer Mike DiBattista and I stuck close to Ken who had contact with Dave on his two-way radio. Ken assured Dave everything was going to be fine and that a crane was being brought in so they could hook up a cable and remove the barrel from the brink. 

Mike and I were soaked to the bone that morning. The mist was coming off The Falls so hard that at times it felt like someone was pointing a hose directly at us. Mike’s camera bag had filled with water and I remember him turning it over to empty it out. 

Dave told Ken he thought he was surely going to die that morning. 

Three years later, on Sept. 26, 1993, Munday returned with a red and white ball-like steel chamber and went over the Horseshoe Falls for the second time. 

John Harkness, who knew Ken since the 1950s, said he was the longest serving member of the Lincoln and Welland Regiment. He joined in 1936. 

“He told me so many stories,” said Harkness. “Those infantry boys had a pretty tough life. The one thing that has always struck me is how much respect his family had for him. They would do anything for him.” 

On Remembrance Day, Ken would often be seen at the cenotaph on Clifton Hill paying his respects to his fallen comrades. 

Those are just a few memories of my good friend, Ken Sloggett. Rest in peace, I will miss you


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## RabidAlien (Aug 28, 2009)




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## Gnomey (Aug 28, 2009)




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## vikingBerserker (Aug 28, 2009)




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## pbfoot (Oct 5, 2009)

Toronto traffic reporters did a double take.

Yes, that was a Second World War Lancaster bomber roaring above Avenue Road, in formation with a saucy-looking little training plane of the same vintage.

The impromptu air show was a special honour for John (Scruffy) Weir, Battle of Britain pilot, Great Escape tunneller and one of four founding investors in what became the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton -- the famous bomber's home base.

The flight was timed to coincide with the close of his memorial service at Upper Canada College's Laidlaw Hall Sept. 24. John Gordon Weir, 90, died Sept. 20 in Toronto.

Dennis Bradley, who with Weir, Allan Ness and Timothy Matthews, together put up the money in 1971 to buy the Fairey Firefly naval fighter plane that became the flying museum's first restored warbird, says Weir was "a dynamic, successful man," an investment banker with Wood Gundy who loved planes and pilots.

Weir was quite active in the museum's formative years, he said, serving on the board of directors and then helping out wherever he could.

"The last time he was out was the 20th anniversary flight of the Lancaster's restoration and return to the air," Bradley said.

"We will miss him."

Weir was born in Toronto, and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1939, the day after the Second World War started.

His father, Gordon Weir, fought in the First World War trenches as a gunner and was gassed at Vimy. He was the one who set his son's sights on the air.

John Weir was determined never to fight in mud. He became a fighter pilot and waged his war in Hurricanes and Spitfires with 401 Squadron.

Before it was over, Flight Lieutenant Weir, who was shot down over France in 1941, became best known for his work in the mud underground: helping instigate, engineer and dig the tunnels used for a mass prisoner escape in March 1944 -- the Great Escape from Luft Stalag III.

Weir told the Veterans Affairs Canada memory project he was never afraid as a lone fighter pilot.

"You can't be too concerned about your own skin," he said. "That's why I didn't want to be on bombers because I'd be concerned about the guys who are flying with me. On fighters, I didn't have to worry, it was just me."

Bradley says Weir was a prisoner of war for four years. One day, when the museum founders were looking at airplanes, Weir spotted a de Havilland Chipmunk training plane.

It was love at first sight, says Bradley. "He took one look at that little plane and its registration number, CF-POW, and had to have it because it reminded him of his years as a prisoner of war.

Weir bought the plane and donated it to the museum in 1973.

The little plane accompanied the Lanc in the flypast for Weir's memorial. John Weir is survived by his wife of 64 years, Fran, and three children.


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## RabidAlien (Oct 5, 2009)




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## Gnomey (Oct 5, 2009)




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## vikingBerserker (Oct 5, 2009)




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## gepp (Oct 17, 2009)




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## syscom3 (Oct 21, 2009)

*Richard Sonnenfeldt: chief US translator at the Nuremberg trials*

The phrase “eyewitness to history” tends to be applied indiscriminately to minor observers of great events, but in the case of Dick Sonnenfeldt the description is merited. Probably no one spent more time with what remained of the Nazi hierarchy after its defeat than did he when, at 22, he found himself chief interpreter at the Nuremberg trials.

As with much at the tribunal, his appointment at such a young age was the result of chance rather than of planning. A German Jew who had fled to America, he was stationed in July 1945 in Austria as a private in a US armoured unit when the passing General “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s predecessor) , asked for an interpreter. Impressed by Sonnenfeldt’s American accent, which was free of the guttural inflections that made other German native speakers hard to understand, Donovan whisked him off to the OSS office in Paris. There he began to translate captured documents and interview witnesses for the forthcoming war crimes trials.

The venue and list of defendants was decided the next month, and Sonnenfeldt moved to Nuremberg. There he became interpreter initially for John Amen, the principal American interrogator, who had made his name prosecuting New York gangsters. Sonnenfeldt, accordingly, was to spend hundreds of hours in the company of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and other leading Nazis, such as Hans Frank, the governor of occupied Poland, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of Germany’s security apparatus.

What was to appal him was not so much the enormity of their crimes, but the sheer normality of these men. Despite the power they had wielded, they also seemed without intellect or insight, distinguished only by their servility and ambition.

“Dictators have no peers,” he concluded, “only sycophants to do their bidding.” The majority claimed loss of memory, denied their involvement in criminal acts, and feigned ignorance of the Holocaust.

The exception was Hermann Goering, who he thought capable of great charm but slippery. He was also the first to be interrogated, and immediately tried to assert himself over Sonnefeldt by correcting his translation. Amen gave the younger man permission to reprove the former Reichsmarschall, which he did by mispronouncing his name as “gering”, meaning “little nothing”, and warning him not to interrupt again.

Goering was unique among the defendants in relishing the trial as an opportunity to defend his achievements, and so comfortable did he become with Sonnenfeldt that he revealed much of his true thinking to him, including his musings on politicians’ use of power.

“Naturally the common people don’t want war,” he told the interpreter, “neither in Russia nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. But the people can be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. It works the same way in any country.”

Heinz Wolfgang Richard Sonnenfeldt was born in Berlin in 1923. The child of two doctors, he grew up in Gardelegen, in north-central Germany, but spent time in the capital with his grandparents while his mother suffered depression after the birth of his brother.

After the onset of Jews’ persecution, which affected his parents’ ability to work, the two boys were sent for safety in September 1938 to a school in Kent. Two years later, however, with German forces just across the Channel, Richard, aged 16, was deported to Australia as an enemy alien. Having survived a torpedo attack, he was not best pleased when told, ten days after his arrival, that he was to be freed from internment and sent back to Britain — by sea. A consolation was a night passed in a Melbourne prison in lieu of a hotel, where the local prostitutes put on a strip show for him: “My knowledge of the female anatomy increased immeasurably.”

On the return voyage he was unexpectedly put ashore at Bombay (Mumbai), where he had to make ends meet with work in a radio factory until able to proceed to America in April 1941. There he was reunited with his parents, who had escaped via Sweden after his father was briefly held by the Nazis, and his brother, Helmut, who would later became National Security Council adviser to President Nixon. In 1943, Richard was drafted and fought at the Battle of the Bulge with a reconnaissance troop. He also helped to liberate Dachau.

At Nuremberg Sonnenfeldt rapidly established himself as chief interpreter because his were the only interrogations not plagued by disputes about translation. He was in general disparaging about the abilities of other interpreters provided by the State Department, many of whom — in a context where nuance was all — were Poles or Hungarians who spoke German or English with marked accents or limited vocabularies. He also became aware that some of them, as well as many Allied officers, viewed the defendants as celebrities and were keen to work at the trials for other than professional reasons.

Amen and the other interrogators soon realised that time taken up in translation during sessions with the defendants allowed the latter to collect their thoughts. Impressed by Sonnenfeldt’s maturity, they therefore at times allowed him to ask multiple questions of his own devising, so as to increase the element of surprise and trap the accused into admissions.

He was among the first to meet Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, and thus among the first to learn — almost a year after the war’s end — of the true scale of the Holocaust. Later, with Airey Neave, he served the indictments on the 22 defendants, and translated Robert Jackson’s opening speech for the prosecution when the trial began.

Sonnenfeldt returned to the US before the verdicts were reached, but though largely convinced of the fairness of the proceedings, he did have criticisms to make of the American legal team.

Not the least of these was its failure — ascribable largely to overwork and poor co-ordination — to place on the record admissions by Goering that established his central role in the execution of the Final Solution. In his later years, Sonnenfeldt was often called on by historians and television companies as one of the last survivors of the trials.

After studying electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, Sonnenfeldt in the 1950s helped to develop colour television with RCA. He worked on early computers for the Nasa lunar programme, became an executive at NBC television, and dean of a school of management. His last job before retirement in 2003 was as head of the world’s largest producer of newspaper printing plates.

Keen on chess, bridge and gadgets, he was also an avid sailor, and in his seventies thrice crossed the Atlantic in a 45ft yacht. He published a memoir, Mehr als ein Leben (2002), translated as Witness to Nuremberg.

His first wife, Shirley, died in 1979. He is survived by his second wife, Barbara, and by two sons and a daughter of his first marriage and three step-children.

Richard Sonnenfeldt, chief of the interpretation section of the US counsel at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945-46, was born on July 23, 1923. He died on October 9, 2009, aged 86


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## syscom3 (Oct 21, 2009)

Navajo Nation Mourns Passing of Code Talker
Since May, Five Code Talkers Have Died

Updated: Thursday, 15 Oct 2009, 6:46 AM MDT
Published : Thursday, 15 Oct 2009, 6:46 AM MDT

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. - Another Navajo Code Talker has died.

Funeral services are scheduled Saturday in Lukachukai for 88-year-old Willard Varnell Oliver.

Oliver's son says his father died Wednesday at the Northern Arizona Veterans Administration Health Care System Hospital in Prescott, Ariz., after being in declining health for the past two years.

Oliver was part of an elite group of Navajo Marines who confounded the Japanese during World War II by transmitting messages in their native language.

The Code Talkers took part in every assault the Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. Their work was declassified in 1968.

Oliver is at least the fifth Code Talker to die since May.


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## vikingBerserker (Oct 21, 2009)




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## gepp (Oct 21, 2009)

Group Captain Herbert M. Pinfold - Passed away 19th October 2009
Battle of Britain Pilot with 56 Squadron,flying Hurricanes, he also flew with 6, 64, 502, 603, Squadrons.
"Born on February 5 1913 Pinfold joined the RAF on a short service commission in mid-September 1934. On the 29th he was posted to 5 FTS, Sealand and with training completed, he went to 6 Squadron at Ismalia, Egypt on September 5 1935. Back in the UK Pinfold was posted to 64 Squadron at Martlesham Heath on March 19 1936 and on July 16 1938 he joined 502 Squadron Aux AF as Flying Instructor and Adjutant.

Pinfold went to 3 FTS, South Cerney on July 2 1940, as an instructor. He arrived at 5 OTU, Aston Down on August 11 for a refresher course. After converting to Hurricanes, he took command of 56 Squadron at North Weald on the 25th, remaining with it until January 29 1941, when he was posted to 10 FTS, Tern Hill, as an instructor.

From January 2 to July 16 1945 Pinfold was at Staff College, after which he was on the staff at Air HQ Kandy, Ceylon and later Singapore. He retired from the RAF on October 1 1958, as a Group Captain."

APO 14.9.34
PO 14.9.35
FO 14.3.37
FL 14.3.39
SL 1.9.40
WC 1.9.42
WC 1.10.46
GC 1.7.53
only kill i could find was he shot down a DO 215 im sure there would of been more.


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## RabidAlien (Oct 22, 2009)




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## gepp (Oct 23, 2009)

R.I.P Ulrich Steinhilper (formerly of 3/JG 52) - passed away last night.Ulrich Steinhilper has written three autobiographical books - Spitfire On My Tail, Ten Minutes To Buffalo, and Full Circle.


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## Gnomey (Oct 23, 2009)




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## vikingBerserker (Oct 23, 2009)




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## Wayne Little (Oct 23, 2009)




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## RabidAlien (Oct 23, 2009)




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## v2 (Oct 24, 2009)




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## Maximowitz (Oct 24, 2009)

gepp said:


> R.I.P Ulrich Steinhilper (formerly of 3/JG 52) - passed away last night.Ulrich Steinhilper has written three autobiographical books - Spitfire On My Tail, Ten Minutes To Buffalo, and Full Circle.



I'm very sorry to hear this. I have a copy of "Spitfire On My Tail" and found it a very interesting and objective account of his adventures during the Battle of Britain.

Rest easy Ulrich.


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## syscom3 (Nov 12, 2009)

Wing Commander Douglas Benham

Douglas Benham received a daunting introduction to air combat in August 1942, as a flight commander with 242 Squadron over Dieppe where the RAF suffered heavily at the hands of the Luftwaffe. When the squadron was sent that November to North Africa in support of the Anglo-US Torch landings, the intensity of the air combat continued as the Germans poured aircraft into Tunisian air bases, in a desperate attempt to stem the Allied advance from Algeria.

Operating from a forward airfield at Bone, 300 miles east of Algiers, 242 and Benham were constantly in the thick of the action and by February 1943 he had been awarded the first of his two Distinguished Flying Crosses. The second was to come near the war’s end, in April 1945, as he led 41 Squadron in ground attack and air superiority sweeps in support of the Allied advance in North West Europe.

In between he had been awarded the Air Force Cross, while being rested from operations, for his work in radically increasing the efficiency of an operational training unit (OTU) in the Midlands — and cutting down its losses in aircraft and pilots.

Douglas Ian Benham was born in 1917 and educated at Southend Grammar School. In September 1938 he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve and began flying training on Tiger Moths. When war broke out in September 1939 he was called up, completed flying training and was posted in May 1941 as a sergeant pilot to 607 Squadron then based mainly on air defence duties over the Fleet at Scapa Flow with its Hawker Hurricanes.

After a further period as an instructor to 59 OTU, in April 1942 he was posted to 242 “Canadian” Squadron (which the legless ace Douglas Bader had commanded in the Battle of Britain). The squadron’s Canadian connection — it had been formed in 1939 with predominantly Canadian personnel — was to be continued when it was one of those chosen to accompany the Dieppe Raid of August 19, 1942, most of the troops for which were provided by the Canadian 2nd Division. Most of the casualties from this military disaster were also Canadians.

Besides providing fighter cover for the assault troops the RAF aimed to draw into battle above the beachhead the entire strength of the Luftwaffe in Northern France. Although the RAF was successful in the former aim, the air battle went in the Luftwaffe’s favour on a ratio of 2-1, with the RAF losing 105 aircraft in a single day. Benham was credited with an Me109 damaged.

When 242 was sent to Algiers on November 8, 1942, the day of Operation Torch, its first task was the interception of German bombers seeking to disrupt allied shipping supporting the landings. Benham had his first combat victory the following day when he and his wingman shot down a Ju88 between them.

When the squadron later moved to Bone much nearer the airfields of German-held Tunis and Bizerta, the action increased in intensity, and within a few weeks Benham was an ace (five kills) counting Ju87s, Me109s and Fw190s among his victims. In his desire to be at grips with the enemy on one occasion he overboosted his Spitfire’s engine while pursuing a posse of Fw190s. The Merlin blew up but he made a successful belly landing, returning to his base on a donkey. When he was awarded his first DFC, in February 1943, his tally was six combat victories and several more shared.

In June 1943 he was appointed chief flying instructor at 61 OTU at Rednal near Birmingham. There he reorganised the air traffic control and improved servicing and refuelling arrangements. The result was a marked reduction in crashes involving inexperienced Spitfire pilots (and consequent loss of aircraft), a substantial increase in training hours flown and a boost to morale. For his remarkable exertions he was awarded the AFC. In August 1944 he returned to the front line as CO of 41 Squadron, which was operating the fast and powerful Spitfire 14 on daylight bomber escorts. Later in the year it moved to the Netherlands as part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force, flying ground attack sorties and fighter sweeps. On January 23 the squadron spotted a number of Fw190s while on patrol over Münster in Lower Saxony. In the ensuing dogfight Benham added another two combat victories to his tally. The citation to the Bar to his DFC, awarded in April 1945, credited him with ten enemy aircraft destroyed.

Shortly before the end of the war he was posted to command the Air Ministry Manpower Research Unit. He would have preferred to stay airborne, but such an appointment was a recognition of his analytical and organisational qualities. An overriding concern was the operational efficiency of the greatly reduced postwar RAF not least of its non-flying branches, in all of which objectives he played a big role.

In 1949 he was back to flying, converting to jets and being appointed Wing Commander Day Training at Fighter Command in 1951. His last appointment was as Wing Commander (Operations) in Aden in 1954. The breaking of the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the pressures on the deployment of RAF air power it involved in this far-flung region led to an extension of this tour. For his role he was appointed OBE.

Benham retired from the RAF in 1957, settled in Pembrokeshire and became an executive in the independent television station TWW based in Cardiff. He was also chairman of the Spitfire Society (Wales) until 1999.

There were two children of his marriage in 1939 to Silvia Carpenter, who died in 1957. He married in 1963 Rosalind Woollard. There were two children of this marriage which was dissolved in 1975. He married in 1985 Jill Dean, a cousin and well-known Pembrokeshire artist. She died in 1992. The son of his first marriage predeceased him. He is survived by the daughter of his first marriage and the son and daughter of his second.

Wing Commander Douglas Benham, OBE, DFC and Bar, AFC, wartime fighter pilot, was born on December 30, 1917. He died on October 28, 2009, aged 91


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## syscom3 (Nov 12, 2009)

A prewar RAFVR pilot, Jim Rosser was called up on September 1, 1939, two days before the outbreak of war. In November 1940 he was posted to 72 (Spitfire) Squadron with which he carried out fighter sweeps over northern France in 1941, when Fighter Command went on the offensive in the aftermath of the Battle of Britain.

He then took part in the intensive air battles which were fought out over the disastrous Dieppe Raid of August 1942, in which British and Commonwealth losses both on the ground where the Canadians suffered heavy casualties, and in the air where the RAF lost many more aircraft than the Luftwaffe, were grievous.

After that Rosser spent some time as a test pilot flying Spitfires at Vickers Armstrong as part of Alex Henshaw’s team before returning to the front line as a flight commander in Normandy after the D-Day landings of June 1944.

Flying in support of Operation Market Garden, the unsuccessful Arnhem airborne operation in September that year, he was hit by flak over the battle area but managed to bring his Spitfire in to a forced landing.

After many vicissitudes and help from the Dutch Underground he regained his liberty and was able to return to Britain to a test pilot post at Vickers, where he remained until January 1946, when he was demobilised. The citation for his Distinguished Flying Cross credited him with two enemy aircraft destroyed and four damaged.

Walter James (Jim) Rosser was born in 1917 and educated at Northampton Grammar School, after which he studied architecture. He had enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve in October 1938, learnt to fly and was called up on September 1, 1939.

Commissioned after joining 72 Squadron as a sergeant pilot, he took part in regular daylight sweeps over the formidable “hornets’ nest”, the German fighter base at St Omer that presented such a menace to the RAF’s sorties over northern France.

He also flew as one of the fighter escort to the bombers that dropped Douglas Bader’s spare artificial legs, after the legendary fighter ace’s Spitfire was in collision with an enemy aircraft on a sweep over the Pas de Calais in August 1941, and had to bale out, leaving one of his tin legs trapped in the cockpit. On this errand of mercy Rosser’s squadron had to fight its way in and out of northern France, losing several good pilots in the process.

He was posted to 130 Squadron as a flight commander in April 1942. Based at Perranporth, Cornwall, the Spitfires of No 130 were involved in sweeps over northwest France, convoy patrols off Cornwall and Devon and local air defence duties.

On one occasion he found himself over the sea with insufficient fuel to return to Perranporth. He calculated that he might just make Ireland although that would mean internment for the duration of the war. There was no option, and he succeeded in reaching an Irish airfield and landed safely.

He was escorted fom his aircraft to an official who informed him that, regrettably, he would indeed be interned. However, as he was refreshing himself alone at the bar he noticed that his Spitfire was in fact being refuelled. No one intervened as he walked out, climbed onboard and took off, to return to Perranporth. In June 1942 he was awarded the DFC.

On September 26, 1944, flying in support of the airborne operation that was intended to outflank the German defensive line and establish a bridgehead across the lower Rhine at Arnhem, his Spitfire was hit by flak and he crash-landed. He was hidden by the Dutch Underground, who advised him to wait for the Allies to advance rather than try and make his way back. But when the Germans discovered he was in the area and threatened to shoot a number of locals unless he gave himself up, he surrendered to a Waffen SS unit.

He subsequently escaped by overpowering a guard and returned to the Resistance, who sheltered him until advance units of the British Army arrived in the area.

After demobilisation he worked as an estate agent in Northampton until the outbreak of the Korean War, when he rejoined the RAF as a pilot. But it was found that he was suffering from high-tone deafness (or “Merlin ear”) and he thereafter transferred to the Secretarial Branch until retirement from the RAF in 1972.

In final retirement after a few more years with a civil engineering practice in Newcastle upon Tyne, he and his wife (formerly in the WRAF) lived first in Lot-et-Garonne, France, and later in Hampshire to share a house with their daughter and her family.

Rosser is survived by his wife, Denise, two sons and two daughters.

Flight Lieutenant Jim Rosser, DFC, wartime fighter pilot, was born on February 18, 1917. He died on October 13, 2009, aged 92


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## v2 (Nov 12, 2009)




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## RabidAlien (Nov 12, 2009)




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## Wayne Little (Nov 13, 2009)




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## Gnomey (Nov 13, 2009)




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## vikingBerserker (Nov 13, 2009)




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## gepp (Nov 15, 2009)

One of the last surviving aviators from World War II’s famed Black Sheep Squadron has died in Covington, La November 14th, 2009..

Henry Mayor "Hank" Bourgeois was 88.

Mr. Bourgeois flew with Marine Fighting Squadron 214.

Serving under Lt. Col. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, the unit became known as the Black Sheep Squadron in the South Pacific.

The squadron shot down 94 Japanese planes.


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## vikingBerserker (Nov 15, 2009)




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## RabidAlien (Nov 15, 2009)




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## ToughOmbre (Nov 18, 2009)

TO


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## v2 (Jan 5, 2010)

*Tadeusz Góra *(January 19, 1918 – January 4, 2010) was a Polish glider and military pilot. Born in Cracow, *he was the first winner of the Lilienthal Gliding Medal in the world* for his record-breaking 577.8-kilometer flight on May 18, 1938, glider PWS-101 from Bezmiechowa to Soleczniki (near Vilnius).

During World War II he joined the Polish Air Force (part of Royal Air Force) as a pilot. He fought in Polish Fighter Squadrons: 306, 315, 316. He made 800 flights, only in P-51 Mustangs. He died in Świdnik on January 4, 2010.


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## jamierd (Jan 5, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Jan 5, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 5, 2010)




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## Njaco (Jan 5, 2010)




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## diddyriddick (Jan 5, 2010)

RIP!


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## ToughOmbre (Jan 5, 2010)

RIP



TO


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## Gnomey (Jan 5, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jan 5, 2010)




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## Vic Balshaw (Jan 5, 2010)




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## Colin1 (Jan 9, 2010)

_Pilot in the Spanish Civil War who later flew for the Soviet Union, commanding Stalin's fighter escort_

Jose Maria Bravo, who died on 26 December aged 92, was a Republican pilot during the Spanish Civil War and later served in the Soviet Air Force, commanding Stalin's fighter escort on the dictator's journey to meet Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Bravo volunteered for the Republican Air Force in Barcelona in December 1936, five months after a faction of the Spanish army rose up against the government and triggered the Civil War.

He trained in the Soviet Union and returned to Spain in June 1937 as a sergeant pilot, in time to take part in the battle of Brunete, a Republican offensive to push back the Nationalists' encirclement of Madrid. Bravo initially flew Russian Polikarpov I-15 biplanes but was rapidly equipped with I-16s, monoplane fighters that dominated the Spanish skies until the arrival of the German and Italian air forces. The Republicans nicknamed their aircraft _moscas_, or flies. Although the Russian aircraft were highly manoeuverable, Bravo later said that they were insufficiently armed to tackle German bombers. The two 7.62mm machine guns fired "pellets that were not very efficient against the Junkers and Heinkel aircraft that the Germans supplied to Franco".

Bravo was a skilful pilot and was rapidly promoted. In April 1938 he became a squadron leader and four months later, aged 21, was named second in command of the 21st Group, the Republic's best-equipped fighter unit.

Born into a middle-class family in Madrid on 8 April 1917, Bravo received a secular education and was an exchange student in Germany when Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. At university he was a talented student whose course was interrupted by the Civil War. As a young man, he learned to fly gliders in Ocana, south of Madrid.

In February 1939, with the fall of Catalonia to the Nationalists, Bravo fled across the Pyrenees to France, where he spent four months interned in the Argeles-sur-mer and Gurs camps in the south of the country. On his release he moved to the Soviet Union, completing his Engineering degree in Kharkov in the Ukraine.

When Nazi Germany invaded in the summer of 1941, Bravo joined a group of Spanish Republican guerrillas that harried the advancing Wehrmacht's supply lines near the Sea of Azov, north of the Black Sea. Bravo later said he resented having to fight on foot "I had become a pilot so that I wouldn't have to walk, and there I was marching night after night through knee-deep snow while surrounded by the enemy".

In 1942 he was admitted into the Soviet Air Force where he served in a unit that flew I-16s defending vital oilfields in Baku, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. In total, Bravo flew 1,700 combat hours on I-16s and emerged from two wars without a scratch. He did, however, come off a runway into a gully in Caspe, eastern Spain and was involved in a mid-air collision near the Caspian Sea.

All former Republican pilots were demobbed in 1948 following the defection of one of their number to Turkey in a stolen aircraft. Bravo, however, remained in the Soviet Union and became a professor of Spanish at Moscow State University. He was an expert on Russian poetry and translated many of the classics of Russian literature into Spanish. In 1960 he was allowed to return to Spain by the Franco regime.

In 2007 Bravo published his memoirs _El seis doble_ (double six), a reference to the domino piece that was painted on the tail fin of his unit's planes. Bravo said it represented the 12 aircraft in a squadron and the value of teamwork.

As an octegenarian, Bravo helped raise funds to restore a Polikarpov I-16 and in 2005 was able to fly the machine while accompanied by another pilot. After the transition to democracy the Spanish government formally recognised his rank in the Soviet Air Force.

Bravo was twice married and is survived by his second wife, a daughter and a son.


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## vikingBerserker (Jan 9, 2010)

Nice post.


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## Gnomey (Jan 9, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 10, 2010)




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## v2 (Jan 13, 2010)

Air Commodore* Charles Widdows*- oldest BoB veteran has died...

Charles Widdows, believed to have been the oldest surviving Battle of Britain pilot, has died in Guernsey on 8th January 2010.
The 100-year-old former night fighter test pilot, pictured – who was the first to fly a production Hurricane, L1547, – died at Les Bourgs Hospice.
He retired to the island from Surrey in 1968 and lived at his Rohais home with Nickie, his beloved wife and constant companion of 70 years, until just a few days before his death, which was announced yesterday by his family.
Although he arrived in Guernsey planning a ‘quiet life’, he soon had a high profile in the community, becoming involved in various areas of island life including politics and Scouting. He was elected a States deputy from 1973 to 1979 with the winning slogan: ‘If it’s new blood you want – vote Widdows’.
Speaking yesterday, his eldest son, Robin, said his father’s health had recently deteriorated, leading to his short stay at the hospice. But, he added, his final days there had been very peaceful.
‘The staff were wonderful and we are extremely grateful to them. He was so well looked after during those last few days.’
He added that the Air Commodore, who led 29 Squadron, which today operates the Eurofighter Typhoon, died in the early hours.


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## ToughOmbre (Jan 13, 2010)

TO


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## Gnomey (Jan 13, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 16, 2010)




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## syscom3 (Jan 16, 2010)

The ranks of the pre war pilots are getting thinner and thinner.


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## v2 (Jan 16, 2010)

*John Leavitt *

Leavitt joined No 617 (Dambuster) Squadron in September 1944. His first two operations after arriving were against Tirpitz, which was sheltering in the fjords of northern Norway. On October 29 1944 he flew as the second pilot with an experienced captain. Over the target, their Lancaster was hit by the battleship's anti-aircraft fire, which hit one of the fuel tanks. Running very short of fuel, the two pilots made a forced-landing at an airfield in the Shetlands. 

On November 11, Leavitt piloted one of 31 Lancasters that mounted a second attack against "The Beast", a name given to Tirpitz by Winston Churchill. After taking off at night from an airfield in northern Scotland, Leavitt headed for the rendezvous near the Norwegian/Swedish border. At dawn, he saw flak ahead and skirted its position. He commented: "The terrain below was precipitous and barren, and at the same time magnificent. I have never felt so completely alone in my life." 

Leavitt dropped his "Tallboy" bomb from 15,000ft a minute after the leader (Wing Commander "Willie" Tait). His aimer saw the 12,000lb bomb drop into the centre of the smoke erupting from the battleship. A short time later, Tirpitz capsized with large loss of life. 

Leavitt also attacked the naval pens at Bremen, Ijmuiden, and Hamburg. On March 27, flying a specially modified Lancaster, he dropped a 22,000lb "Grand Slam" deep penetration bomb on the U-boat construction pens at Farge. 

His 21st and final operation was against Hitler's southern redoubt at Berchtesgaden on April 25. Snow on the ground prevented his bomb aimer from identifying the target and their Tallboy was dropped on a viaduct spotted on the return route. 

After the war he remained in the RAF and continued to fly Lancasters until he retired as a flight lieutenant in September 1946 and returned to the USA. 

John Howland Leavitt was born, during a Zeppelin raid, in Paris on February 6 1918. His American father later served as a US Consular translator to the Versailles Treaty. His mother was English. He was named John Howland after an ancestor who had arrived in America on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims in 1620; after education in Turkey he returned with his parents to the US, attending Darien High School, Connecticut, where his peers elected him the student most likely to succeed. 

A graduate of Brown University, Rhode Island, Leavitt was back in Turkey teaching English at Robert College when Britain declared war in 1939. Keen to get involved, he volunteered to fly with the RAF, applying through the British Consulate in Istanbul. 

He trained as a pilot in Rhodesia and South Africa before heading to England to convert to the Lancaster. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he applied for a transfer to the USAAC, but on being told that this would require him to repeat all his training, he opted to remain with the RAF. 

At the end of the war, he joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, as an intelligence analyst, specialising in Middle Eastern issues and drafting National Intelligence Estimates, including his favourite assessment in the early 1950s – that it would be a long time before the Arabs and Israelis saw eye-to-eye on any issue. 

Soon after, he transferred to the CIA's Directorate of Operations and joined the Agency's campaign to reinstate the Shah in Iran. He spent 15 of his 30 years of service at US embassies in Tehran, Athens, Ankara and Tel Aviv. Though he retired in 1978, he returned to the Agency to assist with the Iran Hostage Crisis and the bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983. 

In retirement Leavitt travelled widely to visit his large extended family. A keen golfer, he enjoyed partnering his wife, who played to county level. 

John Leavitt died on December 31. He was married to his first wife, Lilias, an English WAAF signals officer whom he met at RAF Waddington during the war, from 1945 until her death in 1972. After a brief second marriage, he married his third wife, Judy, also a former WAAF, whom he met at a 617 Squadron reunion at Woodhall Spa in 1983. She died in 2003. He is survived by two sons and two daughters from his first marriage. 

source: Telegraph


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## vikingBerserker (Jan 17, 2010)

Dam


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## Gnomey (Jan 17, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jan 17, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 17, 2010)




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## v2 (Jan 20, 2010)

*Władyslaw Łapot* has died in Ruislip on 17 January, 2010. 
The Polish air force veteran survived 30 bombing missions ( 300 Bomber Squadron PAF ) during the war and gained the Virtuti Militari, the highest Polish honour.
After the war, Mr Łapot decided to stay in the UK. He worked for the BOAC air-line - a predecessor of British Airways - for 15 years, before retiring in 1959.


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## RabidAlien (Jan 20, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Jan 20, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Jan 20, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Jan 22, 2010)




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## Geedee (Jan 29, 2010)

Former Tuskegee Airman, 90, Dies in NYC 
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 28, 2010 
Filed at 6:36 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Lee A. Archer, a decorated member of the Tuskegee Airmen, has died. He was 90.

His son, Roy Archer, says his father died in a Manhattan hospital Wednesday night. The cause of death was not immediately determined.

Archer was an ace pilot in America's first black fighter group in World War II. The Tuskegee Airmen fought with distinction but faced segregation when they returned home. The group was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007 from President George W. Bush.

After serving in the military, Archer, of New Rochelle, N.Y., joined General Foods Corp. in the early 1970s and became a corporate vice president.

Archer was among the Tuskegee Airmen who attended President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009.

Funeral services have yet to be announced.


Respect !


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## RabidAlien (Jan 30, 2010)




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## v2 (Feb 9, 2010)

Wing Commander *Henry Lamond*- NZ Great Escape Hero Dies...  

Wing Commander Henry Lamond, who has died aged 94, was one of the first three men to escape from a tunnel at Stalag Luft III and remained at large for a week; he had been captured in Crete after gallant attempts to rescue stranded personnel in his Sunderland flying boat. 
In the spring of 1942 Lamond was among the early arrivals at Stalag Luft III at Sagan, Goering's show camp for captured Allied airmen and one he claimed was escape-proof. Lamond and his colleagues immediately set about proving him wrong. 

Lamond had already developed a reputation as an inveterate tunneller during his time at another prison camp. He and Bill Goldfinch, who had been his co-pilot when they were captured in April 1941, invited another PoW, Jack Best, to join them in an audacious attempt to dig their way out of Sagan. 

The prisoners had managed to block and flood the latrines in order to convince their captors that it was necessary to dig a drainage ditch to a point near the perimeter wire. Lamond intended to use the ditch to dig a tunnel, from where they would "mole" – or burrow – their way out. 

Just after the evening roll-call their helpers sealed them into the tunnel. The three men burrowed towards the wire, piling sand behind them. Kept alive by air holes pushed up through the soil, they worked all night; but the following morning their comrades were horrified to see wisps of steam rising from four air holes. Fortunately they remained undetected and carried on digging. After 36 hours underground and "moling" for 150ft they broke the surface outside the wire and crept to the nearby woods. 

They headed for a local training airfield, intending to steal an aircraft in which they would fly to Sweden. Arriving at dawn, they hid all day, but then failed to locate a suitable aircraft. They spent the next five nights walking to the river Oder, where they found a rowing boat and set off for Stettin, 200 miles away, with the aim of finding a ship going to Sweden. While they were resting on the river bank they were arrested by local police. 

The three men were the first to escape from Sagan by tunnel and were at liberty for seven days. Lamond later wrote: "This escape destroyed the Germans' overbearing sense of superiority, and re-established the morale of the PoWs, allowing them with great delight to jeer at the Germans about their escape-proof camp." Goldfinch and Best were sent to Colditz, where they were to build their famous glider. It was never explained why Lamond was left at Sagan. 

Henry William Lamond was born on August 26 1915 at Kaukapakapa, a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. He was educated at Auckland Grammar School before serving in the 1st Battalion Auckland Regiment. In 1938 he joined the RNZAF, transferring to an RAF scheme in 1939; he completed his pilot training and was commissioned. 

After arriving in England he joined No 210 Squadron, and in December 1940 was ordered to ferry a Sunderland to Malta. Instead of returning to England, he was sent to No 228 Squadron and started operational flying. In March 1941 the remnants of 228 had to leave Malta, and Lamond flew one of the two surviving Sunderlands to Alexandria; on April 24 he was sent to Suda Bay in Crete. 

With Goldfinch as one of his co-pilots, he reconnoitred the Greek coastline looking for RAF personnel fleeing the German advance. After a successful first mission Lamond was ordered to fly to Kalamata, where he saw signals from the shore. Although short of fuel, he landed and picked up 74 men of an RAF squadron. 

Later the same evening, he was woken up and ordered to fly back to Kalamata. With no flare path for the night take-off, or for the landing at Kalamata, Lamond would have been justified in refusing. However, as he commented later: "In those days one did not." On landing, he hit an unseen obstruction and his Sunderland sank. 

He and three members of his crew survived, and after several hours clinging to a wing they were picked up by a Greek boat. A few days later the Germans occupied the area and the men were captured. 

Lamond was taken to Dulag 185 at Salonika, where conditions were primitive and the PoWs badly treated. It was here that Lamond and Goldfinch first met Best. They remained together during a desperate march in November over the mountains to a railhead at Corinth, where they were loaded into cattle trucks. After travelling through Yugoslavia, Austria and Germany, the RAF prisoners arrived at Stalag Luft I at Barth on the Baltic coast. 

After his recapture and return to Stalag Luft III, Lamond was a member of numerous tunnelling teams. He worked on the three tunnels before the Great Escape, and on the night of the breakout – March 24/25 1944 – he was the dispatcher. Positioned in Hut 104 at the top of the entrance shaft which led to the escape tunnel "Harry", Lamond checked each prisoner and his chattels to ensure that they would not block the narrow tunnel. 

He was also responsible for controlling the flow of prisoners into the tunnel. Just after he had dispatched his 87th escaper, "Harry" was discovered; 76 men had broken free, of whom 50 were later murdered by the Gestapo. 

In January 1945 the camp was evacuated with minimum notice and the PoWs marched westwards to avoid the advancing Soviet army. During one of the worst winters on record, the prisoners suffered greatly on "the Long March". Eventually they reached a camp near Lübeck from where, in late April, they were repatriated. 

Lamond remained in the RAF and flew transport aircraft. During the Berlin Air Lift of 1949 he was an operations controller at Gatow airfield in Germany, where he later served for two years. He was a flying instructor and served in Southern Rhodesia before becoming the chief instructor at No 2 Flying Training School at Syerston, near Newark, Nottinghamshire. 

He retired from the RAF in 1962, and four years later joined the RAF Reserve of Officers. For the next 15 years he worked with the Air Training Corps, of which he later wrote a history. 

A keen golfer, he did not allow hip and knee replacements to interfere with his enjoyment of the sport, but continued playing until late in life. 

In December 1942 the King of the Hellenes awarded Lamond the Greek Distinguished Flying Cross. For his activities as a PoW he was mentioned in despatches, and in 1953 he received a Queen's Commendation for Valuable Services in the Air. 

Henry Lamond died on January 15. He married, in 1945, Nesta John; she predeceased him, and he is survived by two sons and a daughter. 

source: The Telegraph


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## RabidAlien (Feb 9, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Feb 9, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Feb 9, 2010)




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## v2 (Feb 11, 2010)

*Ryszard Danilo Śnieżkowski* - RAF war hero dies, aged 91... 

Tributes have been paid to a decorated pilot from Poland who joined the RAF to fight the Nazis during the Second World War – and was still taking to the air on his 90th birthday.
Warrant officer Ryszard Danilo died on January 2 at the age of 91 in a Preston nursing home.
The father-of-two, from Conway Drive, Fulwood, was born in Galicia, Poland, in 1917.
He joined the Polish army and served with the country's air force at the start of the war, before escaping when Russia invaded.
Mr Danilo, who was known as Richard, travelled to France but was forced to flee when it fell to the Germans in 1940.
He then headed for Liverpool and volunteered to join the RAF, serving with 307 and 304 Squadron and No 10 Air Gunnery School at Walney Island, Barrow, where he married Eliza.
Mr Danilo's son, also called Ryszard, who now lives in Shropshire, said: "He had a colourful history. He achieved so much."
He said his father remained a keen pilot and was still taking to the air in his 80s. Ryszard added: "He took the controls of an aircraft when he was 89."
Grandfather-of-two Mr Danilo had a number of lucky escapes in his flying career.
On one occasion he was coming in to land at a Polish airfield in the first few days of the war when three bombs from an overhead bomber landed across his path.
He felt the ground shake as each hit the ground. Miraculously, none of them exploded.
He flew a variety of aircraft and types of missions including Bomber command, night fighters and Coastal command.
He had a nasty crash at Christmas 1941 when he had to crash land his Beaufighter due to engine failure while returning from patrol over the Solent.
His injuries kept him invalided for a year. He eventually returned to service and was stationed as an instructor pilot at at Walney Island near Barrow.
WO Danilo was awarded several medals including the Atlantic Star and the Defence Medal by the British government.
He was awarded the Polish Order of Merit by the Polish government in exile.
At the end of the war Mr Danilo settled in Preston and found work as an engineer at Leyland Motors, designing a large extension to the Spurrier Works building at Farington Moss and supervising the construction.
He also designed many church buildings around Lancashire on a voluntary basis.
Ryszard added: "He was writing a book of his memoirs. I'm hoping they can be put together and archived. It will be a lovely legacy for my father."
Richard, who has another son, Jan from his second marriage to Halina, was also an active member of the RAF Association, the Polish Air Force Association and the Lancashire Aircraft Investigation Team.
In 1998 he was part of a team which recovered the wreck of an American fighter plane near Walker Lane, Fulwood.
The aircraft had crashed while on a test flight from Warton in June 1944.
A tribute on the Aviation Forum website said: "He worked tirelessly to keep the memory of his fallen comrades alive, among other projects he was involved in, and he was working as much as possible at the end.
"Richard was a real gentleman and will be missed dearly by all that knew him."


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## Wayne Little (Feb 11, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Feb 11, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Feb 11, 2010)




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## v2 (Feb 14, 2010)

*Dick Francis*, ex- RAF pilot, thriller writer and ex-jockey, dies 

Dick Francis, the best-selling British thriller writer and former champion jockey, died on Sunday ( February, 14 ) in his home in the Cayman Islands. He was 89.

A successful steeplechase jockey, Francis turned to writing after he retired from racing in 1957. He penned 42 novels, many of which featured racing as a theme. His books were translated into more than 20 languages, and in 2000 Queen Elizabeth II — whose mother was among his many readers — honored Francis by making him a Commander of the British Empire.

His son Felix said he and his brother, Merrick, were "devastated" by their father's death, but "rejoice in having been the sons of such an extraordinary man."

"We share in the joy that he brought to so many over such a long life," Felix said in a statement. Francis' spokeswoman Ruth Cairns said the writer had died from natural causes, but did not elaborate.

During his writing career, Francis won three Edgar Allen Poe awards given by The Mystery Writers of America for his novels "Forfeit" (1968), "Whip Hand" (1979) and "Come to Grief" (1995).

He also was awarded a Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers' Association for his outstanding contribution to the genre. The association made him a Grand Master in 1996 for a lifetime's achievement.

Aside from novels, Francis also authored a volume of short stories, as well as a biography of British jockey Lester Piggot.

In recent years Francis wrote novels jointly with son Felix, including "Silks" (2008) and "Even Money" (2009). A new novel by the two, "Crossfire," will be published later this year.

"It is an honor for me to be able to continue his remarkable legacy through the new novels," Felix said in his statement.

Richard Francis was born Oct. 31, 1920, as the younger son of a horse breeder in Tenby, South Wales. During World War II he joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 and was stationed in the Egyptian desert before being commissioned as a bomber pilot in 1943, flying Spitfires, Wellingtons and Lancasters.

A few years later he returned to his father's stables and became a steeplechase trainer's assistant. Later, as a professional jockey, he won 345 of the more than 2,300 races he rode in between 1948 and 1957, taking the title of Champion Jockey for the 1953-54 season.

His most famous moment in racing came just a few months before he retired, when, riding for Queen Elizabeth, his horse collapsed inexplicably within sight of certain victory in the 1956 Grand National.

Despite his many successes, he had expressed regret at never winning the prestigious Grand National.

"The first one I rode in I was second, and the last one I rode in I won everywhere except the last 25 yards. I would love the opportunity of having another go, but it's a young man's job," he said once during an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.

Francis' first book, published in 1957, was his autobiography, titled "The Sport of Queens." His first novel, "Dead Cert," came out in 1962 and was followed by a new title every year since.

He also worked for years as a racing correspondent for Britain's Sunday Express, and retired in the British Caribbean territory of the Cayman Islands.

Francis is survived by his two sons as well as five grandchildren and one great-grandson, Cairns said. A small funeral will be held at Francis' home on Grand Cayman, followed by a memorial service in London, she said, but could not say when they would be held.


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## Gnomey (Feb 14, 2010)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8515165.stm


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## vikingBerserker (Feb 14, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Feb 15, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Feb 15, 2010)

Local news here in Dallas mentioned his death, but focused on his writing and said nothing about his RAF experience.


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## v2 (Feb 16, 2010)

*Cy Grant*: Guyanese Born Singer, Writer and Actor Dies at age 90 in England. 

Cy Grant was a man of many talents and led an extraordinary life. 

He was born in the village of Beterverwagting, Demerara, Guyana on November 8th 1919. At the tender age of 11, he moved with his family to New Amsterdam Berbice, Guyana. Cy had seven siblings and after graduating high school he worked as a clerk in a magistrate’s office. He eventually decided to pursue law but a lack of money hindered his dreams until WW11 ended in 1945. 

But before fulfilling his dreams, Cy joined the Royal Air Force and trained to hold the role as a navigator. In 1943, on his third mission, his plane was shot down over the Netherlands. He was captured by the German army and spent the next two years of his life as a prisoner of war. In 1945 when the war was over, Cy became free. He then pursued by dream in England and finally in 1950, he was accepted as a Barrister to the Middle Temple in London.

But during the 1950’s it was quite difficult to find work as a colored man practicing law, thus, he decided to pursue acting. As his career developed, so did Cy creative abilities. Along with acting, Cy ventured into singing and writing. The rest was history.

He was the first black man to be regularly seen on British Television, singing the news on television on the BBC TONIGHT program. He had his own series on radio and TV and his acting career is on record in BLACKGROUNDS, an Oral History Project housed at the Theatre Museum. He is the author of RING OF STEEL, pan sound and symbol. He was the Chairman/cofounder of DRUM, the London based Black arts centre in the 70’s and Director of CONCORD Multicultural Festivals in the 80’s. He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Surrey, Roehampton and a member of The Scientific Medical Network.

Cy Grant died on Saturday February 13th 2010 but not before gracing the world with his many talents. He was an extraordinary Guyanese that produced many works of art that have inspired individuals across the globe. He is survived by his wife Dorith and four children.


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## RabidAlien (Feb 17, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Feb 17, 2010)




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## BikerBabe (Feb 17, 2010)

*Veteran who flew Soviet flag over Reichstag dies*

One of the men featured in the iconic picture of a Red Army soldier holding the Soviet flag above Berlin’s Reichstag at the end of World War II has passed away at the age of 94 in the Republic of Dagestan.
Abdulhakim Ismailov, a native of Dagestan, was one of the three soldiers from the famous picture featuring the raising of the red Banner of Victory on one of the Reichstag’s towers.

The iconic snapshot taken by military photographer Evgeny Khaldey became the symbol of the Soviet victory over Fascist Germany.

It is interesting to note that the photograph depicts the spirit of victory rather than a historical truth. The picture was, in fact, taken on May 2 on the request of Russia’s major news agency. Khaldey took his famous snapshot after the Reichstag had already fallen.

During the last days of WWII the Reichstag building was attacked several times with a number of red flags raised over it, though the Banner of Victory historically refers to the one planted by Lt. Berest and sergeants Egorov and Kantaria on April, 30, 1945.

Abdulhakim Ismailov was born in 1916 in Dagestan. For his participation in the Great Patriotic War he was awarded several orders of merit, including the highest honorary title: the Hero of the Russian Federation. Ismailov was the last person alive from the picture by Khaldey.

BB's note: That soviet pic is to the russians, what the famous photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising is to the americans.


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## Vassili Zaitzev (Feb 17, 2010)

Rest in peace comrade.


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## Ferdinand Foch (Feb 17, 2010)




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## Njaco (Feb 17, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Feb 17, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Feb 17, 2010)

to them both.


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## syscom3 (Feb 17, 2010)

Lt-Col Zbigniew S. Mozdzierski: veteran of the Battle of Cassino.

At the outset of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Zbigniew Mozdzierski, 19, was commanding a troop of 155mm guns of the Polish 6th Artillery Regiment in the southeast of the country, facing the advance of General von List’s 14th Army. He had graduated from the Artillery School at Zambrów three weeks earlier and so had to learn his new profession at speed.

The Poles’ strategy of forward defence, designed to protect the main centres of population and the Silesian coalfields, actually facilitated the swiftly moving German armoured columns’ tactics of dividing the defending armies. By September 10 Mozdzierski’s regiment and others were confined to the pocket of resistance under General Sosnkowski, west of Lwow. After the Red Army crossed the eastern frontier a week later, he and thousands of his comrades were deported to the Soviet Union — virtually as prisoners of war — and not released until the Sikorski-Maisky (Polish-Soviet) agreement of July 1941.

Mozdzierski was one of the 75,000 Polish soldiers released to form the Polish II Corps under General Wladyslaw Anders in Persia (Iran), eventually to move through Palestine to join the British 8th Army in Italy. The 1st Polish Corps was already in Britain established from units which, after escaping the German invasion, had travelled through Eastern Europe and still-neutral Italy to France. These, together with Polish naval and air units that had also escaped, were Britain’s only ally outside the Commonwealth from the fall of France in June 1940 until the invasion of Russia.

Mozdzierski served in Italy with the 10th Artillery Regiment in the II Polish Corps from January 1944 until the German surrender in April 1945. On March 24, 1944, Anders was instructed to capture the dominating heights of Monte Cassino barring the Allies’ route to Rome. The Americans, the battle-hardened 4th Indian Division and 2nd New Zealand had all tried and been unable to hold the ground they gained on the slopes against well-sited and resolutely defended German emplacements. Now it was the turn of the Poles.

Anders’ plan was to capture the approaching ridge to isolate Monastery Hill that would then have to be subjected to constant bombardment and screened by artillery-delivered smoke to allow the 5th Kresowa and 3rd Carpathian Divisions to scale the other heights. As a forward observation officer advancing with the infantry, it fell to Mozdzierski to direct the fire of 1st battery of the Polish 10th Artillery Regiment in this task.

At 11.40pm on May 10, the Polish artillery began its concentration on the German infantry positions on Monastery Hill. Despite the carefully prepared plans for the infantry attacks, the overall artillery support proved inadequate, leaving Anders no choice but to postpone his advance until May 12. After reorganising he renewed his attack and — with increased artillery support — succeeded, so that the Polish standard flew above the monastery at 10.30am on May 18.

Mozdzierski, who was with the attacking infantry in both attempts, was awarded the Polish Cross of Valour for his steadfastness in directing the supporting fire of his battery’s guns, despite being constantly under enemy retaliatory fire. He also received the Polish Monte Cassino Cross, awarded to all Poles who had taken part in the final and successful assault.

Unwounded, he served in the battle for Ancona on the Gothic Line, in the northern Apennines and in the battle for Bologna in the Lombardy Plain. In March 1947 he was transferred to the Polish Resettlement Corps in England as, in company with many thousands of his compatriots who had fought with the Allies in Italy and North-West Europe, he decided against returning to his homeland, by then under Soviet domination as part of the division of Europe into regions of influence agreed at the Yalta conference.

He made his home in England for several years but, after meeting and marrying a British architect, Susan Armstrong, they moved to Los Angeles, where he trained and became a civil engineer.

Zbigniew Stanislaw Mozdzierski was born and educated at Stanislowów in southeastern Poland, now incorporated into Ukraine. His affection for Poland after the end of hostilities found an outlet in voluntary work on behalf of Polish expatriates in England, when he was living there, and later in and around Los Angeles after his move to the United States.

After the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, this work was recognized by him being granted the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Polish army reserve.

In the 1970s he and his wife retired to Guernsey, where he died.

He is survived by his wife, whom he married in 1957, and two daughters.

Lieutenant-Colonel Zbigniew S. Mozdzierski, veteran of the Battle of Cassino, was born on December 12, 1919. He died on December 30, 2009, aged 90


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## syscom3 (Feb 17, 2010)

Squadron Leader “Zeke” Zeleny was a dashing, charismatic figure. Tall, blond and fiercely determined, he twice escaped from his country of birth, Czechoslovakia, during periods of political oppression, on the first occasion briefly joining the French Foreign Legion before arriving in England to serve in the RAF as a navigator.

He fought through the Second World War in the Czechoslovak- manned 311 Squadron, flying Wellington bombers and surviving several raids over Germany. After the war he spent many years as an air traffic controller before setting up and running desert rescue teams and survival schools in Nairobi, Kenya and El Adem, Libya.

In 1960 his team brought home the crew from a crashed light aircraft in Tanzania and in 1968 he visited and investigated the remains of a missing American Liberator Lady Be Good, which had disappeared and crashed in the Sahara Desert in 1943. He was appointed MBE in 1968, one of the few awarded to a Czech-born RAF serving officer. A keen painter, linguist, historian and geographer, after retiring from the RAF, he spent the next 20 years travelling the world as a tour guide.

Adolf Pravoslav Zeleny was born in 1914 in Rozná nad Pernstejnem, Zdár, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic today). He was educated at the local gymnasium, where his father was the headmaster, and although he had no military background he joined the army in 1934 and graduated from the Military Academy, Hranice, in 1937.

In September 1938, after the Czechoslovak Government accepted the Munich edict and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia began, Zeleny and four friends escaped to Poland, hiding on an empty coal train. As war had not yet been declared, the only course open to the many Czechs assembled in Poland, keen to fight against Germany, was to join the French Foreign Legion.

When the defeated French accepted the German terms of Armistice in June 1940, those Czechs who wanted to continue to fight were evacuated by sea to the UK. Zeleny was commissioned as a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1941 and given a basic navigation course. He learnt English with the help of a new friend, Captain Bernard Braine (later a Conservative MP), and met and married his English wife, Vera.

Posted to RAF East Wretham in March 1942 he took part in bombing raids on Cologne and Essen before joining 311 Squadron at RAF Talbenny on anti-submarine patrol as a newly promoted Flying Officer. In September he and his crew were attacked by three German Junkers Ju88s but survived by dodging into cloud. Zeleny later recalled: “We got into a cloud and anytime we got out, there was a German plane waiting, but it didn’t shoot. That was either a miracle or the Germans had run out of ammunition.” That year he was awarded the Czechoslovak Gallantry medal and War Cross. By the end of the war he had completed 52 operations, three in Bomber Command and 49 in Coastal Command.

He then returned to Czechoslovakia, where he was joined by his young family and was put in charge of air traffic at Ruzyne airport. He was elected president of the Association of Airmen and promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. But when Czechoslovakia came under communist rule and he was dismissed as president as a reactionary, he decided to return to England. His family, with British passports, left in April 1948. In August, after obtaining forged papers giving him the ownership of a mythical farm in Australia, he left and landed at RAF Northolt after a nail-biting journey when he feared the Dakota in which he was flying might be recalled to Prague.

After a spell as a farm manager in Kent, Zeleny rejoined the RAF in 1949. He served at various RAF stations in England and did a tour of duty in Singapore. His posting to RAF Eastleigh in Nairobi, Kenya, proved a turning point. He established a mountain and desert rescue team responsible for Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Now in his element, he took part in the rescue of a crashed light aircraft on Monduli mountain near Arusha in Tanzania. The rescue team prepared a landing strip within an hour to take out the badly wounded pilot and two other injured men, along with the navigator, who had been killed.

In 1965 he was posted to RAF El Adem in Libya and typically decided to drive there with his wife in a camper van. The journey took 41 days. Once more he became involved in desert rescue and was appointed to command the station’s school of desert survival and desert rescue team. During this time he led a number of expeditions to various parts of the Libyan Desert: the Tibesti Mountains, Uweinat and Murzuch, among others. In 1968 he organised an expedition to the wreck of the Lady Be Good, a Liberator that vanished in a sandstorm in the Sahara in 1943 and was only found 16 years later. They extracted an engine for evaluation by the McDonnell Douglas company.

Zeleny retired with the rank of squadron leader in November 1971. He then embarked on a career as a tour guide and over the next 20 years visited every continent except Antarctica. He studied the histories and languages of the countries he visited so he could, if necessary, stand in for the local guide. Zeleny was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1974.

At the age of 76 he decided to stop travelling and lived quietly in Frome, Somerset. His wife died in 1999. He is survived by a daughter and son.

Squadron Leader “Zeke” Zeleny, MBE, was born on October 11, 1914. He died on January 25, 2010, aged 95


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## syscom3 (Feb 17, 2010)

From Times Online

February 10, 2010

When it was suggested in December 1940 that army NCOs should be trained to fly gliders, the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff declared: “The idea that semi-skilled personnel be entrusted with piloting these troop carriers is fantastic. Their operation is equivalent to force-landing the largest-sized aircraft without engine aid. There is no higher test of piloting skill.”

Troop and equipment carrying gliders were urgently required to deliver infantry and supporting arms in a more concentrated manner than could be achieved by parachute. The first large-scale glider-borne operation was undertaken during the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. Mistakes were made and many lives lost. Better preparations were essential for the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Peter Boyle was one of the 12 glider pilots selected to fly the six Horsa gliders, towed towards their landing point by four-engined Halifax bombers, for the coup-de-main capture of the “Pegasus” bridge over the Caen canal and the Ranville bridge over the River Orne in the first hour of D-Day, June 6, 1944. The difficulties of this operation and intensive training of the pilots led the Commander of Allied Air Forces for the invasion of Normandy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, to describe it as “the airmanship feat of the war”.

Only eight of the 12 pilots and co-pilots involved in this hazardous operation received a British or French decoration. In Boyle’s case, this omission was corrected over half a century later when the French Government awarded him the Légion d’Honneur.

Two bridges spanned the Caen canal and River Orne on the eastern flank of the Allied Normandy beachhead. It was judged essential for them to be captured before the beach landings began, to prevent German armoured units, known to be based east of the waterways, crossing and attacking the sea-landing formations in the flank. Subsequently, the bridges would be needed for the resupply of the 6th Airborne Division, dropped or air-landed beyond them.

It seemed virtually certain that the German troops responsible for holding the bridges would have prepared them for demolition. To avoid them being blown before the glider-borne troops could take them, it was decided the gliders must make rapid descents from high altitude (6,000 feet) to achieve surprise. This required the three gliders assigned to the Caen canal bridge to make two tight, right-angled turns in the space of three minutes from cast-off from their towing Halifaxes in order to slip quietly down by the bridge.

Boyle was co-pilot and navigator to his friend Geoff Barkway (obituary June 20, 2006) with whom he had trained intensively for this operation for six weeks, including ten night landings under equally exacting conditions. Just as their Number 3 glider for the canal bridge struck light cloud two minutes and 15 seconds after cast off, Boyle identified the bridge below and to the right. The right-angled turns made, the glider approached the bridge at between 90 and 100 mph, instead of the usual 65mph for landing, due to the extra weight of a folding boat for crossing the canal if the bridge was found to be blown. Possibly due to a sideslip, the glider landed at an angle, ripped across the ground and came to a shuddering halt in the gap between the first two gliders and at the edge of a pond, into which Barkway was thrown through the smashed cockpit.

Boyle was slightly concussed by the final shock but Barkway, having crawled out of the pond, freed him from his harness and pulled him clear of the cockpit. Then, as Major John Howard’s company of 2nd Battalion The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry streamed out of the gliders to take the bridge, the two pilots adopted their “total soldier” role for which they were trained, preparing to fight as infantrymen. Barkway was shot in the right arm and evacuated shortly afterwards.

Boyle returned to the glider to collect some equipment and took part in the operation to clear the enemy from the far bank. He spent that night with the small force garrisoning the bridge and, in accordance with the policy of returning glider pilots to England at the first opportunity, sailed from the beach in a tank landing craft on D+1. This was his first active service of the war.

The next three months were spent in practice flying from Brize Norton before moving to Manston airfield in preparation for Operation “Market Garden”, the airborne assault to take the bridges culminating with the rail and road bridges over the Rhine at Arnhem, in September. The aim was to open a route for Montgomery’s 21st Army Group round the north of the German Ruhr and end the war by Christmas 1944. Strategically, this was not a “bridge too far”, as the whole operation would have been pointless without inclusion of the Arnhem bridges, but the enemy was there in greater strength than expected and neither bridge was captured.

Boyle flew as first pilot of a Horsa glider for Market Garden but, in company with other glider pilots who fought at Arnhem as infantry after landing, he was taken prisoner when the remnants of the 1st Airborne Division were forced to withdraw across the Rhine. He spent seven months in Stalag IVB at Mühlberg on the upper Elbe, from where he was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.

On demobilisation, he joined ICI Pharmaceuticals as a publicity assistant but left to join the RAF in 1951. He served as a pilot until 1954 when he joined Glaxo’s New Zealand company. He remained in New Zealand after transfer to WD HO Wills as advertising manager, returning to England to join the board of Lindsey Kesteven Fertilisers in 1965.

He married Aileen Mitchell in 1945. She survives him with a daughter.

Peter Boyle, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, wartime glider pilot, was born on September 9,1923. He died on February 5, 2010, aged 86


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## syscom3 (Feb 17, 2010)

Flight-Lieutenant Leslie Stephenson: wartime night fighter pilot

From The Times

January 15, 2010

The pilot of one of the RAF’s most successful night-fighter teams of the Second World War, Leslie Stephenson, flew two tours of operations with his navigator/radar operator, Arthur Hall (obituary Dec 11, 2007), the first on Beaufighters in North Africa, the second flying Mosquitoes over occupied France in the aftermath of D-Day and, later, as the Allied armies advanced into Germany, over the Reich itself.

Each man was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross twice for their performance in shooting down ten enemy aircraft. The awards acknowledged that in the two-seat night fighter the split-second understanding, acquired or instinctive, between the pilot who pressed the gun button and the navigator who guided him by airborne interception radar into a position to enable him to do so was vital to the team’s success.

Stephenson’s most remarkable feat was the downing of three Junkers Ju88s in a single sortie off the Tunisian coast in May 1943 and it brought both pilot and navigator a telegram of congratulation from the Air Officer Commanding, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Hugh Lloyd.

Leslie Stephenson was born in 1921 in Willington, Co Durham. His father was a pit-worker and his mother served in the drapery trade. He benefited from the opportunity for local children to attend Durham School as a day-boy, enjoying a successful school career both on the academic side and in sport, representing the school at rugby and athletics.

From school he obtained a place at Durham University to read chemistry but on the outbreak of war volunteered to serve in the RAF, and was selected for pilot training. After basic and operational training he was commissioned and posted to 141 Squadron in August 1942, flying night air defence sorties in Beaufighters over central southern England from its base at Tangmere.

In March the following year he was posted to 153 Squadron based in North Africa after of the Anglo-American Torch landings. There he was teamed up with Hall as his navigator, providing night air defence for the Allied troops advancing towards Tunisia, as well as cover for the convoys whose supply effort was so vital.

The pair had their first combat victory at dusk on April 17, 1943, as they attacked head-on a force of ten Ju88s that were approaching Algiers from the East.

Stephenson selected the lead bomber of the formation as his target but as he opened fire it dived steeply away and disappeared in the dying light. Hall, however, maintained radar contact with the quarry and Stephenson was able to follow the Ju88 down until he could see it again. He then sent it into the sea with a few well-aimed bursts of the Beaufighter’s 20mm cannon and .303 machineguns.

May was to prove the most dramatic single month for the pair, making Stephenson an ace (five kills) within only two more sorties. On the night of May 11-12 he shot down two Ju88s, a feat for which he and Hall were cheered by their ground crew when they got back to base. Less than two weeks later they were to surpass even this performance. By that time the Axis forces in Tunisia had surrendered. But with the Allies building up their strength for Operation Husky, the forthcoming assault on Sicily, air activity from Axis air bases, only 100 miles away on the island, was intense.

On the night of May 23-24 Stephenson achieved a remarkable three combat victories in one sortie, bringing his and Hall’s tally to six and earning them both the DFC gazetted that August.

They almost did not live to receive their decorations. The day after their three-kill feat one of the engines of their Beaufighter blew up as it was taking off. Stephenson knew he had insufficient power to climb and made the split-second decision to slam the aircraft back down on to the ground where it soon ran out of runway and ploughed into a wood. Neither man was hurt and they were able to get out and get clear of the aircraft as its fuel tanks burst into flames and its ammunition blew up.

After the Sicily landings in July Stephenson and Hall were rested from operations and went their separate ways as instructors in different operational training units. But they were reunited in 1944 in 219 Squadron which operated the Mk XXX Mosquito. After D-Day this was heavily engaged in night sorties over the Normandy battlefields. Stephenson’s first combat victory in this theatre was on the night of August 15-16 when he shot down a Ju188 medium bomber in the Caen area with two bursts of cannon fire from a range of 250 yards after the target had been acquired by Hall on radar at a range of four miles.

By September the pair were operating over German territory as the Allies advanced, and Stephenson’s second kill was a Ju88 over Erkelenz in the lower Rhineland. His penultimate combat victory was over an Me110 over Krefeld in the Ruhr and his last, also over an Me110, was over Hasselt, Belgium, on Christmas Eve.

He might have had a further combat victory when, in February 1945, he and Hall spotted a twin-engined, twin-boom aircraft over the Rhine. The only aircraft of that particular configuration known to them was the US Lockheed P38 Lightning and they did not close in for the kill. Later, in discussion with a debriefing intelligence officer, it emerged that their sighting might well have been a Focke-Wulf Fw189 “Uhu” reconnaissance aircraft that was known to be operating in the area. A Luftwaffe crew may well have had a lucky escape. Both men were now awarded a Bar to their DFCs.

After the war Stephenson returned to Durham University to complete his chemistry degree. He then became a research chemist with ICI on Teeside. In 1951 he moved to Glaxo Laboratories in Greenford, Middlesex, where he worked with Dr E. Lester-Smith and his team on the grouping of penicillin with vitamin B12 (cyanocobalamin) . He was then highly successful in developing synthetic steroids employed in both fertility and contraceptive formulations, securing several important international patents on behalf of the company. He retired from Glaxo in 1985.

His wife Jean, whom he married in 1951, died in 1999. He is survived by a son and two daughters.

Flight-Lieutenant Leslie Stephenson, DFC and Bar, wartime night fighter pilot, was born on January 20, 1921. He died on December 26, 2009, aged 88


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## RabidAlien (Feb 18, 2010)




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## Njaco (Feb 18, 2010)




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## Njaco (Feb 18, 2010)

Bernard Forsting Obituary: Bernard Forsting?s Obituary by the Gloucester County Times.

Bernard John Forsting Sr. 

Bernard John Forsting, Sr., age 65 died on February 15, 2010. He lived in Mantua and Sewell most of his life. 

Bernard was a Vietnam War Veteran serving in the Special Forces Navy Seals from 1964-1966. During his time in combat, he participated in a hostage rescue in Laos, rescuing 11 Americans and 4 French forces. For his service he was decorated with the Medal of Honor, Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart Medal. For the past 20 years he worked for Rollins Environmental in Logan Twp. 

He is survived by his wife of 30 years Judith A. (nee Gardner), children Danielle Smith, Terry Bozarth, Donna Alexander, Lenna Smith and Jeffrey Smith, grandchildren Kansas Myers, Sieana Smith and 15 grandchildren. He was predeceased by son Bernard, Jr, daughter Diane Thorp, grandson Brian Alexander. 

Friends may call on Monday after 10am in the KELLEY FUNERAL HOME, 125 Pitman Ave, Pitman, NJ. Memorial service 11am. Inurnment Gloucester County Veteran’s Cemetery. Memories may be shared at Home - Kelley Funeral Home. 


The above obit reflects that he won the MoH but I can't find him listed. Might be a family mistake because they were proud of him.


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Feb 18, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Feb 18, 2010)

I haven't been able to find anything, either.


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## Bernhart (Feb 19, 2010)

The last Canadian veteran of World War I has died at the age of 109.

John Babcock enlisted at the age of 15 after lying about his age. He trained in Canada and England but the war ended before he reached the French frontline. 

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Mr Babcock was Canada's last living link to the Great War. 

Just two other veterans of World War I remain alive: American Frank Buckles, also aged 109, and British-born Australian Claude Choules, who is 108. 

Mr Harper, paying tribute to the 650,000 Canadian men and women who served during WW1, said: "Today they are all gone. 

"Canada mourns the passing of the generation that asserted our independence on the world stage and established our international reputation as an unwavering champion of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law." 


I wanted to go to France because I was just a tin soldier 

John Babcock
Speaking in 2007


Who are the last WWI veterans? 
John Babcock was born on July 23, 1900 on a farm in Ontario. 

In February 1916, at the age of 15, he signed up and the medical examiner recorded his "apparent age" as 18, which meant he was allowed to train. 

Despite being under the legal age to fight, which was 19, he persisted in his attempts to get to the front line. 

He lied about his age again, and sailed to Britain with the Royal Canadian Regiment. There, conscripts under the legal age of 19 formed the Young Soldiers' Battalion to train until they were eligible to fight. 

But he never saw action as the armistice was signed six months before he reached his 19th birthday. 

"I wanted to go to France because I was just a tin soldier," Mr Babcock said in an interview with the Canadian Press in July 2007. 

Second attempt

In October 1918, after a brawl between Canadian soldiers and British Army veterans in Wales over a dancehall incident, Mr Babcock was sentenced to 14 days house arrest, the Canadian Press reported. 

Before the fortnight was over, the armistice had been signed and he was on his way home. 

He moved to the US in the 1920s, serving in the United States Army between 1921 and 1924 before becoming an electrician. 

He died in Spokane, Washington, where he had lived since 1932, according to a statement from Mr Harper. 

Mr Babcock tried to enlist in the US military again in 1941 but failed when it was discovered he had never become a US citizen. 

He was naturalised as a US citizen in 1946


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## wheelsup_cavu (Feb 19, 2010)

Wheels


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## v2 (Feb 19, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Feb 19, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Feb 19, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Feb 20, 2010)




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## B-17engineer (Feb 20, 2010)




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## v2 (Feb 20, 2010)

Squadron Leader *Bill Humphrey* 

Squadron Leader Bill Humphrey, who has died aged 86, was a wartime Pathfinder and led the first air attack on the German defences in Normandy on D-Day; in all he completed three operational tours, flying 103 missions and twice winning the DFC. 
In the early hours of D-Day Humphrey's target was the coastal battery at Crisbeq, one of many such batteries on the Cherbourg peninsula posing a major threat to the invasion forces at sea. He was followed by waves of heavy bombers, and all but one of the guns was put out of action. He recorded laconically in his logbook: "Ops. Crisbeq – Dropped first TI [target indicator] on night the second front started." 

Humphrey's first operation with No 105 Squadron had been on February 18 1943, in a daring 20-aircraft low-level daylight raid. The target on that occasion had been the locomotive repair workshops in Tours. 
The group crossed the Channel at 50ft, flying blind for 10 minutes through sea mist before emerging into bright sunshine at the French coast. They streamed over three flak towers, catching the German gunners napping. 

The Mosquitoes then attacked in three formations, destroying the workshops. Humphrey later recalled: "All three formations hit their respective targets well and truly, and we shook up Tours thoroughly." 

Humphrey and his navigator attacked trains and rail depots throughout the spring of 1943, sometimes dropping 30-minute delayed-action bombs on their targets from low-level. 

In July, following the invention of Oboe at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Great Malvern, No 105 Squadron took on a new role. 

The Oboe system identified a target by the transmission of a radio beam from ground emitters located on the east coast; specially-equipped Mosquitoes flew along the beam to the target before dropping markers and flares for the main bomber force. As Humphrey put it: "Low-level had been extremely dangerous, but not very frightening as one was working so hard. Oboe was terrifying, flying dead straight and level along a beam and letting them shoot at you." 

For defence, the Mosquito relied on speed and manoeuvrability, and Humphrey's method of escape after marking the target was to climb above the flak and the enemy fighters. But this was not foolproof. His aircraft was hit on a number of occasions, and once – after his hydraulics and undercarriage had been damaged – he had to make a belly landing on reaching home. 

On another raid he was hit by flak, which left shrapnel lodged in his foot but still succeeded in recovering from a spin and pressed on to his target, marking it accurately. He was awarded a DFC for his "courage and determination". 

On a later mission his navigator was killed by shrapnel; one of the aircraft's engines was put out of action, and Humphrey had to nurse his Mosquito home on the remaining engine to make an emergency landing at an American base. 

William Ernest Gifford Humphrey was born on February 13 1923 in Karachi, where his father was a shipping broker. He was educated at Bradfield College, Berkshire, where he became head boy. 

Aged 17 he tried to follow his elder brother into the RAF, but was told to return later, which he did after six months' studying at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He was sent for training in Texas and in early 1943 was posted to No 105 Squadron at Marham, Norfolk. 

After completing his second tour, Humphrey was awarded a Bar to his DFC and spent six months helping with the development of Oboe and flying test runs. He returned to operational flying in January 1945, joining No 128 Squadron at Wyton. He flew 11 operations to Berlin, as well as others to Magdeburg, Erfurt, Wesel and Kiel. He then declined offers of a postwar career in the RAF – unlike his brother Andrew, who became a Marshal of the RAF and was to die in 1977 whilst serving as Chief of the Defence Staff. 

Bill did not expect to survive the war, and never ceased to marvel at his luck. Decades later, thinking of his comrades who had been lost, he would privately confess to being almost embarrassed by his survival. "One was robbed of one's youth and one's friends," he said once. "Living through a period like that affects the rest of your life. It makes you question what many people automatically accept as fact. I suppose it makes you a bit of a rebel." 

It certainly made him something of a misfit in an increasingly bureaucratic postwar world, and he developed a "can-do", "why not?" approach to obstacles he encountered during his management career with Burmah-Shell in India, where he witnessed the bloody consequences of Partition. 

When he was struck by amoebic dysentery in the subcontinent, Shell moved him to Syria, then to Bermuda. In 1966 he joined the glass-makers Pilkington to run its fibreglass operations in India, but illness forced him to return to Britain. 

He left the commercial world to "put something back". In particular, he wanted to try to alleviate unemployment, and for a time he ran the Elephant Jobs training workshop for young offenders in London. 

In 1978, with the help of his former employers Pilkington, he set up the Community of St Helens Trust in Lancashire. 

Humphrey's philosophy was not to provide work for people but to help them to provide it for themselves. This required a fundamental shift in the accepted wisdom of the time, as small businesses during the 1970s struggled against powerful trades unions. "We have to change the way people think," Humphrey said. 

He set up the trust in an old grammar school classroom opposite Pilkington's main gate, using discarded office furniture. The roof leaked, but he refused to have it repaired, using buckets to catch the raindrops – a useful indication of financial need when potential donors came to call. 

Appointed OBE in 1981, Humphrey is credited with contributing to an increase in the number of new small businesses in St Helens, and with giving life to the enterprise agency, forerunner of today's Business Links. Similar agencies sprang up all over Britain, encouraged by Michael Heseltine, who saw their potential on a visit to St Helens in 1980. 

Bill Humphrey, who died on December 10, is survived by his wife, Pauline, and a son.


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## vikingBerserker (Feb 20, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Feb 21, 2010)

(for his contributions to the war efforts)

 (for his contributions to humanity in general)


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Feb 21, 2010)

WOW!!!


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## Gnomey (Feb 21, 2010)




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## v2 (Feb 23, 2010)

*Jakub Bargielowski *D.F.C. Fighter Pilot 315 Squadron (Polish) died on Februar 21, 2010 aged 89.

Bargielowski


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## gepp (Feb 23, 2010)

Wing Commander Bob Doe, who died on February 21 aged 89, was the joint-third most successful fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, credited with 14 victories and two shared. 

Yet Doe had struggled to become a pilot, barely passing the necessary exams to gain his wings. He lacked confidence, was poor at aerobatics and disliked flying upside down – not an auspicious beginning for a fighter pilot.
On August 15 1940 – dubbed Adler Tag (Eagle Day) by Hermann Goering, the day he claimed he would destroy Fighter Command – the 20-year-old Doe was on standby with his Spitfire as part of No 234 Squadron at Middle Wallop, Hampshire, waiting for his first scramble. Years later he recalled: "I knew I was going to be killed. I was the worst pilot on the squadron." 
When the scramble bell rang, Doe was filled with dread but he took off; the fear of being thought a coward was more powerful than the fear of death.

One hour later Doe landed to find that four of his colleagues had failed to return; but he had shot down two Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters south of Swanage. The next day he destroyed a Bf 109 fighter and damaged a bomber; and two days after that he accounted for another Bf 109.

The Battle intensified, and Doe's outstanding memory was to be of continued tiredness, which produced the ability to sleep anytime and anywhere.

By the end of August he had destroyed five aircraft. On September 4 his squadron intercepted a large force of Bf 110s over the south coast near Chichester.

Doe shot down three and the following day accounted for a Bf 109 over Kent. More successes followed, including shooting down a Heinkel bomber. But by September 7, just three weeks after it had arrived at Middle Wallop, the squadron's 15 pilots had been reduced to just three.

Doe was rested for a short period before joining No 238 Squadron as a flight commander, this time flying the Hurricane. On September 30 he claimed another Heinkel bomber after a head-on attack, but by this time the Luftwaffe was sending most bombers over at night and the intensity of the day fighting reduced.

He shot down a Bf 110 on October 1 and seven days later claimed his final victory on what turned out to be the last major daylight bombing raid of the Battle, when he shot down a Junkers 88 bomber near Portland.

At the beginning of October Doe learnt that he had been awarded a DFC "for his outstanding dash and an eagerness to engage the enemy at close quarters". This "dash" almost proved his undoing a few days later. As he cleared some cloud his aircraft was hit repeatedly and he was badly wounded in the leg, lower back and arm. He bailed out and landed in a sewage drainage pit on Brownsea Island. It was his last action during the Battle.

In just eight weeks he had risen from being his squadron's junior pilot to a flight commander with at least 14 victories. A few weeks later he was awarded a Bar to his DFC.

The son of a head gardener, Robert Francis Thomas Doe was born at Reigate on March 10 1920. A shy, sickly boy, he left school at 14 to work as an office boy at the News of the World. He was one of the first young men to apply to the RAFVR and started to train as a pilot at a civilian flying school. He gained a short service commission in the RAF in March 1939.

After recovering from his wounds, Doe rejoined No 238 in December 1940. On January 3 1941 his aircraft suffered an engine failure on a night sortie and he made a forced landing. His restraining harness broke and he smashed his face into the gunsight. One eyeball had fallen out, his jaw was broken and his nose almost severed; he also broke his arm.

After 22 operations at East Grinstead Hospital he earned his place as a member of the Guinea Pig Club (for patients of novel surgical techniques), and he was able to resume operational flying within four months of his crash. A series of training posts followed at a fighter school, and in October 1943 he volunteered for service in India.

Two months later he formed No 10 Squadron, Indian Air Force, at Risalpur in the North-West Frontier Province, the last Indian Air Force squadron to be formed during the war. He arrived to find 27 pilots, most of them Indian, about 1,400 men and 16 Hurricanes. The rest was up to him.

They flew Hurricane IICs, known as "Hurri-bombers", armed with four 20mm cannon and two 500lb bombs. Doe worked his squadron hard, and once it was declared operational it moved to Burma to fly ground support missions in support of the Fourteenth Army's operations in the Arakan and the Kaladan Valley. After a particularly successful raid led by Doe in support of an amphibious landing, No 10 received a commendation from the commander of the Arakan Group.

Doe's Indian squadron flew intensively, attacking ground targets that were sometimes just a few hundred yards ahead of friendly troops, as General Slim began his southern advance into Burma and towards Rangoon. In April 1945 Doe left the squadron to attend the staff college at Quetta. For his service with the Indian Air Force he was awarded a DSO for his "inspiring leadership and unconquerable spirit and great devotion to duty". At the end of the war he was given the job of running the air display for Indian Victory Week.

Doe remained in the RAF and, after appointments with the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, was sent to Egypt in May 1950 to command No 32 Squadron, equipped with Vampire jet fighters. He had never flown a jet before, so on his way to the squadron he managed to stop off at a maintenance unit and borrow a Vampire for a few hours to familiarise himself. By the time he left in May 1953, No 32 had built up a reputation for esprit de corps envied by all the other RAF and Army units on the base.

He returned to Britain to join the Fighter Gunnery Wing as a senior instructor. A series of staff appointments followed, including two years with the Chiefs of Staff Secretariat. This placed him in the corridors of power, and the boy who had left school at 14 had to learn how to write minutes which would be scrutinised and reworded by secretaries and read by the chiefs. Doe found this job to be the most difficult and challenging appointment of his career. In April 1966 he opted for premature retirement.

Doe settled in Tunbridge Wells, where he joined a family-owned garage business before moving on to Rusthall, Kent, to establish his own very successful garage and contract hire and self-drive car company. He took a passionate interest in his garden and three greenhouses, and in his large family.
Much-admired but always modest, Doe never considered himself a hero, saying that he had been "just doing my duty". But he did write about his wartime experiences in Bob Doe, Fighter Pilot, published in 1989.
Bob Doe is survived by his third wife, Betty, and by five children and three stepchildren.
telegraph.co.uk news military-obituaries /air-force-obituaries


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## RabidAlien (Feb 23, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Feb 26, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Feb 26, 2010)

TO


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## Gnomey (Feb 26, 2010)




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## v2 (Feb 26, 2010)

*Kermit Tyler* - Officer who dismissed reports of incoming planes on Dec. 7, 1941, dies.

American pilot who dismissed initial reports of what turned out to be the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has died at age 96.

Kermit Tyler was the Army Air Forces' first lieutenant on temporary duty at Ft. Shafter's radar information center in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, when two privates reported seeing an unusually large blip on their radar screen, indicating a large number of aircraft about 132 miles away and fast approaching.

"Don't worry about it," Tyler famously replied, thinking it was a flight of U.S. B-17 bombers that was due in from the mainland.

The aircraft were the first wave of more than 180 Japanese fighters, torpedo bombers, dive bombers and horizontal bombers whose surprise attack on Pearl Harbor shortly before 8 a.m. plunged the United States into World War II.

Many questioned his decision for years, and the 1970 movie "Tora! Tora! Tora!" portrayed him in an unflattering light. Audiences watching a documentary at the Pearl Harbor Visitors Center theater still groan when they hear Tyler's response to the radar report.

Daniel Martinez, Pearl Harbor historian for the National Park Service, said Tyler's role was misunderstood and that congressional committees and military inquiries that looked into what happened at Pearl Harbor did not find him at fault. He said a flight of B-17s flying in from Hamilton Field north of San Francisco was indeed due to land at Hickam Field.

"Kermit Tyler took the brunt of the criticism, but that was practically his first night on the job, and he was told that if music was playing on the radio all night, it meant the B-17s were coming in," Martinez said

The music played all night so the B-17 pilots could home in on the signal, and when he heard the music as he was driving to work, Tyler figured the aircraft would be coming in soon.

"I wake up at nights sometimes and think about it," Tyler said in a 2007 interview with the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. "But I don't feel guilty. I did all I could that morning."

Tyler, who suffered two strokes within the last two years, died Jan. 23 at his home in San Diego, said his daughter Julie Jones.

After Pearl Harbor, Tyler flew combat missions in the Pacific. He retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in 1961, launched a career in real estate, and was a landlord.

Tyler is survived by three children. He was preceded in death by his wife, Marian, and a son.

R.I.P.


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## Gnomey (Feb 26, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Feb 26, 2010)

For all of the above.


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## vikingBerserker (Feb 26, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Feb 27, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Mar 2, 2010)




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## Colin1 (Mar 8, 2010)

Andree Peel
who helped dozens of RAF and USAAF pilots escape from occupied Europe

BBC News - WWII heroine Andree Peel dies in Long Ashton aged 105


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## BikerBabe (Mar 8, 2010)

May she rest in peace. A true heroine.


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Mar 8, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Mar 8, 2010)




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## Vassili Zaitzev (Mar 8, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Mar 8, 2010)

I hate the fact that the first time we hear about many of these individual's exploits and accomplishments, is after they've passed away.


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## v2 (Mar 9, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Mar 9, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Mar 9, 2010)




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## v2 (Mar 9, 2010)

Colin1 said:


> Andree Peel
> who helped dozens of RAF and USAAF pilots escape from occupied Europe
> 
> BBC News - WWII heroine Andree Peel dies in Long Ashton aged 105



more about Andree Peel: 
Andrée Peel - Telegraph


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## v2 (Mar 9, 2010)

Air Vice-Marshal Mike Hedgeland has died aged 87....

Air Vice-Marshal Mike Hedgeland, who has died aged 87, played a significant part in the development and use of blind navigation and bombing aids for Bomber Command's Pathfinder Force. He subsequently served as the President of the Ordnance Board. 
Hedgeland was keen to be a pilot, but the RAF valued his inventive minds more greatly and he was commissioned into the Technical Branch in 1942. In August he was selected to join a team led by Dr Bernard Lovell on the development of the H2S blind-bombing radar system at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) at Malvern. 
There followed a period of intense activity and the first operational set was ready by the end of the year when Hedgeland took a team of engineers to the Pathfinder airfield at Gravely, Bedfordshire, to install the set in the Halifaxes of No 35 Squadron. Hedgeland remained at the base as the first squadron radar officer appointed in Bomber Command 

In this post he was also responsible for servicing the GEE navigation aid and the Monica early warning radar, both of which significantly improved the accuracy and effectiveness of the bombers. In 1944 he moved to Wyton, home to more Pathfinder squadrons, where he had the additional responsibility for other bombing and navigation radar aids such as OBOE and Loran. Together with H2S, these devices had a major impact on the accuracy of the Pathfinder aircraft and the main force of bombers that followed them into the target to bomb on the Pathfinder markers. 

In early 1945, Hedgeland moved back to TRE, where he met his wife (a physicist there), and where he worked on more advanced versions of H2S radars and on the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) equipment. For his wartime work he was mentioned in despatches. 

Philip Michael Sweatman Hedgeland was born in Maidstone on November 24 1922 and educated at the town's grammar school. He saw the Battle of Britain unfold in the skies of Kent and whilst waiting to join the RAF he worked for the BBC. 

By the end of the war, Hedgeland was the RAF's most experienced engineer on airborne radars and he spent the next three years at the Central Bomber Establishment where he worked on developing and improving the wartime aids for the next generation of RAF bombers. In September 1948 he was given leave to spend three years at Imperial College London, where he gained an honours degree in Engineering. He served with the University Air Squadron and learned to fly. 

On his return from Imperial he completed his training as a pilot and later converted to the Meteor jet fighter. Over the next few years he took every opportunity to fly and he regularly used a Meteor to calibrate ground radars. 

In February 1952 Hedgeland returned to Malvern for the third time, where he was responsible for masterminding the introduction into service of the navigation and bombing system (NBS) for the RAF's V-bomber force, which incorporated H2S Mark 9. Five years later he was posted to Headquarters Bomber Command where he commanded the Avionics Development Unit with responsibility for the maintenance of all radio and radar systems for the V-Force. 

In 1960 he finally escaped from H2S and after a series of appointments in the technical plans department of the Air Ministry, he attended the Air Warfare Course. In May 1963 he left for the Far East to fill the joint service post of Director of Signals. With British forces heavily involved in Brunei and in the Indonesian Confrontation, where operations in Borneo often occurred in remote and inaccessible locations, great demands were placed on his expertise and organisational abilities. 

Hedgeland returned to the UK in December 1965 and took command of the RAF's central communications centre at Stanbridge. After attending the Imperial Defence College in 1970 he was appointed Director of Electronics, Airborne Radar, in the Procurement Executive at the Ministry of Defence. A colleague commented: "Mike Hedgeland did more to further the cause of airborne radar than anyone else and he was greatly respected." 

In March 1975 he was appointed to the Ordnance Board, which had responsibility for giving advice on the safety and suitability for service of all weapons and those parts of weapons systems and stores in which explosives are used. After a period as vice-president he was appointed president, the first electrical engineer to hold the appointment. 

After retiring from the RAF he acted as a consultant to various companies in the communications field. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical Engineers and was an active committee member with the Thames Valley Branch of the Institute. He also continued to fly, giving air cadets air experience flights and towing gliders for the RAF Gliding and Soaring Association. 

Hedgeland devoted a great deal of his time to the Pathfinder Association. Having witnessed so many young men depart on operations never to return, he had a deep respect for the aircrew who, in turn, held him in high regard. 

The veterans elected him to be their president from 1985 to 1987, a unique honour for a ground-based officer who had never flown on operations. He arranged for the main office blocks at RAF Wyton, the wartime headquarters of No 8 Pathfinder Group, to be named after Pathfinder VC holders. 

Hedgeland had a lifelong interest in radio, communications and broadcasting, starting with a crystal set under the bedclothes; progressing to amateur "ham" radio operation; and then early experiments with FM broadcasting. 

His short time at the BBC started an interest in programme production and whilst serving as a group captain in the Far East he involved himself in the Forces Broadcasting Service as the disc jockey Mike Philips. 

In retirement Hedgeland, a man of great charm, was able to indulge in his love of his garden and of travel, making several round-the-world trips meeting old Pathfinder comrades in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 

source: Telegraph


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## RabidAlien (Mar 9, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Mar 9, 2010)

RIP



TO


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Mar 9, 2010)




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## syscom3 (Mar 15, 2010)

> *Mr. Graves served in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and ’45,*



By MICHAEL POLLAK
Published: March 14, 2010

Peter Graves, ‘Mission - Impossible’ Star, Dies at 83 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

Mr. Graves in a Geico commercial, spoofing his own image.

He died of a heart attack at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., said Fred Barman, his business manager.

It was a testament to Mr. Graves’s earnest, unhammy ability to make fun of himself that after decades of playing square he-men and straitlaced authority figures, he was perhaps best known to younger audiences for a deadpan line in “Airplane!” (“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”) and one from a memorable Geico car insurance commercial (“I was one lucky woman”).

Born Peter Aurness in Minneapolis, the blond, 6-foot-2 Mr. Graves served in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and ’45, studied drama at the University of Minnesota under the G.I. Bill of Rights and played the clarinet in local bands before following his older brother, James Arness, to Hollywood.

His first credited film appearance was in “Rogue River” (1950), with Rory Calhoun. Mr. Graves’s getting a Hollywood contract for the picture persuaded his fiancée’s family to let her marry him. He changed his name for that movie to Graves, his maternal grandfather’s name, to avoid confusion with his older brother.

He soon found himself in classics like Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17” (1953), where he played a security officer with a secret; Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter” (1955); Otto Preminger’s “Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell” (1955); and John Ford’s “Long Gray Line” (1955).

Mr. Graves became known for taking all his roles seriously, injecting a certain believability into even the campiest plot. He appeared in westerns like “The Yellow Tomahawk” (1954) and “Wichita” (1955); a Civil War adventure, “The Raid” (1954); and gangster movies (“Black Tuesday,” 1954, and “The Naked Street,” 1955). He played earnest scientists in science fiction/horror films: “Killers From Space” (1954), “It Conquered the World” (1956) and “Beginning of the End” (1957, about giant grasshoppers in Chicago). There was also cold war science fiction anti-Communism: “Red Planet Mars” (1952).

Other movies included “East of Sumatra” (1953), “Beneath the 12-Mile Reef” (1953), “A Rage to Live” (1965), “Texas Across the River” (1966), “Sergeant Ryker” (1968 ), “The Ballad of Josie” (1968 ), “The Five-Man Army” (1969), “The Clonus Horror” (1979), “The Guns and the Fury” (1981), “Savannah Smiles” (1982), “Number One With a Bullet” (1986), “Addams Family Values” (1993), “The House on Haunted Hill” (1999) and “Men in Black II” (2002).

In 1955 Mr. Graves began his career as a television series regular as the star of “Fury,” a western family adventure series about a rancher named Jim Newton, his orphaned ward and the boy’s black stallion. It ran until 1959 on NBC, helped pioneer television adventure series and solidified Mr. Graves’s TV credentials.

Some of his hundreds of television credits include “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Whiplash” (1961), “The Dean Martin Show” (1970), the Herman Wouk mini-series “The Winds of War” (1983) and “War and Remembrance” (1988 ), “Fantasy Island” (1978-83) and “7th Heaven” (1999-2005). He served as the host or narrator for numerous television specials and performed in television movies of the week like “The President’s Plane Is Missing” (1973), “Where Have All the People Gone” (1974) and “Death Car on the Freeway” (1979).

Mr. Graves played his most famous television character from 1967 to 1973 in “Mission: Impossible,” reprising it from 1988 to 1990. He was Jim Phelps, the leader of the Impossible Missions Force, a super-secret government organization that conducted dangerous undercover assignments (which he always chose to accept). After the tape summarizing the objective self-destructed, the team would use not violence, but elaborate con games to trap the villains. In his role, Mr. Graves was a model of cool, deadpan efficiency.

But he was appalled when his agent sent him the script for the role of a pedophile pilot in “Airplane!” (1980). “I tore my hair and ranted and raved and said, ‘This is insane,’ he recalled on “Biography” in 1997. Some of the role’s lines (“Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”) looked at first as if they could get him thrown in jail, never mind ruining his career. He told his agent to tell David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the director-producers, to find themselves a comedian. He relented when the Zucker brothers explained that the secret of their spoof would be the deadpan behavior of the cast; they didn’t want a comedian, they wanted the Peter Graves of “Fury” and “Mission: Impossible.”

Mr. Graves used his familiar earnest, all-American demeanor in service of some of the comic movie’s most outrageous moments. He reprised the role of Captain Oveur in “Airplane II” in 1982.

Starting in the mid-1980s Mr. Graves was the host of a number of television science specials on “Discover.” In 1987, he became the host of the Arts and Entertainment Network’s long-running “Biography” series, narrating the lives of figures like Prince Andrew, Muhammad Ali, pioneers of the space program, Churchill, Ernie Kovacs, Edward G. Robinson, Sophia Loren, Jackie Robinson, Howard Hughes, Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Winters.

In 1997, Mr. Graves was the subject of his own “Biography” presentation, “Peter Graves: Mission Accomplished.” In 2002, Mr. Graves was interviewed for a special about the documentary series, “Biography: 15 Years and Counting.”

Mr. Graves won a Golden Globe Award in 1971 for his performance in “Mission: Impossible” and in 1997, he and “Biography” won an Emmy Award for outstanding informational series.

In 1998, he joined his wife, Joan, in an effort to get Los Angeles to ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers from residential areas, testifying before the City Council, “’We’re all victims of these machines.”

He is survived by his wife, Joan Graves, and three daughters, Amanda Lee Graves, Claudia King Graves and Kelly Jean Graves.

Derrick Henry contributed reporting.


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## v2 (Mar 15, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Mar 15, 2010)

Great actor,yes....anybody know what he did in the AAF during the War?


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## Njaco (Mar 15, 2010)




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## wheelsup_cavu (Mar 16, 2010)

I never knew that James Arness was his brother.
Rest in Peace.







Wheels


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## ToughOmbre (Mar 16, 2010)

"Mission: Impossible" was one of the hottest shows on TV back in my college days.

RIP



TO


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## syscom3 (Mar 27, 2010)

I saw this this morning. He made ace decades after the war. 

WALKER, JACK G. Colonel Jack G. Walker, World War II ace fighter pilot and distinguished veteran of the 97th fighter squadron, 82nd fighter group, flew west on Monday, March 8, 2010, in Riverside, CA. He was born on July 7, 1920, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. He grew up in West Hollywood, CA. While attending Pasadena Junior College, he learned how to fly through a program initiated by President Roosevelt called the "Civilian Pilot Training Program." He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and received his training in the Cessna AT-17 Bobcat, also known as the "Bamboo Bomber," at Stockton Training Field, CA. During World War II, he was assigned to the 82nd Fighter Group and flew 51 combat missions over North Africa and Italy in his P-38 named "Elaine III." He is credited with five air-to-air victories and survived a crash landing of his P-38 in Wales. He received numerous medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross Air Medal with twelve oak leaf clusters, and the French Croix de Guerre. It was almost 50 years after the war that he was awarded "Ace" status. A group doing research on pilots who had four victories and a probable, located his wingman who confirmed this mission. After the war, Jack flew P-51s with the California Air National Guard and spent 31 years in the Air Force Reserves, retiring as a Colonel. He had a 30 year career as a teacher and coach. After moving to San Diego, he became a frequent attendee and a popular guest at air shows. He is survived by his daughter Jalaine and husband Dan Trainor, and his son Brian and wife Sandy Walker. His smile and wit will be greatly missed. Services were at the Riverside National Cemetery March 12, 2010, with an honor guard and a three gun salute, which he would have been so proud of.


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## FLYBOYJ (Mar 27, 2010)




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## v2 (Mar 27, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Mar 27, 2010)

RIP Colonel



TO


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## Vassili Zaitzev (Mar 27, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Mar 27, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Mar 27, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Mar 27, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Mar 28, 2010)




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## Njaco (Mar 28, 2010)




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## v2 (Mar 30, 2010)

Oberstleutnant *Wolfgang Schenck "Bombo"*died on 05-March-10, aged 97 years old.

Wolfgang "Bombo" Schenck was the first man to command a jet aircraft unit in combat and is considered one of the most diversified pilots to fly for the Luftwaffe during World War II. Born in Windhoek, German Southwest Africa, he was schooled in Germany and later went to Tanganyika to become a coffee planter. In late 1936, he returned to Germany and joined the Luftwaffe. After pilot training, he was assigned to the famous JG (Fighter Wing) 132 Richthofen to fly the Messerschmitt 109 single-engine fighter. The unit was later renamed ZG (Destroyer Wing) 1 and equipped with the twin-engine Me-110 heavy fighter. He then participated in the German blitzkrieg operations against Poland, Norway, and France before suffering combat wounds, which hospitalized him for 3 months. 

On 4 September 1940 with his recuperation complete, Schenck joined a combat test unit, EGr (Experimental Wing) 210, which was tasked to develop and perfect fighter-bomber tactics under the direct supervision of General Field Marshal Albrecht Kesselring, Commander of Air Fleet 2. In April 1941, his unit was reorganized as StG (Dive Bomber Wing) 210 and took part in the advance into Russia. In August 1941, as Commander of the 1st Squadron, StG 210, he received the coveted Knight's Cross for the crushing attack on the airfield at Tarnopol, on the South Front. Following a short flight test tour in Germany at Rechlin, Schenck went back into combat in March 1942 as Group Commander of I/ZG 1 (Group I of ZG 1), leading his unit to many successes in Russia. At age 29, he received the Oak Leaves to his Knight's Cross and was selected to command the newly created SG (Fighter-Bomber Wing) 2, flying Focke Wulf 190s in the Mediterranean theater. 

Wounded again in 1943, he recovered and later was made Inspector of Fighter-Bomber Pilots. In May 1944, due to his extensive combat experience in many different aircraft, he was tasked to lead Special Command E-51, Kommando Schenck. This unit, sent to France, tested the Me-262-A jet as a fighter-bomber against advancing Allied ground forces. From December 1944 to January 1945, he commanded KG (Bomber Wing) 51, flying the Me- 262-A2 and as the war ended, he served as Inspector of Jet Aircraft. Schenck flew over 400 combat missions in World War II in a variety of aircraft, achieving 18 aerial victories and sinking 40,000 tons of Allied shipping. After the war, he returned to Africa and began a career as a bush pilot--logging over 17,000 flying hours.


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## RabidAlien (Mar 30, 2010)

Gotta respect the man's skills!


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Mar 30, 2010)

No kidding RA! Wow!


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## Gnomey (Mar 30, 2010)




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## v2 (Apr 3, 2010)

F/ Lt *Tom Fletcher * 

Flight Lieutenant Tom Fletcher, who died on March 10 aged 95, was the RAF's most decorated air-sea rescue pilot and was once recommended for a Victoria Cross.

On October 2 1942 a Spitfire pilot was forced to bail out over the English Channel, landing in the sea four miles off the French coast on the edge of a minefield. When his leader transmitted an emergency call, the naval authorities at Dover decided it was impossible to get a launch through the minefield, and too dangerous for rescue by a Walrus amphibious aircraft. Despite this, Fletcher immediately volunteered to go, taking off in his Walrus with a Spitfire squadron providing an escort. 

He arrived on the scene just as another Spitfire squadron was engaging enemy fighters trying to interfere with the rescue. He located the dinghy, landed 150 yards away and taxied towards the survivor, who failed to grasp the boathook on the first pass as he fell out of his dinghy. 

In the strong wind and choppy sea Fletcher tried again, and the pilot was hauled on board. He then taxied clear of the minefield and took off, just clearing a floating mine. Throughout the operation his Walrus had come under heavy fire from shore batteries. 

The Air Officer Commanding of No 11 (Fighter) Group strongly recommended Fletcher for a Victoria Cross, writing: "Sergeant Fletcher was fully aware of the risks involved when he volunteered for the task. He carried out the rescue with conspicuous gallantry... he ignored all dangers, and through coolness, considered judgment and skill succeeded in picking up the pilot." 

In the event, Fletcher was awarded an immediate DFM, the next highest gallantry award available for a SNCO at that time. 

Thomas Fletcher was born on September 7 1914 at Leigh in Lancashire and educated at Leigh Grammar School. Although his job as a commercial traveller for a medical equipment business was, at the beginning of the war, classified as a reserved occupation, he volunteered to be a pilot in the RAF, joining up in June 1940. 

On completing his training, he joined No 43 Squadron to fly Spitfires as a sergeant pilot. An effervescent, outspoken and sometimes rebellious character, Fletcher did not see eye-to-eye with his CO, who had him transferred to another Spitfire squadron flying coastal patrols. This fitted him well for air-sea rescue duties, and he joined a flight at Hawkinge, which soon became No 277 Squadron. 

Flying a Lysander spotting aircraft during the summer of 1942, Fletcher found a number of aircrew in the sea and directed RAF high speed launches to rescue them. By the time of his exploit in the minefield in October he had already helped to save nine airmen. 

On December 14 1942, six men were spotted adrift on a raft 10 miles east of Dover, and Fletcher touched down in the rough seas even though he knew that it would be impossible to take off again. 

In failing light he made three passes, picking up the men one by one – although several of them were swept from the raft. Even as his Walrus started to take in water he succeeded in recovering one of the survivors. By now it was completely dark, and Fletcher reluctantly abandoned the search and started to taxi towards Dover. The aircraft continued to ship water, and it took him almost two hours to make the harbour – where the harbour master reprimanded him for not getting permission to bring the sinking aircraft into port. The survivors for whom Fletcher had gone to such lengths were German sailors. 

Fletcher was awarded an immediate Bar to his DFM, one of only 60 awarded in the Second World War. 

In the summer of 1943 Fletcher picked up seven more ditched aircrew, including a USAAF fighter pilot and a Belgian Spitfire pilot. Then, on October 3, he went in search of a Typhoon pilot reported in the sea too near the French coast for a launch to attempt a rescue. Fletcher found three dinghies, landed and picked up the occupants – survivors from an RAF bomber. Having taken them back to base, he immediately took off again, finally locating and rescuing the Typhoon pilot. 

The sea was too rough for a take-off, and he began the long taxi back to England. A Royal Navy launch was sent to assist, but then the Walrus lost a float. The attempt to tow the aircraft failed, and it started to sink. Fletcher, his crew and their survivor had to abandon the Walrus and transfer to the launch. He was awarded an immediate DFC. 

In spring the next year Fletcher took off to rescue a Canadian fighter pilot. The dinghy was so close to the French coast that he had to fly over enemy-held territory to approach it, so that he would be in a position for an immediate take-off. Throughout the rescue he was under heavy anti-aircraft fire and his crewman was wounded. The pilot was snatched from the sea as Fletcher taxied past and brought back to England. 

Fletcher later rescued an American bomber crew from the Somme Estuary and, on April 30, a Spitfire pilot – his final rescue. He had by now saved more people than any other pilot. 

Remaining in the RAF after the war, in July 1945 Fletcher was attached to the High Speed Flight as the search-and-rescue pilot when Group Captain EM Donaldson broke the world speed record off the Sussex coast flying a Meteor jet. He later served as an instructor at the Search and Rescue Training Unit. In 1948 he was badly burned when his Mosquito crashed during a training sortie at the Central Flying School. 

Fletcher trained as a fighter controller, but returned to flying in 1956 before continuing his career at ground control centres in Fighter Command. He retired from the RAF in 1964. 

He spent three years with the company RFD, redesigning life-saving equipment and working on the design of rafts carried in larger aircraft, including Concorde. In 1968 he joined MAFF, where for 10 years he was a higher executive officer responsible for EEC subsidy payments to farmers. 

Tom Fletcher helped to establish the Shoreham Air Sea Rescue Museum and assisted for many years at the annual air shows at Shoreham and Farnborough. He had a keen interest in motor racing, travelling around the country in a caravan to attend meetings. 

He married, in 1941, Mabel Berry. She died in 2003, and he is survived by their son. 

Source: Telegraph


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## RabidAlien (Apr 3, 2010)

Dang, what an incredible career!!


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Apr 3, 2010)

WOW!


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## Vic Balshaw (Apr 3, 2010)

A true hero.


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## Airframes (Apr 5, 2010)

A truly remarkable man. RIP Tom Fletcher.


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## Gnomey (Apr 5, 2010)




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## v2 (Apr 21, 2010)

Wing Commander *Alan 'Red' Owen * 

Wing Commander Alan 'Red' Owen, who has died aged 87, was one of the RAF's most successful night fighter pilots of the Second World War, when he was credited with destroying a minimum of 15 enemy aircraft.
Owen and his radar operator, Vic McAllister, joined No 85 Squadron, equipped with Mosquitos, in August 1944. By that time they had already established a reputation as an outstanding team during operations in North Africa and Italy. 

In the months after the D-Day landings and the Allied advance into France, No 85's role was to undertake bomber support operations over Germany. The Mosquito night fighter crews mingled with the RAF bomber streams seeking out enemy night fighters attempting to attack the bombers. They also flew "intruder missions" to strike enemy aircraft as they took off and landed at their airfields. 
During a brief period in the summer of 1944, the squadron was also employed on patrols over Kent intercepting V-1 flying bombs. On August 5 that year Owen brought down a V-1, before resuming night operations. 

On the night of September 17/18, he destroyed two Messerschmitt Bf 110 night fighters, and by the end of the year he had accounted for seven more aircraft, including a Focke-Wulf 190 over Hamburg, in addition to destroying aircraft on the ground. 

When patrolling south of Frankfurt on December 22, Owen engaged a Junkers Ju 88 and shot it down. Seven minutes later his operator made contact with another night fighter; Owen closed in and destroyed it. Before the patrol was over there was a third contact, and after a 15-minute chase, during which his target took violent evasive action, Owen finally managed to get in a cannon burst; the Bf 110 went into a vertical dive and crashed. 

For their work with No 85 Squadron, both Owen and McAllister were awarded DFCs and within two months each had received a Bar. The citation commented on their "exceptional skill" and described them as "fearless and devoted members of aircraft crew". 

One of eight children, Alan Joseph Owen was born in Chelsea on July 8 1922 and educated at St Mary's Church of England School, Merton Park, and at Wimbledon Technical College, where he trained as a technical draughtsman before joining an engineering firm at Cheam, in Surrey. 

In January 1941 he followed two of his brothers into the RAF and trained as a pilot, his shock of red hair attracting the nickname "Ginger", later adapted to "Red". 

At first Owen was selected to fly Beaufighters, and it was then that he teamed up with McAllister. They were to remain together throughout their operational flying appointments to become one of the RAF's most successful night fighter crews. 

The two sergeants joined No 600 Squadron, and in November 1942 moved with the squadron to North Africa. On the night of December 21/22 they gained No 600's first success in that theatre when they shot down a Heinkel III bomber near Algiers. 

Return fire from the enemy bomber damaged the Beaufighter's undercarriage, and Owen crash-landed at his base. As it slid across the airfield, the Beaufighter collided with a Spitfire, a concrete mixer and a fuel tanker – all of which some wag added to their tally on the squadron score board – before finally smashing into a wall. The aircraft was completely wrecked. 

A few weeks later Owen accounted for another Heinkel as well as an Italian four-engine bomber, which he intercepted at 20,000ft north of Bone, in Algeria. Both he and McAllister were awarded DFMs. 

Subsequently, operating over Sicily, the crew shot down three more aircraft and damaged two others before returning to England in November 1943 to be instructors. 

After his successes over Germany, Owen remained with No 85 until June 1946, initially as a flight commander and later – at the age of only 23 – as the CO. He left the RAF for civilian life but could not settle, and in July 1947 rejoined as a flight lieutenant. 

Owen was sent to No 13 Squadron in Egypt, flying Mosquitos on aerial mapping photographic work. In 1950 he returned to England to develop radar interception tactics at the Central Fighter Establishment. 

After flying night fighters in Germany, he converted to the Meteor jet fighter and assumed command in Malta of No 39 Squadron, which later moved to Cyprus in case it was required for operations during the Suez crisis; in the event, it did not see action. 

After a period at the School of Land/Air Warfare at Old Sarum, working as air liaison officer with the Army's Southern Command, Owen returned to the night fighter role in April 1962, taking command of No 23 Squadron. 

This was in the early days of in-flight refuelling, and in October he led three of the squadron's Javelins on a non-stop flight from Britain to Aden, setting a Fighter Command record of eight hours 50 minutes. 

Two months later the squadron extended its range when Owen led 12 Javelins from RAF Coltishall, in Norfolk, to Singapore and back using in-flight refuelling and staging through the RAF's bases in Cyprus, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. In January 1964 he was awarded an AFC. 

From October 1964 until his retirement from the service in July 1969, Owen served in the fighter operations division at the Ministry of Defence before being posted to a Sector Operations appointment near Jever in Germany. 

This was during the Cold War, when it was a primary function of the RAF to monitor the incursions and activities of Warsaw Pact aircraft and to maintain the integrity of Nato airspace. 

Following his retirement from the RAF, Owen worked for the British Aircraft Co-operation Commission in Saudi Arabia for two years. 

In 1974 he was appointed road safety officer for East Sussex county council. After promotion to county road safety officer, he transferred to a similar position with Kent county council before retiring in 1984. 

For much of his life Owen enjoyed a vigorous game of squash, later choosing golf as his principal sporting pastime. 

"Red" Owen died on February 13. He married, in 1945, Rita Drew, who survives him with their two sons and four daughters.


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## v2 (Apr 21, 2010)

Wing Commander *Lucian Ercolani * 
Wing Commander Lucian Ercolani, who has died aged 92, was a wartime bomber pilot decorated three times for gallantry in operations over Europe and in the Far East; he was later chairman of the family furniture company Ercol.
On the night of November 7/8 1941, Ercolani took off in his Wellington of No 214 Squadron to attack Berlin. The target was obscured by cloud, and Ercolani dropped his high-explosive bombs but decided not to release the incendiaries as, if dropped in the wrong place, they might cause confusion for the following aircraft. 

Over Munster on the return journey, his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire, and the incendiary containers caught fire. The crew's attempt to jettison them failed and the fire spread over the whole of the bomber's floor, filling the aircraft with smoke. 
The flames eventually subsided, but were never completely extinguished, leaving the midsection of the aircraft almost burned away with most of the fuselage fabric destroyed. The aircraft's wings and engines had also been damaged, and it steadily lost height and speed. 

Despite the appalling state of his aircraft and his limited ability to control it, Ercolani decided to try to make it to England. The journey took three hours: he crossed the enemy coast at 1,000ft and eventually had to ditch in the Thames Estuary. 

When the aircraft hit the water Ercolani was injured, and he went down with the sinking bomber – but the cockpit section floated to the surface, allowing him to join his crew in the dinghy, which then floated into the North Sea and eventually along the English Channel. The searching ships and aircraft failed to locate it, and the crew's attempts to paddle ashore were ineffective. Finally, after three days drifting in the bad November weather, Ercolani and his men were washed up on the southernmost tip of the Isle of Wight. 

Flying Officer Ercolani was awarded an immediate DSO – a very rare accolade for so junior an officer – for "outstanding courage, initiative and devotion to duty". 

The son of an Italian furniture designer and manufacturer who had come to England in 1910, Lucian Brett Ercolani was born at High Wycombe on August 9 1917 and educated at Oundle, where he excelled at sport. He left school in 1934 to work at his father's company, Ercol. 

When war broke out he joined the RAF and trained as a pilot in Canada, returning in May 1941 to join No 214 Squadron. In October the next year Ercolani left for India, joining No 99 Squadron near Calcutta. 

The squadron was one of two Wellington long-range bomber units used to attack enemy airfields and river, road and rail supply routes. Ercolani led many of these missions over the ensuing months before the squadron switched to night bombing. Inadequate maps, appalling weather and poor aircraft serviceability due to lack of spares added to the hazards of flying during the "Forgotten War". 

With the expansion of the strategic bomber force and the introduction of the long-range Liberator, in September 1943 Ercolani went to the newly-formed No 355 Squadron. He flew many sorties deep into enemy territory, some involving a round trip of 2,000 miles, to destroy the supply networks used to reinforce and support the Burma battlefield. An important and frequent target was the Siam-Burma railway built by Allied PoWs. 

In September 1944 Ercolani returned as CO to No 99 Squadron, where he won the respect and affection of his airmen ("erks", in RAF slang), who affectionately dubbed him "THE Erk". He led many of the most difficult raids himself, often taking his heavy four-engine bomber as low as 100ft to drop his delay-fused bombs as his gunners strafed buildings or rolling stock. 

He attacked supply dumps and Japanese headquarters, and throughout the early months of 1945 regularly led forces of up to 24 Liberators against targets in Siam, southern Burma and on the Kra Isthmus, often in the face of heavy anti-aircraft fire. He was the master bomber for an attack against the railway system at Bangkok and was mentioned in despatches. 

By the end of March 1945 the decisive battle for central Burma was won, and a few weeks later the "erks" of No 99 bade a sad farewell to their popular CO. For his outstanding leadership and courage he was awarded a Bar to his DSO. 

Ercolani was then put in command of No 159 Squadron, part of the Pathfinder Force, attacking targets in Malaya and flying a number of mining operations to distant ports, including Singapore – sorties of more than 20 hours duration. 

On June 15 he led a force of Liberators to attack a 10,000-ton tanker, the Tohu Maru, which had been located in the South China Sea. The mission involved a round trip of 2,500 miles. Flying in appalling weather, some of the Liberators were unable to find the target, while some were damaged by enemy fire. Ercolani attacked at low level and made three separate bombing runs, registering successful hits on the tanker, which caught fire. Subsequent reconnaissance reports confirmed that it had sunk, a devastating blow to the Japanese troops depending on its vital cargo of fuel. Ercolani was awarded an immediate DFC. 

He flew his last operation on August 5 when he attacked a target in Siam. Almost immediately, his squadron then turned its attention to dropping food and medical supplies to the many PoW camps spread across Siam and the East Indies. 

Ercolani left the RAF in March 1946 and rejoined his father at Ercol. Owing to the scarcity of raw materials, new furniture had been rationed since 1942, and the particular achievement of the Ercolanis was to mass-produce the Windsor chair while conforming to the stringent requirements of cost and material laid down by the Board of Trade. At its peak of production, Ercol made around 3,000 Windsor chairs a week. 

For many years Ercolani served as chairman and joint managing director with his brother. He formally retired in the mid-1990s but remained closely involved with the company until his death on February 13. 

In 1980 he became Master of the Furniture Makers' Guild, of which his father had been a founder member. 

Ercolani took a great interest in young people and in their education, whether they were Ercol's apprentices or those training in design. For some years he served as a governor at High Wycombe College. 

In 1992 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in design by the Council of National Academic Awards. He was a devoted supporter of the British Legion, and had a passion for classic cars and for sailing – his many forays to sea took him from the Hamble to France and to the Azores. 

Lucian Ercolani married, in 1941, Cynthia Douglas. She died in 2004, and he is survived by their daughter; a son predeceased him.


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## v2 (Apr 21, 2010)

*Ryszard Kaczorowski* 
Ryszard Kaczorowski, who has died aged 90, was the last president of the Polish government-in-exile, which for two generations defied political gravity by continuing to exist after the Soviet takeover of eastern Europe.
Uniquely among the exiled governments of the Second World War, the Polish version had a constitutional mechanism for a legitimate administration to be formed on foreign soil. When the existing government was interned in Romania after Poland was invaded by the Germans and the Russians in 1939, a substitute was formed in Paris. It soon moved to London, where it was a valued ally until the Attlee government stopped recognising it in favour of Soviet-dominated Warsaw. 

As some 300,000 Poles made new lives in Britain, rather than return to their occupied homeland after the war, their administration survived for 45 years, growing old and quarrelling bitterly. For many observers it seemed an unreal survival from an ancient comedy. 
The age of its cabinet members — unpaid volunteers who had retired from the jobs they had found in Britain — ranged from 60 to 81. 

There was a minister for military matters without an army, a ministry of justice with no law courts and a minister for foreign affairs who enjoyed no official recognition anywhere. 

Yet they looked after the interests of the Polish diaspora and exasperated the authorities in what they often referred to as “the inhuman land”, who declared that those who worked against the “People’s” Poland were no longer welcome. 

Their dogged opposition to the Soviet Union exasperated the Foreign Office by their refusal to countenance the western powers’ attempts to find an accommodation with the Soviet government . 

Kaczorowski had been serving as minister of home affairs for three years when, on July 19 1989, he was called out of a performance of An Ideal Husband at a West End theatre to be told that President Kazimierz Sabbat had died, having nominated him as his successor. 

A retired accounts clerk with a dignified carriage and a genial disposition, Kaczorowski had the power to appoint the cabinet but did not preside at its meetings. For the 18 months of his presidency he was the public representative of Free Poland as the Communist regime fell apart. 

When the international press called at “The Castle”, his government’s headquarters in Eaton Place, Belgravia, he would explain in a thick guttural accent that he represented the legitimate authority in the Poland he had not seen for almost 50 years. 

Being sworn in as president was the greatest honour, he would say, then add: “Yet not so. The greatest days will be when I cease to be president.” As he spoke, he would point to the insignia of the Polish state laid out on the table before him — the handwritten copy of the 1935 constitution and the presidential seal . 

Kaczorowski shunned official approaches from Communists in Poland, and remained uneasy about the attitude of Poles in their homeland until three weeks before the first free general election under Communist rule to the presidency and lower parliamentary house. 

Lech Walesa, Solidarity’s presidential candidate, sent an envoy to London, saying that he did not want to receive power from the discredited General Jaruzelski but from the hands of President Kaczorowski. 

On the day of Walesa’s inauguration Kaczorowski, with some 30 ministers and supporters, assembled at Ealing Broadway tube station at 7am to travel to Heathrow, where they took a plane to Warsaw . However, their flight was late, so they failed to make their planned entrance into Polish airspace at the moment General Jaruzelski surrendered power. 

The son of a railwayman, Ryszard Kaczorowski was born on November 26 1919 at Bialystok, eastern Poland, where he went to a commercial school. Although a teetotaller, he found work with a wine merchant. He also became a scoutmaster, rising to commandant of the Szare Szeregi (The Grey Ranks). 

After the outbreak of war he was responsible for running messages for the emerging underground movement. In 1940 he was arrested by the invading Russians and accused of being a British spy; his captors reminded him that Baden Powell, founder of the scout movement, had been a British spy in South Africa. 

After being taken to the headquarters of the NKVD security force, Kaczorowski was sent on to Minsk. He was sentenced to death and spent 100 days with three other prisoners in an underground cell . They were asked to sign a petition seeking mercy, which they refused to do. Eventually the sentence was reduced to 10 years in a labour camp, and Kaczorowski was sent to the gold mines of Kolyma in the north-east Arctic. 

There he shifted earth from 4am to 9pm daily, which left him unable to close his hands. But after the German invasion of Russia, he was sent to a transit camp at Magadan, then allowed to join the Polish Army. 

As a signalman with the 3rd Carpathian Division, 2nd Polish Corps, he took part in the battle for Monte Cassino . 

Kaczorowski arrived in Britain without speaking a word of English and settled in London, where he married Karolina Mariampolska, with whom he had two daughters. In the course of the next four decades he worked as an accounts clerk for four firms while becoming chief commissioner of the Polish scouts and chairman of the Polish Scouts Council. 

When he retired at 65 he was asked by Count Raczynski, the government-in-exile’s president, to join the Polish National Council, and he was appointed minister of home affairs. His responsibilities could be somewhat surreal; he was once required to draw up railway timetables for when Russia returned Poland’s former eastern provinces. But he demonstrated a steadiness which prompted President Sabbat to name him as his successor. 

After returning to his homeland to hand over his insignia of office to President Walesa at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Kaczorowski went back to London to preside over the dissolution of the upper house (the Senate) and the sale of the Eaton Place headquarters. 

Although he continued to live in London, he became a regular visitor to Poland, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the local university at the former NKVD headquarters, where he had been interrogated in 1940. 

He died on Saturday in the air crash, near Smolensk in western Russia, which killed Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski and more than 90 others.


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## Gnomey (Apr 21, 2010)

to all.


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## v2 (Apr 21, 2010)

*Morris 'Dick' Jeppson* at 87; weapons specialist armed the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima


On Aug. 6, 1945, Jeppson and another man armed the bomb called 'Little Boy' aboard the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay. The bombing is credited with bringing an early end to WWII.
Morris "Dick" Jeppson, a weapons specialist who was mid-flight when he completed arming the first atomic bomb, which the Enola Gay B-29 Superfortress dropped on Hiroshima in World War II, has died. He was 87.

Jeppson, a retired scientist and businessman, died March 30 of complications related to old age at Summerlin Hospital Medical Center in Las Vegas, said his wife, Molly.

The historic combat mission on Aug. 6, 1945, was the only one Jeppson ever flew.

Worried about his family's safety, he remained silent for decades about his role in the attack that killed at least 80,000 people, leveled two-thirds of the Japanese city and ignited controversy for having unleashed atomic power as a weapon.

When the Army Air Forces unit that flew the mission gathered in 1995, Jeppson attended and spoke in public about the bombing for the first time.

"You had a job to do, you just did it," Jeppson had often said since then.

The mission is credited with helping to bring an early end to the war. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, another B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, prompting the Japanese surrender.

Navigator Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, 89, the only surviving member of the 12-man Enola Gay crew, told The Times that Jeppson was "quiet, efficient and businesslike" during the mission. "He wasn't the type of guy to blow his own horn."

Jeppson, one of several men trained to arm the bomb, was a 23-year-old second lieutenant when he was chosen to climb into the bomb bay on a coin toss.

With him was weaponeer Navy Capt. William "Deak" Parsons. Together they began arming the bomb with Jeppson acting as assistant, handing over tools.

"They did that very early in the mission, in the first half hour," said Dick Daso, curator of Modern Military Aircraft at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "After that, they had to come inside the cabin because the bomb bay wasn't pressurized."

A few hours later, Jeppson made a final visit to the bay to change out three green safety plugs -- each "the size of a saltshaker," he later said -- for the red plugs that armed the bomb.

He made his way to the cockpit and told the plane's pilot, Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., that the bomb called "Little Boy" was set to go.

Once Jeppson felt the B-29 jerk up, he knew the bomb had been dropped.

"People were looking down and seeing this enormous cloud coming up and the destruction spreading," Jeppson told Time magazine in 2005. "And that's the point that it's somber because you know a lot of people are getting destroyed down there in the city."

After the 12-plus-hour flight, the plane returned to Tinian Island in the Pacific, where Jeppson was unexpectedly greeted by a good friend who was a Navy lieutenant. They were sharing dinner when a Navy officer asked Jeppson, "What did you do today?" he recounted in Time. "I said, 'I think we ended the war today.' "

Morris Richard Jeppson was born June 23, 1922, in Logan, Utah, one of three sons of Robert and Elsie Jeppson. While he was growing up in Carson City, Nev., his father worked in agricultural education for the state.

At 19, Jeppson joined the military and was part of a group that spent 10 months studying engineering and radar at Yale and Harvard universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

With several others, he was assigned to remote Wendover, Utah, and the 509th Composite Group. It was the first military unit formed to wage nuclear war.

At the end of the Enola Gay mission, Jeppson kept a few of the plugs that signified his role in the bombing. When he sold two of them for $167,500 at auction in 2002, the federal government claimed they were classified material and tried, but failed, to block the sale.

After the war, Jeppson studied toward a doctorate in physics at UC Berkeley, working at its radiation laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore laboratory.

He also founded a number of companies, including Applied Radiation Corp., which built electron-beam accelerators for nuclear physics research, and Cryodry Corp., a maker of industrial microwave ovens.

A longtime resident of Carmel, Calif., he retired to Las Vegas 20 years ago.

In addition to Molly, his wife of 48 years, Jeppson is survived by a brother, four daughters, two sons, 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.


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## RabidAlien (Apr 22, 2010)

to all.


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## Airframes (Apr 22, 2010)

Farewell and Rest in Peace.


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## Oggie2620 (Apr 23, 2010)

Squadron Leader 'Stapme' Stapleton - Telegraph 
Posting copied from thread by Adrian Roberts (Commonwealth Forces of WW2)


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## Wayne Little (Apr 23, 2010)

To all RIP


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## ToughOmbre (Apr 23, 2010)

RIP to all



TO


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## v2 (Apr 23, 2010)

Another Hero Gone: *Eddie Boulter* 
Fighter pilot, Norfolk inventor and restorer of vintage planes Eddie Boulter has died peacefully aged 86.
He flew 48 missions over enemy territory in Mosquitos was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
more: From hero fighter to inventor - tributes paid to Eddie Boulter - Norfolk News - EDP24


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## Gnomey (Apr 23, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Apr 23, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 24, 2010)




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## syscom3 (Apr 26, 2010)

“Mr Höss told me, as unemotionally as if he were talking at the breakfast table, that 2.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz.”

There can have been little in his legal training or service in the United States Navy that prepared Whitney Harris, then in his mid-thirties, for his encounters with many of the worst Nazi war criminals. His three-day interrogation of the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, was part of Harris’s work as a member of the US prosecuting team at the International Military Tribunal which tried Third Reich figures in Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946.

It was a challenge demanding legal skills, tenacious research and the psychological ability to cope with the revelations of Nazi barbarity. Höss suddenly became available as a potential witness when he was captured by the British after most of the evidence had been gathered for the trials.

The aim at Nuremberg was to assemble, from the postwar chaos of Europe, what Harris called “an irrefutable record set of what happened under the Nazi regime”, as well as a case against the worst perpetrators that would secure their punishment and establish new principles of international law. So Harris had to hear Höss describe what he had done at Auschwitz while retaining the detachment of the legal mind.

The revelation of 2.5 million deaths, Harris recalled, “did not unnerve me, it affected me like a statistic. If, however, he had described the death of a single child, I would have been shocked.”

It seemed hard to link the often pathetic-looking figures on trial with what they done at the height of their power. Harris later told the German magazine Der Spiegel that Höss “was not in the least bit imposing; there was nothing about him that suggested a monstrous murderer”.

Before the trials, Harris later admitted: “I did not have the slightest idea of the scale of genocide that had taken place . . . we didn’t have much solid evidence.” But, by the painstaking assembly of factual evidence through interrogation and the sifting of many documents, Harris and his prosecuting colleagues were able to build a case that secured convictions and revealed much to the outside world about how the Holocaust had come about.

Höss (who would later be tried and executed near to the scene of his crimes in Poland) was used in evidence for the broader case that Harris was compiling against Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had been chief of the Reich main security office, and against two of its principal agencies, the Gestapo and the security service or SD. This investigation helped to reveal the origins of the mass extermination of Jews and others in Eastern Europe before the death camps were established, in particular the horrific work of the Einsatzgruppen, special units that followed behind the advance of the German Army eastward in 1941.

In another grimly successful interrogation, Harris heard Otto Ohlendorf, who had commanded one of the Einsatzgruppen, admit that his men had murdered 90,000 men, women and children in 1941 alone.

Such confessions were combined with documentary evidence gathered as far as possible amid the rubble of the Reich and its former territories. “We were really surprised at the documentation we were able to come up with,” said Harris, who began his work at Nuremberg armed only with a second-hand typewriter and the help of a secretary. “I went through Gestapo offices and dug through rubbish and found documents ordering the extermination of Jews. We scurried all over Europe getting evidence.”

The case against Kaltenbrunner became formidable. While “most of the defendants admitted that war crimes and the Holocaust had occurred but tried to play down their own individual involvement”, Harris sensed that “Kaltenbrunner did not believe he would be spared”. He was the only one of the defendants sentenced to death who did not appeal.

It was all a far cry from the professional legal routine that Harris had settled into a decade or so earlier. Born in 1912 in Seattle, the son of a car salesman, he graduated in 1933 from Washington University and then, as jobs were hard to find in the Depression, continued studies at the University of California law school.

After working as a lawyer in Los Angeles for five years he joined the US Navy as his country joined the war in 1941, served in the Pacific and became an officer, before in 1945 he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, an intelligence agency, investigating war crimes in Europe. Based in London, he began to work with Justice Robert Jackson, who had been sent by the US to London to prepare for the indictment and trial of Nazi leaders. Harris joined Jackson’s team, which then moved to Nuremberg to begin the prosecutions in collaboration with other teams from the victorious Second World War powers. He was there from August 1945 until October 1946.

As well as preparing his own cases, Harris had a ringside seat at the macabre theatre in the Nuremberg courtroom, making his own assessments of the different defendants. There was Julius Streicher, former publisher of the particularly vile anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, “without a doubt the most unpleasant of them all”. Albert Speer, Hitler’s former architect who escaped a death sentence, “made a very positive impression because he did not try to talk his way out of it”. And there was Hermann Goering, former head of the Luftwaffe, arrogant to the last, who “assumed the role of leader of the defendants”, trying to “challenge the prosecution in every possible way”.

There were even moments of black humour, when the prosecution tripped up Rudolf Hess, once Hitler’s deputy, who ludicrously claimed to be suffering from complete amnesia.

When the trials came to an end Harris also witnessed the final drama, as Jackson’s personal representative at the hanging of those sentenced to death in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg on the night of October 15, 1946. Goering cheated the executioners by committing suicide. But early the next day, recounted Harris, “two trucks, carrying eleven caskets, left the prison compound . . . bound for Dachau Concentration Camp, near Munich, where . . . the bodies were burned in ovens which had been designed, and used, for Dachau prisoners”.

After Nuremberg, Harris worked in the late 1940s as legal adviser to the US military government in Berlin as the Cold War began to intensify. He then returned to the US to pursue an academic and private career in law.

But the Nuremberg experiences continued to dominate his thoughts. In 1954 he published a book, Tyranny on Trial, giving a full account of the prosecutions and what they had uncovered. He was a regular contributor to seminars and media accounts of those momentous months.

He also campaigned vigorously for a permanent international court to uphold what he saw as the principles that the Nuremberg trials had established. Nuremberg, he pointed out, had been established only in retrospect, after the crimes had been committed. A permanent court would mean that “no one — whether general, or head of state — could ever say again, he didn’t know that he would be called to account for his actions”.

As proposals for an International Criminal Court advanced, Harris was dismayed that the US, which had taken such a strong lead in prosecuting in Nuremberg, now refused to accept the jurisdiction of the new court. But he took great pleasure in his invitation in 2000 to witness the German state accede to the court’s jurisdiction in Berlin. This was, he said, final recognition by the Germans that “what we did in Nuremberg was right”.

Those months in 1945 and 1946 had been not only a huge legal challenge, but also the most testing of times for a young man suddenly confronted with the human detail of the Holocaust. That experience haunted him, and he could be pessimistic. “I believe there is a God; I believe God is merciful and just, but if Man desires to destroy himself, I believe God will not save him,” he once said. But the Nuremberg trials, he believed, stood “firmly against the resignation of Man to the tyranny of evil leaders”.

Harris was married in 1964 to Jane Foster, who predeceased him, in 1999. He is survived by his second wife, Anna Galakatos, and by a son, three stepsons and a stepdaughter.

Whitney Harris, lawyer and prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, was born on August 12, 1912. He died on April 21, 2010, aged 97


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## syscom3 (Apr 26, 2010)

Posted to 603 Squadron in the spring of 1942, John Mejor was among 47 Spitfire pilots launched on April 20 from the American aircraft carrier Wasp in the Mediterranean north of Algiers, from where they made the 667-mile flight to Malta. There they were welcomed as a reinforcement to the air defences of the beleaguered island, but Malta’s joy was to be short lived.

Enemy intelligence had learnt of the Spitfires’ arrival and both the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica launched a series of devastating attacks, catching many of the Spitfires on the ground. It was the beginning of a summer of intense air combat as the Axis air forces based on Sicily strained every nerve to neutralise Malta’s threat to Rommel’s supply lines in North Africa.

Mejor flew 48 sorties over the island and the convoys that brought it desperately needed supplies. Among these was Operation Pedestal whose arrival — albeit after huge losses — in Grand Harbour in August 1942 was vital to the island’s survival. The tanker Ohio entering Valletta under tow in a sinking condition with her decks almost awash has become one of the imperishable images of the Mediterranean war.

As a flight commander of 1435 Squadron Mejor flew four sorties over the Pedestal convoy, repelling dive-bombing attacks on a number of ships by Ju87s and coming to the aid of the badly damaged MV Melbourne Star, which was a sitting duck as she limped painfully towards Malta. He thwarted an attack by an Italian flying boat, a strafing run by an Me109 and at mast height chased off three Ju88 bombers which menaced her. As a result the Melbourne Star survived to limp into Valletta, one of only five survivors out of the 14 merchantmen that had left the Clyde on August 3. Informed on his return to Malta that he had been invited to dinner by the Melbourne Star’s grateful master, Mejor found that this was no other than his uncle, Captain David MacFarlane, subsequently to be awarded the DSO.

Mejor was credited with two combat victories, two shared and two further “probables”. On one occasion he was shot down himself as he simultaneously brought down a Ju87 Stuka.

John Mejor was born in Antwerp in 1921, the son of a Belgian engineer and a Scottish mother. His father died when he was young and his mother brought the family to Liverpool. Mejor was educated at Bootle Grammar School.

As soon as he was old enough he enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1940 and after basic and then operational flying training was posted to 132 (Spitfire) Squadron in 1941. From there he went in April 1942 to 603 Squadron whose Spitfires and pilots were embarked in USS Wasp on the Clyde for the passage to the Mediterranean.

Shortly after Pedestal Mejor was posted back to Britain for a “rest” as a flying instructor. But he was back on operations by July 1943 with 122 Squadron, flying Spitfires on bomber escorts and fighter sweeps over France. Among the many engagements he was involved in was an encounter with a Messerschmitt 210, an aircraft intended as an improvement to the 110 which had never really lived up to its baneful sounding sobriquet Zerstörer. The 210 fared no better and Mejor added it to his tally of combat victories in a clash over the Pas de Calais.

Later in the year the squadron became part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force, created to provide battlefield support for the projected invasion of occupied Europe. Until that day dawned it was deployed in attacks on gun emplacements, army trucks, trains, aircraft on the ground and coastal shipping. In February 1944 it was re-equipped with Mustang IIIs, whose much greater range enabled it to penetrate deep into enemy airspace. Mejor was awarded the DFC towards the end of this tour of operations, which ended after D-Day on which he flew his last combat sorties, over the Normandy invasion beaches.

Rested from operations, Mejor spent the remainder of the war as a test pilot. In 1945 he was offered a permanent commission. The Cold War was soon an established geopolitical fact and among his postwar appointments was a spell in strategic intelligence in Ottawa, helping to analyse the capabilities of the Soviet and Chinese air forces for the Royal Canadian Air Force in the light of the Korean War experience.

In 1953 he was appointed CO of 1953 Squadron, flying successively Vampires, North American Sabres and then Hunter Mk IVs. From its base at Brüggen, West Germany, the squadron operated intensively in the strained Cold War atmosphere, often confronting aggressive attempts by Soviet fighters to penetrate Nato air space as the air forces of both sides tested each others’ willingness to resist incursions.

In a climate of defence cuts Mejor left the RAF in 1964 and moved to Exmouth where he worked for Devon County Council and became chairman of the Devon Conservation Forum.

He is survived by his wife, Cecile, whom he married in 1945, and by two daughters.

Wing Commander John Mejor, DFC, RAF fighter pilot, was born on July 12, 1921. He died on March 24, 2010, aged 88


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## syscom3 (Apr 26, 2010)

One of the Battle of Britain’s top scoring pilots, Bob Doe became an ace (five kills) in his first week of air fighting, which coincided with the Luftwaffe onslaught of mid-August, 1940, Goering’s vaunted Adlerangriff (Eagle attack) that was to have swept the RAF from the skies. Doe was one of the few RAF pilots to score combat victories in both the Spitfire and Hurricane during the Battle, switching to the latter — slower and less manoeuvrable — fighter with 238 Squadron, when his original squadron, No 234, had lost most of its pilots and was posted to Cornwall for a rest.

Strangely, perhaps, Doe regarded himself as a timorous individual with no gifts as a pilot. His superiors disagreed and his record, 15 combat victories (14 kills and two shared) speaks for itself. Reticent he might have been on the ground, but once in the air Doe was imbued with that desire to be at grips with the enemy that is the hallmark of the finest fighting troops.

Having survived the Battle of Britain and serious injuries in a crash in 1941, he was posted to the Far East, leading ground attack operations in support of Slim’s 14th Army in difficult conditions over the jungles of Burma. His skill and leadership earned him a DSO to add to the two DFCs he had won in 1940.

Robert Francis Thomas Doe was born in Reigate, Surrey, in 1920. At 15 he left school to work as a messenger boy at the News of the World. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in March 1938 and in January 1939 was accepted for a short service commission. On his own admission he was rated merely “average” and only just won his wings. All this was to change in the heat of battle.

Posted to 234 (Spitfire) Squadron he was pitchforked into action on August 15, 1940, and maintained an extraordinary tempo of combat over the next two months. On that day his first victory was a shared one, over a Messerschmitt 110 twin-engined fighter off the Dorset coast, and soon after he shot down a second. The fighting over the following weeks was unrelenting. On August 16 he shot down a Messerschmitt 109 and a Dornier Do18 flying boat. Two days later he downed a second Me109 and damaged another. A shared Ju88, on August 21, made him an ace in just six days of fighting.

The attack on 11 Group’s airfields in the last week of August took the battle into a crucial phase for the RAF as packed bomber formations and fighter escorts repeatedly fought through the air defences. Doe’s next six victims were Me109s — on September 4 he shot down three in a single sortie. But the attrition was frightful. In a few days No 234 had all but ceased to exist. On September 7 Doe flew his last sortie with it, shooting down an He111 over London. After that, with only three of its pilots remaining the squadron was sent to Cornwall to rest and rebuild.

Doe’s respite was brief. Posted as a flight commander to 238 (Hurricane) squadron, he was back in action by the end of the month, and had three more combat victories by the time the battle began to die down in October.

On October 10 he was shot down in the Luftwaffe’s last big daytime sortie and baled out of his Hurricane with severe wounds to his leg and shoulder. He was awarded the DFC on October 23, and a Bar on November 26. He rejoined his squadron in December, but on January 3, 1941, his aircraft suffered engine failure during an attempted night interception. He managed a forced landing, but his harness broke with the impact and his head was smashed against his gun sight. He suffered severe facial injuries and broke his arm.

Lengthy surgery involving 22 operations was done by the brilliant New Zealand-born plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies. Astonishingly, Doe resumed flying in May 1941, and joined 66 Squadron as a flight commander. After front- line and training appointments, in August 1943 he was posted to India and tasked with forming and training 10 Squadron, Indian Air Force. With their “Hurribombers” — Hurricanes armed with four 20mm cannon and carrying two 500lb bombs — No10 supported the 14th Army campaign that drove the Japanese out of India and pursued it south through Burma. Air power was decisive in the fighting, and 10 Squadron’s precision air strikes played an important role. The citation for Doe’s DSO, gazetted in October 1945, commended his “unconquerable spirit”.

At the end of the war Doe gained a permanent commission and after a period training the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, was in 1950 given command of 32 (Vampire) Squadron in Egypt after a few hours in the cockpit to familiarise himself with jets. In his two years in command he raised it to a level of efficiency envied by other units in the theatre.

Subsequent appointments included the Fighter Gunnery Wing at Leconfield, the Joint Planning Staff and Senior Personnel Staff Officer at Flying Training Command after which he opted for retirement in 1966. Settling in Kent, he set up a garage and car hire company. His autobiography, Bob Doe: Fighter Pilot, was published in 1991.

Bob Doe is survived by his third wife, Betty, and by six daughters and a son of his second and third marriages. The daughter of his first marriage predeceased him.

Wing Commander Bob Doe, DSO, DFC and Bar, wartime fighter ace, was born on March 10, 1920. He died on February 21, 2010, aged 89


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## syscom3 (Apr 26, 2010)

Derek Hodgkinson began his war in Coastal Command, flying reconnaissance sorties over German and Norwegian waters. Later he took part in Bomber Command’s campaign against Germany in 1942 when his Operational Training Unit (OTU) was “volunteered” to make up the numbers in the third of Bomber Harris’s “1,000 Bomber” raids.

Shot down on his way home from Bremen, he spent the rest of the war as a PoW in Stalag Luft III, from which he led a group of prisoners on the “Long March” when the camp was evacuated in the icy winter of 1945.

After the war he continued in Coastal Command, going on to high rank within the RAF, during which time he was involved with the Multi-Role Combat Aircraft consortium which led to the Tornado strike bomber.

William Derek Hodgkinson was educated at Repton, from where he joined the RAF on a short service commission in 1936. In 1937 he was posted to 220 Squadron, a Coastal Command unit flying Ansons. After a period with a Lockheed Hudson conversion unit, he returned to No 220, which in the early months of the war still operated the Anson, an aircraft of limited performance soon to be replaced by the US-built Hudson, a patrol bomber of vastly improved range, with which Hodgkinson was already familiar.

He flew anti-shipping strikes over the North Sea from Thornaby on the Tees from May 1940. When the squadron moved to northern Scotland in April 1941, Hodgkinson undertook “battle flights” in which the Hudson, with its forward-firing armament, was used as a long-range fighter, attacking aircraft and flak ships in Norwegian waters. He had several narrow escapes when attacked by Me109s but gained a combat victory, a Heinkel He115 float plane, over the Skagerrak. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his performance.

In 1942 he was “rested” from operations through a posting to an OTU, though this given no respite from the perils of the front line. In a determined effort to prove that strategic air power could win the war, the pugnacious head of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, had determined on a series of 1,000 bomber raids against German cities, and instructors and pupil pilots from the OTUs were mobilised for the demonstration.

The first raid, on Cologne on the night of May 30-31, 1942, stunned the Germans; the next, against Essen at the start of June, was much less successful. Nothing daunted, Harris planned a third raid on the night of June 25-26 when 1,006 bombers (including 272 from OTUs of which Hodgkinson’s Hudson crew was one) took off to attack Bremen. Damage was extensive, as at Cologne, but at a high cost — 5 per cent of the bombers failed to return.

Hodgkinson’s bomber dropped its load successfully but as he approached the Dutch coast on the flight home, his aircraft was attacked by a German night fighter and caught fire. With great skill he managed to ditch in the sea off the Frisian Islands. Surfacing after the aircraft had broken up and sunk, he found one of its main wheels was the only part still floating. He and his navigator, the only other survivor, clung to it for more than an hour when, almost exhausted, they were joined on the surface by the aircraft’s dinghy, broken free from the submerged bomber. They scrambled in and were eventually washed ashore on one of the islands and taken prisoner.

He spent most of the rest of the war at Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia, where he played a big role in organising escape efforts. On the night of January 27, 1945, with Red Army approaching, the Germans suddenly decided to march their prisoners out of the camp to prevent them falling into Russian hands. Hodgkinson was in a group headed towards Bremen. After a 50-mile march in sub-zero conditions in one of the coldest winters in northern Europe for years, they were entrained at Spremberg for a naval PoW camp, Marlag Nord, near Bremen. There they remained until April when, with British troops approaching, they were again marched to a camp near Hamburg where Hodgkinson was eventually liberated at the end of the war.

Granted a permanent commission in 1947, he served for 15 years in Coastal Command, as CO of 210 Squadron (Lancasters) at St Eval, Cornwall, and 240 Squadron (Shackletons) at Ballykelly, Northern Ireland. In between, he had helped to set up the Australian Joint Anti-Submarine School, and, from 1958 to 1961, commanded RAF St Mawgan, in Cornwall.

From 1966 to 1968, as Assistant Chief of Staff Operational Requirements, he played an important role in ensuring that the UK joined the Panavia consortium developing the multi-role combat aircraft. After this was achieved in 1967 he spent much time shuttling between London, Bonn and Munich persuading the other members of the consortium, Germany and Italy, to accept the RAF Air Staff requirement for a deep-strike aircraft rather than the short-range battlefield weapon favoured by them.

In the middle of this onerous task he was also required by the Air Force Board to write a report on the RAF officer career structure. He recommended, among other things, the abolition of the supplementary list of “second class citizens” in favour of promotion based on ability and potential. His proposals were accepted.

From 1970 to 1973 he was AOC-in-C Near East Air Force, Commander British Forces Near East and Administrator Sovereign Base Areas, Cyprus. It was a tense period: there was a struggle in Dhofar, where rebels backed by the Communist People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen threatened the stability of Oman, whose ruler, Sultan Qaboos, asked Britain for help. With British forces sent to Dhofar to fight the guerrillas, Hodgkinson toured the region to procure support for British policy from the rulers of Jordan and Iran. Several British officers were seconded to the Oman armed forces.

In Cyprus, the return of the former Eoka leader, Colonel Grivas, previously supported by Archbishop Makarios in his policy of enosis (union) with Greece, also raised tensions. But Hodgkinson struck up a good relationship with Makarios, by then weaned away from enosis, and Grivas’s agitation with a new Eoka-B proved ineffectual.

In his final appointment as Air Secretary, 1973-76, Hodgkinson had to cope with large reductions in RAF personnel after the British withdrawal from East of Suez. This cost the careers of many middle-ranking officers of great promise, a blow whose effects Hodgkinson and his staff did their best to mitigate.

After retiring from the RAF, Hodgkinson helped to run the Regular Forces Employment Assocation of which he was vice-chairman and chairman from 1977 to 1982 and thereafter president, 1982-86.

He had been awarded the Air Force Cross in 1942, was appointed CBE in 1960, CB in 1969 and KCB in 1971.

He married Heather Goodwin in 1939. He is survived by her and by their son and daughter.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Derek Hodgkinson, KCB, CBE, DFC, AFC, wartime Coastal Command pilot and Air Secretary, 1973-76, was born on December 27, 1917. He died on January 29, 2010, aged 92


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## Gnomey (Apr 27, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Apr 28, 2010)




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## v2 (Apr 29, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 30, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Apr 30, 2010)

RIP 



TO


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## v2 (May 4, 2010)

*F/Lt Ludwik Martel *

Ludwik Martel was born on 5th March 1919. 
Ludwik arrived in England in early 1940 and was commissioned in the RAF in May and transferred to the PAF on 6th August. 

He joined 54 Squadron in mid-September 1940 and moved on to 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron on 28th. He claimed a Bf 109 destroyed on 5th October. 
On the 25th October 1940, Ludwik was forced down in his Spitfire IIa P7350 by a ME 109, suffering a shrapnel wound to his left leg.

Ludwik was posted to 317 Squadron on 19th March 1941. 
He was rested on 28th January 1942, being posted to 58 OTU at Grangemouth as an instructor, before returning to 317 Squadron on 25th August. 

Ludwik went to West Kirby on 13th February 1943 to prepare for overseas, and on 13th March arrived in the Middle East in a C-47 with other Polish pilots to form the Polish Fighting Team, otherwise known as ‘Skalski’s Circus’. 
They were attached to 145 Squadron and operated in the Western Desert from 17th March to 12th May 1943, and destroyed 30 enemy aircraft. 
Ludwik damaged a FW 190 on 4th April and on 20th, he destroyed a Bf 109 and damaged a Mc 200. 

Back in the UK he returned to 317 Squadron on 22nd July 1943. 
He was posted to 16 FTS, Newton on 20th August, but went back to 317 Squadron on 4th November, as a Flight Commander. 
Tour-expired, Ludwik was posted to HQ PAF on 12th September 1944. 
He was attached to the School of Air Support at Old Sarum on 4th March 1945 for a course, before being posted to HQ BAFO Operations Room in January 1946. 

Ludwik served with 131 Wing from 14th October 1946 until released from the PAF in January 1947.

Ludwik Martel passed away after a long illness on April 25, 2010.


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## RabidAlien (May 4, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (May 4, 2010)




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## Gnomey (May 4, 2010)




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## Maximowitz (May 5, 2010)

As posted by Kurt Braatz over on TOCH:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last week, Rudolf Opitz passed away in his home in Connecticut. 'Pitz', one of Germany's most famous test pilots, was nearing his 100th birthday. Widely known as one of the key people in developing and flying the Me 163 rocket interceptor, he saw combat from mid-1944 as Gruppenkommandeur of I./JG 400, the first and last fighter wing in aviation history to operate rocket-powered aircraft. 'Operation Paperclip' made him emigrate to the U.S. in 1945. He became an U.S. citizen and managed to continue his career as a test pilot at Avco-Lycoming. Having been inducted to the National Soaring Hall of Fame, he had amassed some 10.000 hours of flight time in innumerable types and more than 5.000 dead stick landings.

A remarkable career.


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## v2 (May 5, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (May 5, 2010)




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## Gnomey (May 5, 2010)




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## Airframes (May 5, 2010)

R.I.P. Ludwik and Rudolf.


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## v2 (May 7, 2010)

*Marguerite Garden* 
Marguerite Garden, who died on May 5 aged 84, was a Scottish grandmother who, as a 14-year-old schoolgirl in occupied Brittany, risked her life daily to work as a courier for British military intelligence and helped Allied airmen escape across the sea. 
August 1940 Marguerite Vourc’h, as she then was, returned home from boarding school in Paris to find her home village of Plomodiern, in western Brittany, occupied by German troops. Though the Resistance was virtually non-existent at the time, her father, Antoine, the local doctor, sought out sympathisers on his rounds; meanwhile Marguerite, in pretended innocence, established from her friends where their families’ sympathies lay. 

When her brother Jean returned home from the war, she helped him and some friends escape to England disguised as fishermen. They soon returned to Brittany, trained and with a couple of radios. 

Perched on a hillside, about three miles from the coast, Plomodiern was the perfect spot from which to track the movements of German boats in the Bay of Dournenez, and Marguerite soon showed her true potential. 

For days on end she would cycle round the local coastline, gathering intelligence on soldiers, boats and mines, which was duly relayed to MI6. Increasingly, her work brought her into contact with the Resistance as she helped deliver false identity cards to the networks. No one took a 14-year-old schoolgirl on holiday for a spy, and she managed to continue her work even after part of the family home was commandeered to billet Gestapo and Wehrmacht officers in January 1941. 

One day she was going to collect eggs and spotted a tall mast with strange wires in a local field. The farmer’s wife, assuming she was just a nosy child, told her it was for sending messages to the German submarines. Within three days the RAF had destroyed the mast. 

During term time Marguerite continued to study in Paris, but at half-term and holidays she would resume her spying. School provided her with perfect cover for carrying messages and parcels between her local Resistance network and another in Paris. When she returned to Paris, hidden among her school books were folders bulging with military information. “There was no reason to suspect me,” she recalled. “I was a young girl, travelling to my school. I was never arrested.” 

As the war progressed, Marguerite became involved in helping Allied airmen escape to Britain by hiding them in lobster boats. She also passed on information about German ship positions which a family friend, a Madame Le Roux, managed to extract from an unsuspecting harbourmaster. 

When Madame Le Roux was arrested at the Vourc’h family home, the Germans at first failed to make any connection. But, fearful of what she might say under interrogation, Marguerite’s father made his escape, eventually finding his way to North Africa. When the Gestapo eventually turned up on the family doorstep Marguerite’s mother informed them that he had abandoned his family. They believed her and Marguerite did not come under suspicion. 

As the war approached its denouement Marguerite and her mother were joined by Jean-Claude Camors (code-named Raoll), a Resistance friend of her brother. 

Together they planned an operation to repatriate some 40 Allied airmen who were then hiding in Brittany. 

The airmen were duly assembled, but before they could put the plan into action, Raoll was recognised by a German double agent and shot. His death meant Marguerite and her mother had to find a place to hide the airmen and a way to feed them. They approached the local priest, who agreed to hide them in his church. The men hid there for days, while the Resistance waited for a chance to get them home. 

The successful escape of the airmen, however, was to be the undoing of Marguerite as, when the men arrived in Britain, the BBC broadcast a coded message that the “fourth son of a doctor of Brittany” had arrived. It was too obviously a reference to Marguerite’s family, and the Gestapo soon came calling once again. 

Marguerite was at school at the time and her mother was visiting the Breton town of Quimper. Warned by friends not to come home, they hid in a run-down apartment in Paris. 

But Marguerite’s younger sisters, aged four, six and eight, were left behind and had to face the wrath of the Gestapo: “They’d wake the girls up in the middle of the night, holding their rifles to the girls’ faces,” Marguerite recalled. “They would do anything they could to terrify them into saying where mother was. But it didn’t work.” 

A few months later Paris was liberated. 

The sixth of nine children, Marguerite Vourc’h was born on January 25 1926 at Plomodiern, in the Finistère department, where her father was both the village doctor and a local councillor. A veteran of the First World War, he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur. Marguerite was educated locally and at the Maison d’education de la Légion d’honneur at St Denis, just outside Paris. 

After emerging from hiding during the liberation of Paris in August 1944, Marguerite had the harrowing task of locating and bringing back to her mother the body of her brother Jean, who had been mortally wounded at Versailles during the battle for Paris. 

After the war she went on to study Architecture at the Beaux Arts in Paris, but cut her studies short when she met James Garden, a Scottish army surgeon visiting Paris on holiday. She followed him to Scotland against the wishes of her father, and they married in 1949, eventually settling in Lanark, where her husband became a prominent orthopaedic surgeon. 

A keen amateur naturalist, Marguerite Garden was a prime mover in founding the Corehouse Nature Reserve, which is now run by the Scottish Wildlife Trust, and supported many other conservation projects in South Lanarkshire. She served for many years in the Red Cross and worked tirelessly in collecting funds each year for the Poppy Appeal for the Royal British Legion. 

After the war she received a handwritten letter of thanks from the Air Chief Marshal for her help in securing the freedom of many of his men, but for many decades her story went untold for the simple reason that she had remained true to her orders to remain silent. 

In 2003, however, her contribution was recognised belatedly by the French government and she was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. In the same year she was nominated for a “Woman of the Year” award, and in 2004 her story formed part of a BBC2 documentary, Crafty Tricks of War. “It wasn’t bravery, it was necessity,” she recalled. “It was sad and frightening. But there was something about those days, maybe it was the adrenalin. I have never been so alive.” 

Marguerite Garden’s husband predeceased her in 1992, and she is survived by her seven children. 

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (May 7, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (May 7, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (May 18, 2010)

Edward Finch, 99 years, 2 months, 11 days, another of our country's World War II vets, has gone to be with his heavenly Father, Sunday, May 9, 2010.
Funeral: 10 a.m. Wednesday at Bedford Baptist Temple of Bedford. Burial: 2:30 p.m. in Truce Cemetery in Jack County. Visitation: 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at Mount Olivet Funeral Home.
Memorials: In lieu of flowers you may send to Alpha-Omega Hospice or to Bedford Baptist Building fund.
Ed Finch was born Feb. 27, 1911, in Jack County. He married Valrie Rowland in 1934, they had a long marriage of 74 years. They were married in Quanah, where they both worked in farming for their families. Ed's longtime work was in construction.
He served with pride and dignity in the U.S. Navy and was a lifetime member of River Oaks Masonic Lodge.
He was preceded in death by wife, Valrie; granddaughters, Nancy Kempe and Misty Finch; father and mother, Clarence and Amy Finch; brothers, Bluford, Bernie, Darrell and Percy Gene Finch.
Survivors: Sons, Nathan Finch and wife, Mava, of Hurst, Donnie Finch and wife, Linda, of Euless and Ronnie Finch and wife, Talonda, of Kemp; daughters, Cleta Kempe and husband, Billy, of Keller, Mirion Simmons and husband, Gene, of Azle; 20 grandchildren; 32 great-grandchildren; 15 great-great-grandchildren; brother, Douglas Finch and wife, Bonnie; sister, Trudy Stapelton and husband, James; and a great number of nieces, nephews and friends.

Read more: Edward Finch Obituary: View Edward Finch's Obituary by Star-Telegram



***********************************************************************************


Lloyd Howard Shaw, a World War II veteran and longtime resident of Fort Worth, passed away Saturday, May 1, 2010, at the age of 96.
Funeral: 1 p.m. Tuesday at Thompson's Harveson Cole Funeral Home where his family will greet friends beginning at noon. Interment: 1 p.m. Thursday in Greenwood Cemetery in Weatherford, Okla.
Memorials: Gifts in his memory may be made to the building fund at Arborlawn United Methodist Church, 5001 Briarhaven Road, Fort Worth, Texas 76109.
Lloyd was born July 27, 1913, in Ennis County, son of the late Walter T. and Lilly Taylor Shaw. He married Edna Mae McClintock on April 18, 1936. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1943-1945 aboard the USS Hector in the South Pacific. He was with the fleet during the battle for the Philippines. In the late 1940s he served as the VFW Post commander in Weatherford, Okla.
Shortly after the war, Lloyd started his own construction company. He moved to Fort Worth in 1969 where he resided until his death. A longtime member of Arborlawn United Methodist Church, he loved to fish and owned a small bass boat for many years until Mae forced him to sell it after he backed the boat, trailer and pickup into Lake Benbrook.
In addition to his parents, Lloyd was preceded in death by all of his siblings.
Survivors: His wife of 74 years, Edna Mae; son, Robert Lloyd Shaw; and grandson, Darren Lloyd Shaw.

Read more: Lloyd Howard Shaw Obituary: View Lloyd Shaw's Obituary by Star-Telegram



***********************************************************************************

Earnest Wilson, 102, a retired grocer and World War II veteran, entered rest Monday, April 12, 2010.
Funeral: 11 a.m. Monday, April 19, at Greater St. Paul Baptist Church, 4628 Avenue J. Burial: Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery


***********************************************************************************


Ernest Willie Worthey, 90, a father, grandfather, great-grandfather and World War II veteran, died Sunday, April 11, 2010, at a local healthcare center.
Graveside service: 10:30 a.m. Tuesday in Roselawn Memorial Park, 3801 Roselawn Drive, Denton. Visitation: Relatives and friends are welcome for visitation 6 to 8 p.m. Monday at Denton Funeral Home, 120 S Carroll Blvd., Denton.
Ernest was born March 15, 1920, in a farm house located south of Denton, to the late Mary and John Worthey. As a boy, he attended school in a three-room school house at Pilot Knob and later graduated from Denton High School in 1938. Ernest volunteered and served in the Army Air Force during World War II and was stationed on the Island of Guam. He attained the rank of technical sergeant and was in charge of the platoon that provided maintenance on B-29 planes, including the Enola Gay. On Oct. 28, 1943, he was united in marriage to Martha Elizabeth Pritchard in Macon, Ga., while serving in the military.
After being discharged from the service, Nov. 22, 1945, Ernest purchased a farm located northeast of Denton near the Mustang Community. In the year 1951 he began a career at Bell Helicopter and still managed to work his farm. Ernest was blessed with four children and remained in the Pilot Point area until 1980.
Later, Ernest married Karlene McClary, his teenage sweetheart, on Oct. 21, 1982. They both resided in North Richland Hills for many years. After 33 years of service he retired from Bell Helicopter in 1984. After retiring, Ernest became an avid bowler and serve on several league boards in the North Richland Hills area. Ernest was a member of the North Richland Hills Baptist Church.

Read more: Ernest Willie Worthey Obituary: View Ernest Worthey's Obituary by Star-Telegram

Visitation: 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday at historic Baker Funeral Home, with a wake at 4 p.m.
Earnest Wilson was born July 1, 1907, in Lane, La. He owned and operated a local grocery store in addition to raising and running champion greyhounds.
Earnest was preceded in death by his wife, Cora; daughter, Peggy Jo McNeal; mother, Emma Fuller; brother, William Fuller; and aunt, Josephine "Lil Auntie" Sanders.
Survivors: His son, Darrell Kelley; granddaughter, Marsha Griggs; cousin, Lorine Peoples; his caregiver, Joyce Smith; and a host of other family members and friends.
Published in Star-Telegram on April 15, 2010

Read more: Earnest Wilson Obituary: View Earnest Wilson's Obituary by Star-Telegram


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (May 18, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (May 19, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (May 19, 2010)

RIP



TO


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## Gnomey (May 19, 2010)




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## v2 (May 24, 2010)

*John Kempe * 

John Kempe, who died on May 10 aged 92, was headmaster of Gordonstoun from 1968 to 1978; he was also a noted mountaineer and served as a fighter pilot during the Second World War. 
Gordonstoun was already famous as the alma mater of the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales; under Kempe, it also educated Prince Andrew and then Prince Edward, who arrived just before the headmaster retired. 

The school's other claim to fame was its spartan regime: boys were required to go for a dawn run, whatever the weather, and to take two cold showers a day. But while Kempe retained these traditions, he was also an innovator, in 1972 admitting girls who, within three years, made up nearly a quarter of the pupils.
To coincide with this seismic development, Kempe allowed the boys the option of wearing trousers (until then shorts had been compulsory throughout the school, and many boys chose to continue wearing them); the girls, meanwhile, wore skirts of the Gordonstoun tartan. 

There were other changes. Kempe introduced the summer school at Gordonstoun, which proved both popular and lucrative. He brought in the "school visitor" – a poet or musician, for example, who would live at the school for a couple of months at a time. (Among those who took up the post was the South African poet and novelist Christopher Hope, who had chosen exile in Britain because of his opposition to apartheid.) 

Kempe also introduced individual tutors for sixth form pupils, and – every Friday, again for the sixth form – special lectures by eminent men and women who talked on a wide variety of topics. The headmaster himself taught classes in English, logic and philosophy, and would invite groups of pupils to his house for tea, sherry or his own home-brewed beer. 

Before his time at Gordonstoun, Kempe was widely known in the mountaineering world. He was a member of the Alpine Club, having climbed extensively in the Alps, and played a notable role in the first ascent of Kanchenjunga ("The Five Treasures of Snows") in north-east Nepal, at 28,169ft the world's third highest mountain. 

In 1951 Kempe had been appointed founding principal of Hyderabad Public School in India, and among his first acts had been to ensure that the dates of the school holidays coincided with the Himalayan climbing season. 

At that time Kanchenjunga had never been climbed – indeed, some considered it unscalable – but in 1953, with the Welshman Gilmour Lewis, Kempe undertook a reconnaissance. The next year they returned with a stronger party to examine the mountain's south-west face, and their report concluded that the climb might after all be possible. 

This attracted the interest of John Hunt (fresh from the conquest of Everest) and the Himalayan Joint Committee, which in 1955 sent what is known as a "reconnaissance in force", led by Charles Evans. Also in the party were the British climbers George Band and Joe Brown, who became the first to reach the summit of Kanchenjunga. Band has said that the achievement would never have been possible without the earlier work of John Kempe. 

In 1956 (by which time he was headmaster of Corby Grammar School in Northamptonshire) Kempe was the leader of an expedition to the Peruvian Andes which climbed Huagaruncho, the first time the 18,797ft peak had been conquered. Legend had it that the Incas had reached the summit, where they were supposed to have planted a gold cross (no such thing was found). 

This was to be Kempe's final expedition. He gave up climbing in 1957 after marrying his wife, Barbara Huxtable, the daughter of an Australian doctor who had won an MC and Bar at the Battle of the Somme. 

John William Rolfe Kempe was born in Nairobi on October 29 1917, the son of an officer in the Colonial Service. When John was four his father died of a fever, and his mother took her young son and daughter to live at her family's home in Norfolk. John was educated at Stowe and Clare College, Cambridge, where he read Economics and Mathematics. At Cambridge he also joined the University Air Squadron – of the 22 undergraduates who trained with him at Duxford, only two others were to survive the war. 

*Kempe was about to enter the Indian civil service when war was declared, and he volunteered for the RAF. In 1941 he was posted to No 602 Squadron, flying Spitfires, and in May the next year promoted to squadron leader. The next year he was mentioned in despatches. 

In June 1944 he was posted No 125 Squadron, flying Mosquitos. From a base in North Africa he escorted convoys making for Malta. He commanded Nos 153 and 255 Night Fighter Squadrons, and in 1945 was posted to Algiers as chief test pilot (Middle East). Shortly before being demobilised in 1946 he was again mentioned in despatches. *

After the war Kempe worked briefly at the Board of Trade and in private business, but found himself dissatisfied and restless. Discovering that his former housemaster at Stowe was now teaching at Gordonstoun, Kempe wrote to ask if there was a vacancy for a mathematics teacher. There was, and he got the job. 

It was after only three years in Scotland that Kempe was invited to Hyderabad, the brief being to create a facsimile of an English public school. In 1955 he was appointed head of the grammar school at Corby, the Northamptonshire steel town, where he remained until 1967. 

Kempe was a member of the Mount Everest Foundation committee (1956–62) and chairman of the Round Square International Service Committee (1979–87), through which young people undertake voluntary work in developing countries. He was also vice-chairman of the European Atlantic Movement Committee from 1982 to 1992 (and its vice-president thereafter), and a trustee of the University of Cambridge Kurt Hahn Trust from 1986 to 1989. 

He was appointed CVO in 1980. 

As well as articles in various journals, he published A Family History of the Kempes (1991). 

John Kempe is survived by his wife and by their two sons and one daughter. 

source: The Telegraph


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## RabidAlien (May 24, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (May 24, 2010)




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## Gnomey (May 24, 2010)




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## gumbyk (May 24, 2010)

New Zealand has lost one of its World War II flying aces, Flight Lieutenant Peter Francis Locker Hall, who has died in England aged 88.

The former teacher was credited with shooting down eight German aircraft while based in Britain as a pilot with the Royal New Zealand Air Force's 488 squadron of Mosquito fighter planes.

After returning from a mission over Europe on one engine in an aircraft damaged by flying debris, Flight Lieutenant Hall (left) and his British navigator were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. A bar was later added in his case.

Born in Opotiki, Mr Hall caught the flying bug as a boy, when his clergyman father shelled out 10 shillings ($1) for him to go on a flight in 1928 with pioneering Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith.

"When Kingsford Smith came over to Gisborne, they landed on the beach and I think he paid 10 shillings for a joy flight so he was hooked on flying, and that's how he got into the Air Force," his nephew, Richard Hall, said from Brisbane last night.

Flight Lieutenant Hall remained in Britain after the war with his English wife Mary and became an aircraft salesman for the de Havilland company, which sent him back to NZ on regular business trips.

He joined the inaugural flight to New Zealand of the ill-fated Comet in the early 1950s and arranged the sale of Hawker Siddeley aircraft to Mount Cook Airlines founder Sir Harry Wigley, whom he got to know well.

In 1972, Mr Hall left de Havilland to set up an award-winning woodcraft and furniture restoration business in England's Lakes District and, according to his nephew, was once commissioned to make a bowl for Diana, Princess of Wales.

Richard Hall said his uncle did not talk much about the war on his trips back to New Zealand, evidently having qualms about the loss of life caused by his service.

His wife died last year. The couple are survived by three children and many grandchildren.

Kiwi flying ace credited with eight kills dies in England - National - NZ Herald News


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## RabidAlien (May 24, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (May 24, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (May 27, 2010)

John Finn, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Hawaii on the day the United States was plunged into World War II, died today at his Southern California home at the age of 100.

Finn, a retired Navy lieutenant, was stationed at Kaneohe Bay Naval Air Station on Dec. 7, 1941.

As Japanese planes strafed the base, Finn took up a .50-caliber machine gun in defense.

Firing from an exposed position, Finn was wounded several times during the first wave of the attack. Still, he refused to be evacuated, and his actions were credited with rallying other sailors to take up weapons.

On Sept. 15, he received the Medal of Honor from President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his actions.

Last December, when he was in Hawaii for a memorial event at what is now called Marine Corps Base Hawaii at Kaneohe Bay, Finn told The Advertiser he would never forget the attack.

"I grew up thinking the Navy, Marines and Army were invincible," he said, "and here we were, getting our clocks cleaned.

"We got caught so flat-footed. ... They really kicked the living hell out of us."

The event at Kaneohe honored the 18 sailors and two civilians who lost their lives in the attack.

Finn, who regularly returned to Hawaii for Dec. 7 commemorations, was born July 23, 1909, in Los Angeles.

He was the oldest of the 97 Medal of Honor recipients still living.


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## Wayne Little (May 28, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (May 28, 2010)

RIP Lt. Finn



TO


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## Gnomey (May 28, 2010)




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## v2 (May 28, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (May 28, 2010)




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## Park82 (Jun 11, 2010)

Hi,

Just wanted to mention something I thought might interest some of you.. here at the RAF Benevolent Fund we’ve just produced a special online tribute book together with website friendsandrelations.com as a tribute to all the pilots who flew in the Battle of Britain. 

By visiting www.battleofbritainbook.com you can create a dedicated page for any of The Few, whether living or passed on. There you can post pictures, anecdotes, facts and memories - contributing to what we hope will be an invaluable public record of the young men who fought to defend the UK in its most vital hour. 

Thanks to everyone who's visited so far


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jun 14, 2010)

I realize this is a bit late but it was just sent to me and I had not heard about it. I'm not sure this is the proper place for it so if it is not will one of the Mods please put it in the proper spot. This incident took place last September. The respect displayed is unreal and very commendable and it brought a tear to my eyes. 

The Sailor Pictured Below Is,


Navy Petty Officer,


PO2


(Petty Officer, Second Class)


EOD2




(Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Second Class)




"MIKE MONSOOR"




April 5th, 1981 ~ September 29th, 2009














Mike Monsoor,




Was Awarded "The Congressional Medal Of Honor" Last Week,




For Giving His Life In Iraq , As He Jumped On, And Covered With His Body, A Live
Hand Grenade,






Saving The Lives Of A Large Group Of Navy Seals That Was Passing By!




~




During Mike Monsoor's Funeral,




At Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery , In San Diego , California ..




The Six Pallbearers Removed The Rosewood Casket From The Hearse,




And Lined Up On Each Side Of Mike Monsoor's Casket,




Were His Family Members, Friends, Fellow Sailors, And Well-wishers.




The Column Of People Continued From The Hearse, All The Way To The Grave Site.




What The Group Didn't Know At The Time Was,




Every Navy Seal




(45 To Be Exact)




That Mike Monsoor Saved That Day Was Scattered Through-Out The Column!




~




As The Pallbearers Carried The Rosewood Casket




Down The Column Of People To The Grave Side.




The Column Would Collapse..




Which Formed A Group Of People That Followed Behind.




~




Every Time The Rosewood Casket Passed A Navy Seal,




He Would Remove His Gold Trident Pin From His Uniform,




And Slap It Down Hard,




Causing The Gold Trident Pin To Embed Itself




Into The Top Of The Wooden Casket!




Then The Navy Seal Would Step Back From The Column, And Salute!




~




Now For Those,






Who Don't Know What A Trident Pin Is,




Here Is The Definition!




~




After One Completes The Basic Navy Seals Program Which Lasts For Three Weeks,




And Is Followed By Seal Qualification Training,




Which Is 15 More Weeks Of Training,




Necessary To Continue Improving Basic Skills And To Learn New Tactics And Techniques,




Required For An Assignment To A Navy Seal Platoon.




After successful completion,




Trainees Are Given Their Naval Enlisted Code,




And Are Awarded The Navy Seal Trident Pin.




With This Gold Pin They Are Now Officially Navy Seals!




It Was Said,




That You Could Hear Each Of The 45 Slaps From Across The Cemetery!




By The Time The Rosewood Casket Reached The Grave Site,




It Looked As Though It Had A Gold Inlay From The 45 Trident Pins That Lined The Top!











This Was A Fitting End To An Eternal Send-Off For A Warrior Hero!


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## RabidAlien (Jun 14, 2010)

One hell of an honor from those Seals. 

Checked this on Snopes (yeah, I'm a cynical bastard). Its true (except for his rate....he was apparently MA2, not EO2). There's even a video on Snopes' page. 

http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/monsoor.asp


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## Gnomey (Jun 15, 2010)

One of the first places I go with any of these email stories. Glad to hear there is some truth to it though.


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jun 15, 2010)

Glad to know it is true.


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## vikingBerserker (Jun 15, 2010)

Dam straight!


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## v2 (Jun 25, 2010)

*Squadron Leader Jim Heyworth.* 

Squadron Leader Jim Heyworth, who has died aged 88, completed 60 missions as a bomber pilot before joining Rolls-Royce, where he went on to become the company's chief test pilot.
Heyworth was seconded to Rolls-Royce at Hucknall in June 1944 to "develop a new type of power unit", which turned out to be the jet engine invented by Frank Whittle. He soon had his first experience of flying with the revolutionary new engine when he piloted a Wellington bomber modified to carry the Whittle W2B. He tested the same engine, which was given the name Welland, in the prototype Meteor jet fighter. 

After leaving the RAF in 1946, Heyworth remained with Rolls-Royce. The next few years saw dramatic advances in aircraft engine design, and Heyworth played a key role in their development. The many innovations at the beginning of the jet age had to be tested using standard fighters and bombers modified as flying test beds. Heyworth flew a modified transport version of the Lancaster bomber fitted with Nene jet engines, and the Trent-engined Meteor, the world's first propeller-turbine aircraft. 
He was also involved in the development of vertical take-off engines. In 1954 he completed a number of "flights" in the tethered engine test rig called the Thrust Measuring Rig (TMR) – better known as "The Flying Bedstead" – which was used to develop the vertical thrust technology and flight control systems later used in the Harrier. Subsequently he flew a Meteor fitted with the RB 108 vertical lift engine. 

The Meteor proved an ideal aircraft as an engine testbed, and Heyworth flew a number of them fitted with a wide variety of jet engines, including one equipped with afterburners. He also tested the powerful Conway engine mounted on an Ashton jet and the Vulcan bomber. 

In 1955 he was appointed the company's chief test pilot, following in the footsteps of his brother Harvey, a former Battle of Britain pilot who had been the first test pilot to fly 1,000 hours on jets. Testing such a wide variety of experimental designs, some not as successful as others, was not without incident, and Heyworth had his fair share of them. 

Engine failures forced him to land a Spitfire in a field, and a Mustang on a remote airfield after oil covered the windshield, obliterating his view. He was once in a Meteor at 25,000ft when the canopy flew off; and on another occasion the wheels of his Hunter fighter failed to lower. 

Alexander James Heyworth, the son of a doctor, was born at Belper, Derbyshire, on June 5 1922 and educated at St Edward's, Oxford, where he excelled at rugby and hockey. He was accepted to read Medicine at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, but in May 1940 he volunteered for flying duties with the RAF. 

After training as a pilot he joined No 12 Squadron to fly Wellington bombers. During a daylight attack against Germany's capital ships at Brest in July 1941, his aircraft was attacked by fighters, but his skilful direction of the gunners kept them at bay. 

On the night of October 14/15 1941 he attacked Nuremberg. The weather was poor, and after dropping his bombs he turned for home. Moments later the starboard engine failed, and he was faced with a long transit over enemy territory flying on the one remaining engine. He and his crew debated heading for Switzerland, but with his wedding only two weeks away, Heyworth decided to head for base. 

Despite full power on the port engine the bomber steadily lost height. All the disposable items, including the guns and ammunition, were jettisoned. To hold the aircraft straight, Heyworth had to apply full rudder, but after a few hours the strain began to tell on him and the crew found some rope to lash the pedal to the airframe, thus giving his leg some respite. 

The aircraft crossed the French coast at 1,000ft, and once it was below a safe height to bail out, the parachutes were also jettisoned. Heyworth just managed to reach the Kent coast as dawn broke, and, with the remaining engine failing and fog descending, he crash-landed near Romney Marsh. The crew were uninjured, but were arrested by a farmer armed with a shotgun. With hands held high, Heyworth was able to convince him that they were not Germans. 

Heyworth, who had held the aircraft steady on one engine for more than five hours (an unprecedented feat at that time), was awarded an immediate DFC. 

After a few months on a rest tour, Heyworth returned to No 12 Squadron in 1943 to fly Lancasters during Bomber Command's main offensive and at the height of what was called the Battle of the Ruhr. Aged 21 he was promoted to squadron leader and appointed a flight commander. He attacked the industrial cities of the Ruhr, including the Krupps works at Essen, and flew on the major raids against Hamburg in the summer of 1943. He was mentioned in despatches. 

After completing his 60th operation he was posted to a staff appointment and shortly afterwards was awarded a Bar to his DFC, the citation noting his gallantry and "unabated enthusiasm". 

After 18 years' test flying, during which time he flew 82 different types of aircraft, Heyworth retired from the role in 1962 and joined the engineering management department of Rolls-Royce at Derby, finally retiring in 1981. 

He was appointed a Liveryman of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators in 1962, when he was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He was awarded the Thulin medal by the Swedish Aeronautical Society. 

After retiring Heyworth served as chairman of his parish council and as a local school governor. A keen sportsman in his younger days, he represented the East Midlands at hockey; he continued to play golf until he was well into his eighties. 

Jim Heyworth, who died on June 10, married, in 1941, Joy Quiggin, who survives him with their three sons. 

source: The Telegraph.


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## RabidAlien (Jun 25, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Jun 25, 2010)




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## Vic Balshaw (Jun 25, 2010)




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## Airframes (Jun 25, 2010)

R.I.P. Sqn. Ldr. Heyworth.


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## Wayne Little (Jun 27, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Jun 27, 2010)

RIP Squadron Leader 



TO


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## BorderWarrior (Jul 4, 2010)

In memory of my Grandfather, Corporal William Watson Mitchell, Royal Air Force 1938-1946, Mentioned in Despatches, Imperial Service Medal for Meritorious Service.

Born 17th December 1910-Died 29th April 2010.

Joined up 1938 and served in the Battle of Britain before being posted to the North Africa Theatre where he remained for 4 years.
Post war worked on Royal Navy Aircraft at various locations but latterly at RNAW Almondbank, Perth, Scotland, up to his retirement.

Small in stature but a larger than life character and a true gentleman all his life, rest in peace Grandad.


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## Gnomey (Jul 4, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jul 4, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 6, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Jul 6, 2010)

TO


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## RabidAlien (Jul 6, 2010)




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## v2 (Jul 8, 2010)

Air Commodore* Pat Kennedy * 

Air Commodore Pat Kennedy, who has died aged 92, fought with distinction in the Burma campaign and in its immediate aftermath, when his squadron was one of the first to fly to the Dutch East Indies following a serious outbreak of fighting against Indonesian nationalists there.
Within days of the Japanese surrender in August 1945, Dr Sukarno proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia, which created a dangerous situation, in particular on Java, when Allied forces struggled to reassert control. With Indonesian revolutionaries determined to fight to establish independence, both the RAF – which had been deployed largely to discover the location of the many thousand of PoWs and internees in unknown jungle camps – and returning Dutch forces were targeted. 

The RAF quickly deployed two Thunderbolt fighter-bomber squadrons, including Kennedy's No 81 Squadron. For the next few months No 81 shouldered the responsibility for all operations, notably providing cover to ground units hunting for PoWs in Western Java. 
The flying conditions were arduous and often dangerous, as supplies were dropped to many isolated PoW camps. The Thunderbolts were also called on to mount strafing sorties against rebel strongholds and to bomb airfields and ammunition dumps. As some RAF squadrons were withdrawn, No 81 remained, and Kennedy attracted widespread praise for his efforts in the air and on the ground. The citation for his DSO concluded: "He had a prolonged and excellent record of gallantry and devotion to duty." 

Patrick Ascension Kennedy was born on May 5 1917 (Ascension Day) at Cooke, Co Tipperary, and educated at Newbridge College near Dublin. In February 1938 he joined the Royal Ulster Rifles as a rifleman and sailed with the 2nd Battalion for France in early October 1939 as part of the British Expeditionary Force. With the German invasion of the Low Countries, the regiment moved into Belgium and was heavily engaged. A series of fighting retreats culminated in a withdrawal to Dunkirk, and on June 9 Kennedy and a few of his colleagues discovered a rowing boat and headed for a destroyer sailing to Folkestone. 

After returning from France the duties of guarding the Sussex coast did not satisfy Kennedy's restless nature, and in January 1941 he took advantage of a scheme allowing Army personnel to transfer to the RAF to train as pilots. He completed his training in Canada before joining 123 Squadron, based in Iraq and flying Hurricanes. The squadron then moved to Persia to protect the oilfields from the threats in the north before transferring to Egypt, from where it operated over Crete. 

In October 1943 Kennedy left for India and six months later joined 4 Squadron, Royal Indian Air Force, as a flight commander, flying Hurricanes in the tactical reconnaissance and ground attack roles in support of the Fourteenth Army. Kennedy flew many reconnaissance sorties over the mountainous Arakan, often in adverse weather, to gain valuable information on Japanese troop concentrations and movements before leading formations in attacks against them. 

When supporting the 81st West African Division, cut off in the Kaladan Valley, Kennedy and his pilots attacked enemy positions within 300 yards of friendly troops. During two of these sorties Kennedy's Hurricane was badly damaged by ground fire but he succeeded in returning to an airfield. 

As the Fourteenth Army advanced towards Rangoon, 4 Squadron bombed Japanese strongpoints and supported Indian troops at Kangow, where it laid a dense smoke screen to enable the troops to land safely. After moving further south, Kennedy led more "smoke screen" sorties, described by one pilot as "hair-raising and involving flying very low". In March 1945 the squadron was rested and Kennedy was awarded a DFC. Shortly afterwards he took command of No 81 Squadron. 

Kennedy returned to England in 1947 and spent two years at the Central Fighter Establishment. In January 1950 he was appointed to command No 6 Squadron, flying Vampire jet fighters. Over the next two years the squadron was based in Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, and was viewed as the best in the Middle East Air Force. 

No 6 exercised regularly with the Arab Legion under the command of Glubb Pasha and established a very close relationship with King Abdullah and the Jordanian people. Shortly after receiving the RAF Standard, the King presented the squadron with his personal standard, making it the only RAF squadron to be granted two Royal Standards. For his outstanding leadership of No 6, Kennedy was awarded an AFC. 

After three years at the air ministry, in 1958 Kennedy took command of No 31 Squadron, flying Canberra aircraft in the tactical reconnaissance role from its base at Laarbruch on the Dutch-German border. 

In May 1964 Kennedy commanded the V-Bomber base at Marham, but within three months he was faced with major difficulties. A Valiant bomber was found to have fatigue cracks in the wing and, after exhaustive tests, it was decided to scrap the whole Valiant force. The shock of the loss of Valiants, and the period of uncertainty that followed, gave Kennedy a testing time. At the end of his tour he was promoted to air commodore, but shortly after taking up his post at HQ 1 (Bomber) Group, he took voluntary retirement. 

Kennedy joined the British Aircraft Corporation and moved to the Middle East to work on the development of a national air defence scheme for King Idris of Libya. On September 1 1969 a group of Army officers, including 27 year-old Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, launched a coup, and Kennedy was confined to his hotel room. Not liking this, he commandeered a taxi and told the driver to head for Tunis. On arrival, he handed over his watch as payment and boarded an aircraft for England. 

After a brief spell in BAC's guided weapons division at Stevenage, Kennedy moved to Warton, Lancashire, dealing with international aircraft sales to the Middle East, particularly Oman. 

In 1984 he and his wife bought Lindeth Fell on the shores of Lake Windermere, which they established as a country house hotel. Kennedy developed the extensive gardens, designed by Thomas Mawson in the early 20th century, and remained actively involved in their maintenance until late in his life. Lindeth Fell won the Good Hotel Guide's "Country Hotel of the Year Award" in 2009. 

Pat Kennedy, who died on May 2, married, in 1958, Diana Clark; she survives him with their four daughters. 

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Jul 8, 2010)

Wing Commander* 'Ronny' Rotheram * 

Wing Commander 'Ronny' Rotheram, who has died aged 92, won a DFC during the Battle of France while attacking the bridges across the Meuse at Maastricht in order to deny their use to the German Army. 
The Blenheim squadrons of No 2 Group had been thrown into the battle in an attempt to stem the rapid German advance. Rotheram was a member of 107 Squadron, which on May 12 1940 was ordered to attack the Maastricht bridges. 

Led by its charismatic commander Basil Embry, the Squadron attacked from 6000 feet and was immediately engulfed by heavy flak. Five of 12 Blenheims were lost in the attack and Rotheram's aircraft was hit repeatedly leaving his windscreen shattered and his observer wounded. 
As he turned away from the target after dropping his bombs, Rotheram found that the controls to his port engine were severed and, as the starboard engine was damaged, he started to drop out of formation. At that moment two Me109s attacked, but he found a small patch of cloud and managed to evade them. Shortly afterwards the propeller of the port engine detached and he made a skilful forced landing which all three crew survived, although his gunner was injured. 

After the crash, Rotheram and his observer were driven to an underground fort at Tildonk where they were brought before the King of the Belgians and Sir Roger Keyes, Churchill's personal emissary to the King, and questioned about the state of the bridges. Rotheram was flown back to England. He later discovered that the main bridges were already down at the time of the attack and that traffic was instead pouring over two pontoon bridges. 

Rotheram was back on operations with 107 Squadron 10 days later and by the end of the month had taken part in 11 more daylight missions, nearly all against heavy opposition. His aircraft was hit on four more occasions and losses among the Blenheim force were heavy. By the end of the month, he was operating in support of the Dunkirk evacuation when he was rescued from the attentions of Messerschmitt fighters by the timely arrival of Spitfires and Hurricanes. 

Ronald Cooper Rotheram was born in Dublin on August 27 1917, the third of seven sons of Major Auston Rotheram, who had been a subaltern in the 4th Hussars with Winston Churchill in India and was a member of the Ireland team at the 1908 Olympic games. Five of the brothers served in the RAF; two lost their lives in service. The Rotherams, like many Anglo-Irish families, left Ireland in the 1920s. Ronny attended Cheltenham College and later Beaumont College, and entered the RAF College at Cranwell in 1936 where he gained his full colours for rowing. 

Rotheram was posted to 107 Squadron on leaving Cranwell. In April 1940 the Squadron was engaged in the Norwegian campaign including a low-level attack against the recently occupied airfield at Stavanger. After the Battle of France, Rotheram was posted to 101 Squadron, a training and reserve unit. He returned to operations in January 1941 with 105 Squadron as a flight commander and took part in shipping strikes and bombing raids on Germany and occupied Europe. 

In May 1943 Rotheram was appointed Commanding Officer of 244 Squadron, an anti-submarine squadron based at Sharjah. The squadron was equipped with the Bisley, an underpowered variant of the Blenheim which was prone to crashing due to sand getting into the engines. Many aircraft were being lost and morale was understandably poor. Rotheram arranged for regular engine changes and had the armour and heavy turrets removed, which greatly improved the aircraft's reliability and flying qualities. Many hours flown on patrols without a sighting were finally rewarded when a sergeant and his crew sank the U-533 in the Gulf of Oman. Rotheram was appointed OBE for his time in command of 244 Squadron. In 1944 he attended the Middle East Staff College at Haifa. 

Rotheram continued in the RAF after the war. He completed the Army Staff College course in 1947 and his later service included an appointment in Copenhagen with Sir Hugh Saunders's mission to the Royal Danish Air Force and two years as Officer Commanding RAF Kai Tak, Hong Kong. He retired from the RAF in 1972 having flown 37 aircraft types, from the Avro Tutor biplane to the Vampire jet. He later worked for Associated Books at Andover. 

Ronny Rotheram, who died on April 8, married, in 1946, Catherine Askelund, the daughter of a marine engineer of Norwegian descent. She died in 1971, and in 1990 he married Audrey Danny, who survives him with a son and daughter from his first marriage. 

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Jul 8, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Jul 8, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Jul 8, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 10, 2010)




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## Colin1 (Jul 11, 2010)

_Free French fighter pilot who flew more than 100 missions against the Luftwaffe on the Russian Front_

Jacques Marquis de Saint Phalle, who died on June 15 aged 92, was one of the last surviving French fighter pilots who flew for the small but daring Normandie-Niemen squadron of the Free French Air Force against the Luftwaffe on the Russian Front.

De Saint Phalle, whose family has lived for centuries in the Burgundian Chateau de Montgoublin and traces back to 6th century priest Saint Fal, had fled occupied France for England in the hope of flying Spitfires with the RAF on the Western Front. Instead, he found himself flying Russian Yak fighters in dogfights against Fw190s and Bf109s over the freezing plains of Russia.

Although de Saint Phalle himself flew more than 100 missions he had only one kill, shooting down an Fw190. His own Yak fighter had already been riddled with bullets and he was forced to crash-land as he saw his enemy's plane explode.

His 96-man French squadron however, shot down a total of 273 enemy aircraft between March 1943 and May 1945, giving the Yak fighter a reputation as the most lethal warplane on the Eastern Front, favourably comparing with the Spitfire that dominated over Western Europe. Such was the reputation of the Free French pilots, enhanced by powerful propaganda from their Soviet allies, that Field Marshall Keitel issued a decree that "any Free French pilot captured should be immediately executed."

Gustav Andre Jacques de Saint Phalle was born in what was then Mazagan (now El Jadida) in Morocco, on June 30, 1917. As the eldest son, he inherited the title of marquis from his father, Ferdinand Aime Tossaint Joseph de Saint Phalle, a civil engineer who had gone to Morocco to build roads and bridges after being demobbed from the Great War through injury. Jacques's mother was Anne Marguerite D'Urbal. Another branch of the de Saint Phalle family emigrated in the 1930s to America, where Jacques's neice, best known as Niki De Saint Phalle, became an internationally renowned painter, sculptor and filmmaker. She died in 2002.

As a teenager, Jacques hoped to become a monk but, with the Nazis rapidly rearming, applied instead to the Armee de l'Air. After obtaining his pilot's licence on July 7 1939, he served in Central France until war broke out in September, when he was sent to fighter pilot school at La Senia airfield in Oran, Algeria. He was there when the Wehrmacht occupied France in May 1940.

He was unable to return to the occupied 'Free Zone' of his country, where 'to earn a crust' as he put it, he worked in Foix for a charbonnier or coalman. All the Armee de l'Air, under Vichy control, could offer him was a post as a guard at the Istres airbase, which housed its slumbering Dewoitine and Morane-Saulnier fighters.

But he was intent on finding a way to escape to England and so, with the help of the Resistance, trekked over the Pyrenees disguised as a peasant, avoiding Franco's Guardia Civil and reaching the American consulate in Bilbao. From there, he made it to Seville, where he teamed up with a fellow French pilot, Henry Foucaud who had also set his sights on joining the RAF.

Together, the two Frenchmen, by train and mule-drawn cart, managed to cross the border into Portugal, reaching the British Embassy in Lisbon. They soon found themselves on a DC-3 to Bristol to link up with their compatriot pilots in the Free French GC-3 Normandie.

After Jacques lied to the squadron commander, Jean Tulasne, that he had completed the necessary 400 hours required of a skilled pilot - he had actually flown 50 - he and Foucaud found themselves flying Yaks on the Russian Front. Foucaud would die in an airfield accident in Tula, Russia in April 1944.

Later the same year, Stalin suggested remaning GC-3 the Normandie-Niemen squadron after it played a key role above the ground battles to cross the Niemen river, in present day Belarus.

From 1945 to 1975, Jacques flew for Air France, becoming the airline's first pilot to fly a 747, a far cry from his wartime Yak fighter with its 1,650hp engine. He retired to the Chateau de Montgoublin in 1975 but continued to fly and to teach as president of his local flying club. Honoured as a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur and awarded the Croix de la Guerre by France, Jacques also received three military awards from the USSR, the Order of the Red Star, the Medal for Victory over Germany and the Order of the Patriotic War.

Jacques generally avoided using his title of Marquis although others in Burgundy who respected his family's history always did. He is survived by his second wife Agnes whom he married in 1977, by their son and his stepdaughter and by a son and stepdaughter from his first marriange to Emilie, who died in 1969.


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## gumbyk (Jul 11, 2010)

NZ WWII war hero dies - National - NZ Herald News

I watched a documentary about him the other week - sounds like he got up to some pretty non-standard ops.


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## BorderWarrior (Jul 12, 2010)

Respects to all.


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## RabidAlien (Jul 12, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 12, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Jul 12, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Jul 12, 2010)




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## GrauGeist (Jul 12, 2010)

My girlfriend's Grandfather, Arno Melger, (United States Army, World War II) passed away Sunday morning at 00:31 at the age of 94.

He served in the ETO and was a translator (he was first-generation American of German parents) and spoke German fluently. He returned to civilian life in 1946 and was a resident of Red Bluff, California at the time of his passing.


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## Njaco (Jul 12, 2010)

Sorry to hear that GG. My condolences.


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## RabidAlien (Jul 13, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 13, 2010)

Condolences David...RIP Mr. Melger


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## Gnomey (Jul 13, 2010)

Condolences GG.


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## Njaco (Jul 16, 2010)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/us/15baker.html

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: July 14, 2010

Vernon Baker, who was the only living black veteran awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in World War II, receiving it 52 years after he wiped out four German machine-gun nests on a hilltop in northern Italy, died Tuesday at his home near St. Maries, Idaho. He was 90. The cause was complications of brain cancer, said Ron Hodge, owner of the Hodge Funeral Home in St. Maries. 

“I was a soldier and I had a job to do,” Mr. Baker said after receiving the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for bravery, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony on Jan. 13, 1997.

But in the segregated armed forces of World War II, black soldiers were usually confined to jobs in manual labor or supply units. Even when the Army allowed blacks to go into combat, it rarely accorded them the recognition they deserved. Of the 433 Medals of Honor awarded by all branches of the military during the war, not a single one went to any of the 1.2 million blacks in the service. 

In the early 1990s, responding to requests from black veterans and a white former captain who had commanded black troops in combat, the Army asked Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh, N.C., to investigate why no blacks had received the Medal of Honor during World War II. The inquiry found no documents proving that blacks had been discriminated against in decisions to award the medal, but concluded that a climate of racism had prevented recognition of heroic deeds. Military historians gave the Army the names of 10 black servicemen who they believed should have been considered for the Medal of Honor. Then an Army board, looking at their files with all references to race deleted, decided that seven of these men deserved to be cited for bravery “above and beyond the call of duty.” 

Four of the men — Lt. John R. Fox of Cincinnati; Pfc. Willy F. James Jr. of Kansas City, Mo.; Staff Sgt. Ruben Rivers of Oklahoma City; and Pvt. George Watson of Birmingham, Ala. — had been killed in action. Two others — Staff Sgt. Edward A. Carter Jr. of Los Angeles and Lt. Charles L. Thomas of Detroit, who retired as a major — had died in the decades after the war. Those six received the medal posthumously at the White House ceremony in 1997. 

Mr. Baker, the lone survivor among the seven, was greeted with a standing ovation as he entered the East Room to the strains of “God Bless America” played by the Marine Corps Band. As Mr. Clinton placed the Medal of Honor around his neck, Mr. Baker stared into space, a tear rolling down his left cheek. “I was thinking about what was going on up on the hill that day,” he said later. 

That day was April 5, 1945. Lieutenant Baker, a small man — 5 feet 5 inches and 140 pounds — was leading 25 black infantrymen through a maze of German bunkers and machine gun nests near Viareggio, Italy, a coastal town north of Pisa. About 5 a.m., they reached the south side of a ravine, 250 yards from Castle Aghinolfi, a German stronghold they hoped to capture. Lieutenant Baker observed a telescope pointing out of a slit. Crawling under the opening, he emptied the clip of his M-1 rifle, killing two German soldiers inside the position. Then he came upon a well-camouflaged machine-gun nest whose two-man crew was eating breakfast. He shot and killed both soldiers. 

After Capt. John F. Runyon, his company commander, who was white, joined the group, a German soldier hurled a grenade that hit Captain Runyon in his helmet but failed to explode. Lieutenant Baker shot the German twice as he tried to flee. He then blasted open the concealed entrance of another dugout with a hand grenade, shot one German soldier who emerged, tossed another grenade into the dugout and entered it, firing his machine gun and killing two more Germans. Enemy machine-gun and mortar fire began to inflict heavy casualties among the platoon. Lieutenant Baker’s company commander had gone back for reinforcements, but they never arrived, so the remnants of the platoon had to withdraw. Lieutenant Baker, supported by covering fire from one of his soldiers, destroyed two machine-gun positions to allow the evacuation. Seventeen of the men in the platoon had been killed by time the firefight ended. 

The next night, Lieutenant Baker voluntarily led a battalion advance through enemy minefields and heavy fire. 

Lieutenant Baker received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for bravery. Asked a half-century later whether he had ever given up hope of being awarded the Medal of Honor, he seemed surprised. “I never thought about getting it,” he said. 

Freddie Stowers, a black veteran of World War I nominated for the medal in 1918, finally received it posthumously from President George Bush in 1991. 

Vernon Joseph Baker was born on Dec. 17, 1919, in Cheyenne, Wyo., the son of a carpenter. After his parents died in an automobile accident when he was 4, he and two older sisters moved in with their grandparents, who also lived in Cheyenne. The youngster developed a penchant for trouble, so he was sent to Boys Town in Omaha at age 10. He stayed there for three years, then earned a high school diploma while living with an aunt in Iowa. 

He joined the Army in June 1941 and was sent to Camp Wolters, Tex., for basic training — his first trip to the Deep South. When he boarded a bus to the camp after stepping off the train, the driver shouted a racial epithet and told him to “get to the back of the bus where you belong,” he recalled years later in an interview with The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash. When he began to show leadership potential, he was sent to Officer Candidate School, graduating as a second lieutenant in 1942. He went to Italy in 1944 with the 92nd Infantry Division’s 370th Regiment, which was composed of black enlisted men and black junior officers but had white officers in senior positions. In October 1944, Lieutenant Baker was shot in the arm by a German soldier, and when he awoke from surgery he noticed that he was in a segregated hospital ward. 

After the war, he remained in Italy for three years, then returned to the United States and re-enlisted. He stayed in the Army until 1968, then worked for the Red Cross at Fort Ord, Calif., counseling needy military families. After his first wife, Fern, died in 1986, he retired and moved to a rural section of Idaho to pursue his love of hunting. 

Mr. Baker’s survivors include his second wife, Heidy; three children from his first marriage; a stepdaughter; and a stepgrandson. 

Asked at the awards ceremony how he had felt about serving in a segregated unit, Mr. Baker replied: “I was an angry young man. We were all angry. But we had a job to do, and we did it. My personal thoughts were that I knew things would get better, and I’m glad to say that I’m here to see it.”


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## RabidAlien (Jul 17, 2010)




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## v2 (Jul 17, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Jul 17, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Jul 17, 2010)

and it was well deserved.


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## v2 (Jul 23, 2010)

Battle of Britain ace Wing Commander *Ken Mackenzie *has died aged 92 

Wing Commander Mackenzie died at a nursing home at Sibbertoft, near Market Harborough.

He served for nearly 28 years in the RAF before taking up other aviation-related posts in Europe and Africa.

He moved to Lutterworth with his wife Margaret in 2000 from Cyprus.

To mark his wartime heroism, a street in the town was named after him.

Mr Mackenzie joined the RAF at the outbreak of Second World War after learning to fly in his native Northern Ireland.

He became famous overnight when, on October 7, 1940, he attacked a Messerschmitt Bf 109.

With no apparent result, he followed it down to almost sea level in his Hawker Hurricane and, when it did not ditch, he struck the enemy fighter's tailplane with his wing, and the enemy fighter crashed into the sea.

He then made a forced landing outside Folkestone, Kent.

He spent three years in a PoW camp, and when he was repatriated he continued his service, retiring from the RAF on July 1, 1967. While in Lutterworth he took a keen interest in the efforts to mark the contribution to aviation by Sir Frank Whittle who developed the jet engine in the town.

Lutterworth town councillor Eileen Derrick, who campaigned for a street to be named after him, said: "Ken Mackenzie was such a nice gentleman and a true hero."

Mr Mackenzie died last Thursday. He is survived by his widow, two sons and a daughter.

source: This is Leicestershire


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## v2 (Jul 23, 2010)

Commander *Mike Crosley * 

Commander Mike Crosley, who has died aged 90, was a Fleet Air Arm ace and later a test pilot. 
Among the operations in which he took part was Harpoon, when a convoy ferried supplies and new aircraft to the relief of the besieged island of Malta in the summer of 1942. Crosley flew one of four Sea Hurricanes allocated for air defence of the carrier Eagle. 

On June 12 he was on alert on the deck of Eagle. After two hours strapped in his cockpit, he was expecting to stand down when he heard the klaxon sound. Within a few moments he was airborne, being directed by radar to an enemy aircraft; and when his flight leader turned back with engine trouble, Crosley decided to pursue the enemy alone. 

He closed until the wingspan of the three-engined Italian bomber filled his gunsight, then pressed the trigger. At that moment he noted sparks coming from the underside of the bomber – it was the enemy returning fire. Then smoke burst from the Italian's engines and its wingtip came dangerously close as it dived towards the sea. 

Crosley followed, determined to finish it off; but as he emerged from the cloud he saw the bomber floating on the water with a yellow life raft beside it. 

He later wrote: "_ touched the trigger, but realised I was doing something wrong. I would like to think that I might have made friends with those seven aircrew who were picked up by a British destroyer." 

The next day Crosley shot down a twin-engined German fighter-bomber. He wove in and out of the German's slipstream, and when the target filled his gunsight he fired one long burst which hit the aircraft's wing, "sparking like firecrackers". 

On the third day Crosley was again involved in aerial combat and believed he shot down two aircraft: after detailed analysis he was credited with a possible and a probable, and was praised for helping to break up an air attack on the fleet. 

On August 11 Eagle was torpedoed, and Crosley had just minutes in which to grab his life jacket from the aircrews' briefing room before she rolled over and sank. He quickly joined 800 Naval Air Squadron, flying from the escort carrier Biter during Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. On November 8 he shot down two Vichy French fighters in a dogfight over the airfield of La Senia, near Oran. He was awarded his first DSC. 

Crosley was next appointed senior pilot of 804 NAS in the escort carrier Dasher, a ship which he thought was not only ill-fated but also ill-managed. Dasher – a converted merchant ship – began to break up while she was escorting an Arctic convoy, and Crosley was not surprised to learn that she had blown up after there had been a fire on board. 

He was then selected to pass on his experience to new fighter pilots at HMS Dipper, near Yeovilton, where he flew the Royal Navy's version of the Spitfire, known as the Seafire. 

By D-Day Crosley had joined 886 Naval Air Squadron, flying Seafires from Lee-on-the-Solent. His role was to direct the fire of the heavy ships which were bombarding the German defences. On the second day of the Allied landings he shot down a German Bf109, which crashed 15 miles south-west of Caen, and two days later damaged an Fw190 which he chased in a dogfight through the skies over Normandy. 

He spent the weeks after D-Day flying two, or even three, sorties a day before being appointed to command 880 Naval Air Squadron; this was based in Orkney as part of 30 Naval Air Wing, which embarked in the fleet carrier Implacable and carried out a series of attacks on German shipping in the fjords of Norway. By the time the war ended 880 Squadron and Implacable were prosecuting the war in the Pacific, striking at the Japanese mainland. Crosley was mentioned in despatches, and in August 1945 received a Bar to his DSC. 

Robert Michael Crosley was born on February 24 1920, the son of the tenor Lovat Crosley; the Crosley family had once owned Sunningdale Park, in Berkshire. His mother deserted the family, and Mike's early childhood was unsettled until he was rescued from a series of foster homes by his grandmother. He was educated at Pilgrims' School, Winchester, and King Edward VII School in Southampton, and finally enjoyed some stability after his father married one of his leading ladies, Rose Hignell, and established a plant nursery on the banks of the Hamble. 

Mike Crosley was a Metropolitan Police constable (a reserved occupation) when war broke out, but volunteered on the day of the Fleet Air Arm strike on Taranto, November 11 1940. 

After the war Crosley joined No 6 Empire Test Pilots' Course, and left the Navy to test Short's flying boats under development in Belfast. On the outbreak of the Korean War he rejoined the Navy, helping to train new pilots and flying 75 missions over Korea from the carrier Ocean. 

He wrote pilots' notes for a range of aircraft, which he flew to their limits, and was awarded the Queen's Commendation for Valuable Services in the Air. In 1954-55 he was commanding officer of 813 Squadron, flying the Wyvern from the new Eagle. 

In 1958 Crosley was promoted commander and returned to test flying at Boscombe Down, making the first deck landings of the Buccaneer low-level bomber. 

He retired in 1970, aged 50, trained to be a schoolmaster and went on to teach physics at Bramdean prep school, Exeter, and at Upper Chine Girls' School on the Isle of Wight. 

Having built his first boat (a canoe) when he was 15, Crosley later constructed three Flying 15s – all called If – which he sailed against the Duke of Edinburgh and Uffa Fox. He also built a 27ft sloop, Seafire, which had to be extracted from his garden on the Isle of Wight by a crane. Crosley also made much of his own furniture, travelling far and wide to find rare veneers. 

Crosley logged 2,818 flying hours in 147 different types of aircraft and made 415 deck landings. Throughout the war he kept extensive diaries, on which he based two books: They Gave Me a Seafire (1986) and In Harm's Way (1995). Together they form a history of the wartime expansion of the FAA and a vade mecum for test pilots. 

Mike Crosley died on June 20. He was thrice married, lastly, in 1969, to Joan Eglen, who survives him with his five children.

source: The Telegraph._


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## Gnomey (Jul 23, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Jul 23, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Jul 23, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 24, 2010)




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## GrauGeist (Jul 25, 2010)

A remarkable career...RIP Cmdr Crosley


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## Njaco (Aug 8, 2010)

While trying to contact relatives about my brother' passing, just found this about my uncle.

Dr. Paul C. Wermuth, Sr. Obituaries SalemNews.com, Salem, MA

"Prior to his academic career, Dr. Wermuth enlisted in the United States Army Air Force in 1943 at the age of 17, and served as a gunner-mechanic and instructor in the 3028th Army Air Force Base Unit until 1946, when he was honorably discharged with the rank of Corporal. He received the Good Conduct Medal, American Theater Ribbon and World War II Victory Ribbon for his service."

While no military hero, he was a great guy and loved to debate. He was my dad's favorite brother.


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## Wayne Little (Aug 8, 2010)




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## v2 (Aug 8, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Aug 8, 2010)




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## B-17engineer (Aug 8, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Aug 8, 2010)

He was a hero to all the guys he trained.


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## vikingBerserker (Aug 8, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Aug 18, 2010)

*Scottish WWII piper Bill Millin dies in Devon hospital *

A Scottish bagpiper who played men into battle during World War II has died in Devon. 

Bill Millin, who was 88, played his comrades ashore on Sword Beach during the D-Day Normandy landings.

The Glaswegian commando's actions were later immortalised in the film, "The Longest Day". 

Mr Millin, who lived at a nursing home in Dawlish since suffering a major stroke seven years ago, died in Torbay Hospital.

A statement released by his family said: "This morning following a short illness piper Bill Millin, a great Scottish hero, passed peacefully away in Torbay hospital."

Mr Millin was serving with 1st Commando Brigade when he landed in France on 6 June, 1944. 

His commanding officer, Lord Lovat, asked him to ignore instructions banning the playing of bagpipes in battle and requested he play to rally his comrades 

Despite being unarmed, Mr Millin marched up and down the shore at Sword Beach in his kilt piping "Highland Laddie". 

He continued to play as his friends fell around him and later moved inland to pipe the troops to Pegasus Bridge.

His bagpipes, which were silenced four days later by a piece of shrapnel, were handed over to the National War Museum of Scotland in 2001, along with his kilt, commando beret and knife. 

Despite suffering a stroke, Mr Millin continued to travel to France regularly In 2006 when a song was written in his honour by Devon folk singer Sheelagh Allen, Mr Millin told BBC: "I enjoyed playing the pipes, but I didn't notice I was being shot at. 

"When you're young you do things you wouldn't dream of doing when you're older."

For the past 66 years, Mr Millin returned to France on numerous occasions to pay his respects to his fallen comrades. 

His family said he would always be remembered as an iconic part of all those who gave so much to free Europe from tyranny. 

Mr Millin's funeral will be held privately, but a service of remembrance will be held at a later date. 

TO


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## v2 (Aug 18, 2010)




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## v2 (Aug 18, 2010)

Group Captain *Dennis Lyster*. 

Group Captain Dennis Lyster, who has died aged 99, was a pilot who flew on the RAF’s first strategic bombing operation of the Second World War and completed 61 further missions, winning the *DSO* and *DFC*.

On the night of May 15/16 1940, Lyster’s Hampden bomber of 83 Squadron was one of 99 aircraft that took off to strike industrial targets in the Ruhr following the German advance into the Low Countries – the first attack of the conflict on the factories feeding the German war machine. 

Within a few days, the Hampdens were called on to assist the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force in France and Lyster bombed elements of the German advance including the railway system used to bring up reinforcements. Following the Dunkirk evacuation, the bomber force commenced a campaign against German industry, ports and oil installations. 

Lyster attacked Scharnhorst at Kiel on July 1, but once the Battle of Britain was under way the Hampdens were increasingly allotted targets associated with an anticipated German invasion of England. Lyster laid mines at the entrance of the port of Lubeck, bombed the docks at Stettin and Hamburg, and the submarine base at Lorient. 

When reconnaissance photographs identified a build-up of invasion barges at the Channel ports, Lyster and his fellow crews bombed those gathering at Antwerp and Ostend. By the end of October, he had completed 39 bombing operations, including a visit to Berlin, and was awarded the DFC. 

The son of a farmer, George Dennis Lyster was born on April 16 1911 at East Oakley and attended Farnham Grammar School. He was deeply interested in machinery and drove early tractors and maintained the farm’s electricity supply with a single Blackstone 110 volt generator. 

The annual visit of some Bristol Fighters to his father’s farm made Lyster determined to be a pilot. He took lessons in early 1930 and his first solo flight created a stir. After getting lost, he landed at a nearby RAF airfield where he bought fuel for two shillings and sixpence and asked for directions home. 

Lyster joined the RAF in January 1935 and completed his pilot training at the RAF’s flying school in Egypt before joining 83 Squadron to fly the elegant Hind biplane bomber. Re-equipped with the Hampden in late 1938, the squadron settled at Scampton near Lincoln. 

Lyster had always had a deep interest in navigation and at the end of 1940 attended a specialist navigation course before returning to No 83 as a flight commander. The navigators on Hampdens were usually inexperienced pilots, so Lyster keenly monitored their efforts. Isolated in his pilot’s cockpit, he had a map strapped to his knee and carried his own sextant on his long-range operations. He was thus sometimes able to correct the efforts of his “navigator”. 

Over the next few months he attacked numerous German cities, flying inadequate and unheated bombers in all weathers on sorties that were often in excess of seven and eight hours. After completing another 22 operations, Lyster was rested and became an instructor at a bomber training unit. He was assessed as exceptional and was awarded the DSO. 

For the remainder of the war, Lyster remained a bombing instructor but, on the night of June 1/2 1942, he was co-opted to take part in the second of the Thousand Bomber Raids when Essen was the target. For his services as a chief flying instructor he was awarded the AFC. After the war, he completed the RAF Staff College course at Haifa before joining the staff HQ Middle East Air Force in Egypt. 

Whenever Lyster was given a ground appointment he made strenuous efforts to fly as often as possible. In February 1948, he took a Spitfire from Fayid in Egypt to the South African Air Force base at Waterkloof near Johannesburg, a flight which involved 10 refuelling stops. He then demonstrated the aircraft at airfields in South Africa and in Northern and Southern Rhodesia. 

Lyster converted to jets in 1951 and in January 1953 was appointed to command the Examination Wing of the Central Flying School. It was the responsibility of Exam Wing, or the “trappers” as they were irreverently known, to test and standardise the flying instructors of the RAF. They were also in great demand by overseas air forces and the wing made annual tours worldwide. In October 1954 Lyster, flying his own transport aircraft, led a team to Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand to test the instructors of those air forces. At the end of his period in command, Lyster was classed as an A1 instructor of exceptional ability and was awarded a Bar to his AFC. 

He commanded the fighter airfield at Stradishall in Suffolk, where he flew the latest jets, and his final appointment was at Headquarters Fighter Command. He retired in January 1961 having flown 64 different types of aircraft. 

After leaving the RAF, he renovated a row of fisherman’s cottages in West Bay, Dorset. With his son he purchased a dairy farm near Honiton when he became involved in farm management. He was well known in the area for loud thuds as he dynamited tree stumps to clear his land. A skilled horseman and shot, he maintained a deep interest and love for the countryside and for nature. 

He finally settled on a farm at Sidbury in Devon, amazing his family and friends when he persuaded a surgeon to fit him with a replacement knee when in his mid-nineties. He was a long-standing supporter of the British Legion. 

Dennis Lyster died on June 24. He married Molly Richardson in 1935; she died in 1983. He later married Pauline Broadburn. She survives him with a son from his first marriage. 

source: The Telegraph.


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## v2 (Aug 18, 2010)

Wing Commander *Herbert "Kitch" Kitchener*. 

Wing Commander Herbert "Kitch" Kitchener, who has died aged 95, was one of the last surviving RAF fighter pilots to successfully engage the enemy whilst flying a biplane. 

After taking off from the aircraft carrier Glorious on April 24 1940, Kitchener and his fellow pilots of 263 Squadron flew their 18 biplane Gladiator fighters to a frozen lake near Namsos in Norway. The conditions they found were depressing. There were no facilities, refuelling bowsers or acid for their starter batteries and just one armourer to service and rearm all the guns – 72 of them. To add to their problems, the ice at one end of the lake was melting. Due to enemy attacks over the next few days, most of the aircraft were destroyed on the ground and the remnants joined the Allied withdrawal at the end of the month. 

After its evacuation, 263 Squadron re-equipped with another 18 Gladiators to support the Narvik expedition in northern Norway. Kitchener and his fellow pilots took off from the aircraft carrier Furious on May 20 and headed for the airfield at Bardufoss. Over the next few days, a number of furious air combats took place. Late on May 25, Kitchener and another pilot intercepted a four-engine aircraft on patrol. Over a five-minute period, they made a number of coordinated attacks against the large aircraft before it crashed into the sea. 

On June 2, the Luftwaffe launched a major attack on the Narvik area. During the afternoon, Kitchener took off with his leader and they intercepted 12 Heinkel bombers. They attacked one bomber at the rear of the formation and shot it down. The two pilots made seven more attacks and damaged at least three other bombers. Continuing their patrol, they encountered two Stuka dive-bombers and made simultaneous attacks against them. One caught fire and crashed and the other disappeared into cloud trailing smoke. 

The following day, the evacuation of Narvik started and the Gladiators did their best to cover the embarkation. During the early hours of June 8 the surviving 10 Gladiators, together with 10 Hurricanes of 46 Squadron, flew on to Glorious. Later that day the carrier was sunk with great loss of life; only two RAF pilots were among the 38 survivors. 

Kitchener was one of the pilots who had not been assigned an aircraft. He returned aboard a transport ship. Two months later, it was announced that he had been awarded the DFM for “setting a high example of courage and determination”. Later, the King of Norway awarded him the Norwegian War Cross. 

Herbert Horatio Kitchener was born on August 30 1914, in Crowborough. It was a few days after the First World War commenced and his patriotic family named him after Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, Christian names that young Herbert did not like. He soon accepted the nickname “Kitch”, which stuck with him for the rest of his life. He was educated at Uckfield Grammar School and joined the RAFVR in October 1937. 

After returning from Norway as one of the few surviving pilots, Kitchener was commissioned and rejoined 263 as it re-equipped with the Whirlwind fighter. The squadron moved to Cornwall in November to search for E-boats and to escort convoys. Later it went on the offensive over northern France. On March 11 1942 Kitchener engaged a Junkers 88 but return fire knocked out one of his two engines and damaged the other. He tried to land at an airfield, but the damaged engine failed and he crashed. He was pulled from the cockpit just before the aircraft exploded. 

Kitchener suffered a fractured skull and a broken arm and spent months in hospital. For the rest of the war he worked in an operations room and on accident investigation in the Middle East. He left the RAF in 1945, and received the Air Efficiency Award. 

After the war, Kitchener returned to local government service working in Kent until his retirement in 1979. His roots were in Sussex and he was a lifelong member of the County Cricket Club. A keen sailor, he played tennis until late in his life. From childhood he sang in many choirs. 

Herbert “Kitch” Kitchener died on July 7. He is survived by his wife Margaret. 

source: The Telegraph


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## diddyriddick (Aug 18, 2010)

"Millin began his apparently suicidal serenade immediately upon jumping from the ramp of the landing craft into the icy water. As the Cameron tartan of his kilt floated to the surface he struck up with Hieland Laddie. He continued even as the man behind him was hit, dropped into the sea and sank."

Piper Bill Millin - Telegraph


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## Colin1 (Aug 18, 2010)

Be better off in Obituaries

Just heard it on the radio, apparently, when asked why they didn't shoot him, German veterans of the D-Day landings said they 'thought he was mad'


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## Gnomey (Aug 18, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Aug 18, 2010)

To all.....

  


TO


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## Njaco (Aug 18, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Aug 19, 2010)

What class though.


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## Smoke (Aug 19, 2010)

A true Highland warrior.


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## RabidAlien (Aug 19, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Aug 19, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Aug 19, 2010)




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## diddyriddick (Aug 19, 2010)

Colin1 said:


> Be better off in Obituaries
> 
> Just heard it on the radio, apparently, when asked why they didn't shoot him, German veterans of the D-Day landings said they 'thought he was mad'



Sorry. My mistake.


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Aug 19, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Aug 19, 2010)




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## Arsenal VG-33 (Aug 25, 2010)

Just saw the news while on my lunch break. French ace was best known for his role in the Normandie-Niemen squadron in Russia. 23 total "kills" and over 250 combat missions.

(in French):
Mort du capitaine Marcel Albert, 92 ans, héros du Normandie-Niémen - Yahoo! Actualités

(in English, wiki entry):
Marcel Albert - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Repose en Paix!


Marcel Albert at right, leaning on prop -


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## FLYBOYJ (Aug 25, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Aug 25, 2010)

TO


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## Gnomey (Aug 25, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Aug 25, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Aug 25, 2010)




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## Thorlifter (Aug 26, 2010)

Marcel Albert, who became one of the leading French fighter pilots of World War II, flying Soviet-built planes in duels with German aircraft on the Eastern front, died Monday in Harlingen, Tex. He was 92.

His death, at a nursing home, was announced by France’s Order of the Liberation, founded by Gen. Charles de Gaulle during the war. The cause was complications of cancer, his nephew Jean Mavinger told The Associated Press in Paris.

Mr. Albert was among four pilots of the Free French’s Normandie-Niémen fighter unit to be decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union, receiving the citation in 1944. Flying Yakovlev fighter planes — known as Yaks — in combat alongside Soviet pilots, he took part in shooting down 24 German planes, according to the Order of the Liberation.

Created by de Gaulle in 1942 to help repel Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Normandie-Niémen unit was composed of nearly 100 French fighter pilots, almost half of whom were killed in action. According to the Normandie-Niémen Museum in Les Andelys, France, its pilots flew 5,240 missions and shot down at least 273 German planes.

Mr. Albert was born in Paris on Nov. 25, 1917. He was a mechanic with the Renault auto works before joining the French Air Force in 1938. He fought as a fighter pilot during Germany’s invasion of France in May 1940, shooting down two German planes on a single day; he later flew in combat out of England.

He left military service in 1948 and came to the United States, where he opened a chain of hotels.

Mr. Albert and his wife, who died last year, had no children. He is survived by a sister.

In November 2009, France’s ambassador to the United States, Pierre Vimont, went to Harlingen to present Mr. Albert with a medal recognizing him as a grand officer in the Order of the Legion of Honor.

And just three months ago, Mr. Albert found that the Russians, too, had not forgotten his exploits in the skies over the Soviet Union and eastern Germany. He received a visit from Russia’s consul general in Houston, Nicolay Y. Babich, who presented him with a commemorative medal struck for the 65th anniversary of World War II’s end in Europe. Mr. Babich also took a bottle of vodka as a gift from the Russian people.

At that time, Mr. Albert commented on how the sacrifices of wartime had proved their worth.

“The world isn’t in trouble at all,” he was quoted as saying by The Valley Morning Star of Harlingen. “The world has already been stable for over 50 years.”

But Mr. Mavinger said his uncle rarely spoke of his wartime experiences.

As Mr. Mavinger told The A.P., “All his friends died in Russia.”


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## RabidAlien (Aug 27, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Aug 27, 2010)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Aug 27, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Aug 27, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Aug 28, 2010)

Just noted on Claes Sundin's site that Luftwaffe Ace Walter Wolfrum, 137 victories, has passed away on 26th August.


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## imalko (Aug 29, 2010)

I've noted that myself on the same site few moments ago.


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## RabidAlien (Aug 29, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Aug 29, 2010)




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## Oggie2620 (Aug 30, 2010)

This is really sad RIP Max
Wife couldn't save elderly man from house fire in Goolgowie St, Rosebud | Herald Sun


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## vikingBerserker (Aug 30, 2010)

to both


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## v2 (Aug 31, 2010)

Wing Commander *John Connel Freeborn *DFC* - passed away at 28th August 2010. 

John Connell Freeborn was born in Middleton, Yorkshire on 1st December 1919. Commissioned in the RAFO in 1938, Freeborn then went to No. 8 Flying Training School, Montrose on 9th April. When his training was completed Freeborn was posted to No. 74 Squadron at Hornchurch on 29th October as an "above average" pilot. He was granted a short service commission in the RAF in January 1939.
Three days after the outbreak of war, Freeborn was involved in an incident known as 'The Battle of Barking Creek" where he and Flying Officer V G Byrne shot down two Hurricanes of 56 Squadron, mistaking them to be enemy Bf 109s. At just 18 years of age, John Freeborn came up before a General Court Martial on 7th October 1939, but was rightly acquitted, as was F/O Byrne. 
In the early stages of the war, Pilot Officer Freeborn flew many fighter sweeps over the channel and Dunkirk with 74 Squadron. On one occasion, Freeborn was forced to bale out of his Spitfire due to his aircraft receiving return fire.
Freeborn flew more operational hours during "The Battle of Britain" than any other pilot and succeeded in destroying several enemy aircraft during this fierce period of conflict. Freeborn received the DFC (13/8/40) and was made a Flight Commander on 28th August, 1940. He later received a bar to his DFC (25/2/41) and was then posted to No. 57 Operational Training Unit on 6th June 1941 as an instructor.
In December 1942, Freeborn returned to operations with No. 602 Squadron at Skeabrae as a Flight Commander. 
On 1st June 1943, Freeborn was given command of No. 118 Squadron at Coltishall until he was finally posted to Italy to be a Wing Commander Flying of 286 Wing. 
John Freeborn retired from the RAF in 1946 as a Wing Commander. 

Due to the nature of differing combat reports and official records, the amount of aerial victories Freeborn achieved are varied. Most credit him with scoring around 12-13 destroyed enemy aircraft with many more damaged. John's own personal tally credit's him with 25 and a half.


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## RabidAlien (Aug 31, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Aug 31, 2010)




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## diddyriddick (Sep 2, 2010)

Major Martin Clemens, a coastwatcher on Guadalcanal died on May 31st.

Major Martin Clemens - Telegraph


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## vikingBerserker (Sep 2, 2010)

Dam......


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## Gnomey (Sep 2, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 3, 2010)

Dang. I have a book on standby at Amazon by/about him.


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## Wayne Little (Sep 3, 2010)




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## v2 (Sep 4, 2010)

Oberleutnant *Walter Wolfrum* surprisingly died on 26 August 2010 at the age of 87. He was one of the last Ritterkreuzträger, flying with JG52. 

Walter Wolfrum first saw combat in the Crimea with 5/JG52. He was shot down three times, and wounded twice before scoring his first victory. With his score at 70 he was again wounded, but returned to take command of 1/JG52 in May 1944, taking part in the fiercely fought defence of the Ploesti oilfields. he was again wounded, but returned to command 1/JG52 until the end of the war. he had flown 423 missions, achieved 137 victories, and was awarded the Knight's Cross.
His biography is "Unbekannte Pflicht" is published by NeunundzwanzigSechs Verlag.


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## vikingBerserker (Sep 5, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Sep 5, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 5, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Sep 5, 2010)




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## diddyriddick (Sep 8, 2010)

"VICE-ADMIRAL Sir Richard Peek, who was badly injured in a Japanese kamikaze attack on his ship in the Pacific in World War II before going on to the top post in the Royal Australian Navy in November 1970, has died of kidney failure in hospital in Canberra, aged 96."

Sea dog survived first kamikaze strike


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## vikingBerserker (Sep 8, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 8, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Sep 9, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Sep 9, 2010)




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## ToughOmbre (Sep 9, 2010)

RIP



TO


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## v2 (Sep 16, 2010)

Wing Commander *John Freeborn* 

Wing Commander John Freeborn, who has died aged 90, was one of the RAF’s leading fighter “aces” in the Battle of Britain, during which he flew more operational hours than any other pilot. 
Freeborn had already seen much action before the Battle. Flying Spitfires with 74 (Tiger) Squadron, he was heavily engaged in the air fighting during the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force to Dunkirk in May 1940. 

Over a six-day period, the squadron accounted for 19 enemy aircraft, two shot down by Freeborn. On one occasion his Spitfire was badly damaged and he crash-landed on the beach near Calais but managed to get a lift home in a returning aircraft. 
On July 10, the opening day of the Battle, Freeborn shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 109 over Deal. For the next few weeks he flew continuously and his successes mounted. 

On August 11 he flew four missions in eight hours and was credited with shooting down three fighters and probably a fourth. Two days later he shot down a Dornier bomber, and later in the day learnt that he had been awarded the DFC for his “high courage and exceptional abilities as a leader”. 

He was appointed a flight commander and by the end of the Battle on October 31 had been credited with shooting down at least seven aircraft in addition to his earlier successes over Dunkirk. 

No 74 Squadron remained in the front line, and by the end of November Freeborn had been with the squadron longer than any other Battle of Britain pilot. In December he shot down two more Bf 109s and damaged others. 

Then, in early 1941, Fighter Command went on the offensive, with Freeborn flying sweeps over northern France. At the end of February he was awarded a Bar to his DFC, the citation confirming that he had destroyed 12 enemy aircraft and damaged others. He was rested in June, having served on No 74 Squadron for almost three years. 

John Connell Freeborn was born at Middleton, Yorkshire, on December 1 1919, and educated at Leeds Grammar School. He joined the RAF in March 1938 and, after training as a pilot, joined No 74 Squadron to fly Gauntlet biplane fighters before the squadron was re-equipped with the Spitfire. 

On September 6 1939 Freeborn was at the centre of a tragic “friendly fire” incident when ground controllers plotting incoming aircraft scrambled the Spitfires of No 74 Squadron from Hornchurch in Essex. Due to a series of misunderstandings, the squadron commander ordered his pilots to attack. In fact the detected aircraft were returning Hurricanes that had been scrambled against a “phantom raid”. Freeborn shot down the Hurricane of Pilot Officer Montague Hulton-Harrop, who was killed. A second Hurricane was shot down by another pilot of No 74 Squadron. 

The two pilots were court-martialled but acquitted of any liability or blame, despite their squadron commander testifying against them. The “Battle of Barking Creek”, as this incident was later to become known, led to a complete review of Fighter Command’s plotting system. 

After his long period with No 74 Squadron, Freeborn instructed new pilots on fighter tactics before taking up a post in the United States as a flying instructor. He also tested the latest American fighters. 

He returned to operational flying in 1943, when he flew Spitfires with No 602 Squadron, providing fighter escort to RAF bombers attacking shipping and port installations. On June 1 he was given command of No 118 Squadron, flying in a similar role. 

Freeborn was promoted to become one of the RAF’s youngest wing commanders and spent the first six months of 1944 commanding 286 Wing, flying operations from southern Italy in support of the Allied armies. 

This was a period of intense activity, as the RAF attacked German installations and convoys in the Balkans and provided defence for Allied convoys in Italian waters. He returned to Britain in late 1944 and left the RAF in 1946. 

After qualifying as a driving instructor, Freeborn was invited to join Tetley Walker as regional director for their Minster soft drinks brand. He took early retirement, and in the early 1980s moved to Spain. In 2000 he came back to Britain, settling in north Wales. 

Self-confident to the point of bloody-mindedness, Freeborn was always happy to express his opinions. As an 18-year old he had once informed his CO that he could outfly him, and his brushes with authority made for a colourful life both in the RAF and elsewhere. He never lost his affection for his native Yorkshire, nor for a pint of Tadcaster ale . 

Although he had been cleared of any blame for the death of Montague Hulton-Harrop in 1939, the death of a fellow fighter pilot in such circumstances was always in his thoughts. Shortly before his death Freeborn admitted: “I think about him nearly every day. I always have done. I’ve had a good life — and he should have had a good life, too.” 

Freeborn’s life story was the subject of A Tiger’s Tale, written by Bob Cossey and published in 2002. His autobiography, Tiger Club, co-written with Christopher Yeoman, came out last year. 

John Freeborn died on August 28. He married, in 1941, Rita Fielder. She died in 1979, and he married, secondly, Peta in 1983. She predeceased him in 2001, and he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage. 

source: The Telegraph


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## Airframes (Sep 16, 2010)

R.I.P. a true 'Tiger'.


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## Wayne Little (Sep 16, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 16, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Sep 19, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Sep 19, 2010)




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## v2 (Sep 22, 2010)

Group Captain *Mike Judd * 

Group Captain Mike Judd, who has died aged 92, was a veteran of the fighting in the North African desert campaign, and recognised as one of the RAF's outstanding fighter-bomber pilots. 
In early 1944 Judd was given command of a wing of three Canadian Typhoon squadrons and, in the build up to D-Day, attacked the V-1 launching sites and the coastal radar units in the Pas-de-Calais. On June 1 he attended a meeting at 21st Army Group and was briefed on the operational plan for the Normandy invasion and the role his wing would play. 

With knowledge of this top-secret information, he was not allowed to fly for the next few days for fear of his being shot down and captured. He found it particularly frustrating to stand by idly as his pilots took off to attack enemy gun positions. 

But just after dawn on June 6 Judd took off from an airfield in Hampshire, leading two of his squadrons. He had been ordered to destroy two German 88mm gun batteries that overlooked the Normandy beaches and would pose a serious threat to Allied forces as they went ashore. Each aircraft carried two armour-piercing 1,000lb bombs. 

The low cloud base hindered the attack, but the Typhoons dived on to their targets. As he pulled away, Judd saw for the first time the sheer size of the invasion fleet and he later observed: "I knew this was a historic moment I would never forget." 

On the following day Judd's Typhoon was badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire as he again attacked enemy positions. The aircraft's hood simply disappeared and a large hole was blown in one of the wings. It was only with difficulty that Judd managed to keep control as he was escorted back across the Channel to make an emergency landing. But for the next three weeks he continued to lead his wing against rail and road targets and, on June 27, he and his comrades started operating from temporary airstrips in Normandy. 

Flying daily in support of Montgomery's army, the Typhoon wings attacked any transports they could find. Judd and his pilots also bombed the bridges over the rivers Orne and Odon as the Germans started their retreat eastwards. After being moved to airfields in Holland, the Typhoons targeted trains and the railway system in an attempt to interrupt the movement of V-2 rockets to their dispersed sites. 

At the end of January 1945, Judd was finally rested and two weeks later it was announced that he had been awarded a DSO for his "brilliant work as an outstanding pilot with a fine fighting spirit". 

Michael Thomas Judd was born on September 19 1917 at Scotney, Hampshire, and educated at Gresham's School, Holt, before going on to Wadham College, Oxford, where he read Greats. 

He gained a good degree which led to the award of a Laming Travelling Fellowship at Queen's College. In August he left for France, but war was declared within a month and he returned to England and was called up. 

During his time at Oxford, Judd had been commissioned into the RAF Volunteer Reserve and trained as a pilot with the University Air Squadron, in which two of his close friends were Leonard Cheshire and Richard Hillary, later the fighter pilot who wrote The Last Enemy. 

Judd completed his pilot training in December 1939 and was assessed as above average, which, to his great disappointment, led to his selection as a flying instructor rather than to his heading for Fighter Command. He left for Montrose to instruct at an advanced flying training school, where his skill was soon apparent. He rose to become a flight commander and after almost 18 months as an instructor was awarded an AFC. 

In September 1941 he sailed for the Middle East, where he joined No 238 Squadron to fly Hurricane fighters providing support for the Eighth Army. Returning from one sortie, he flew into a sandstorm and was forced to land in the desert, recovering his aircraft the following day. 

In April 1942 Judd was promoted squadron leader and appointed to command No 250 Squadron, equipped with the American-built P-40 Kittyhawk fighter fitted with long-range fuel tanks. He led his squadron against enemy supply dumps and airfields, strafing aircraft on the ground. He destroyed a Ju 87 Stuka bomber and damaged another. 

The German Panzer armies relied entirely on resupply from mainland Europe. On May 12, intercepted enemy radio transmissions indicated that a large formation of Luftwaffe transport aircraft were heading for Libya from Crete. Judd took off at the head of his squadron to escort a Beaufighter squadron and intercepted 12 lumbering Junkers 52 troop carriers 50 miles off the coast. He shot down two of the aircraft as his pilots went in pursuit of the others. Only two of the Junkers escaped. 

As the Eighth Army prepared to counter-attack Rommel's army, Judd attacked supply dumps and motor transports. During these sorties he damaged two enemy fighters and, on October 22, he destroyed a Messerschmitt Bf 109. He continued to lead the squadron until November, when he was rested and awarded a DFC. 

After a brief spell in East Africa, Judd was sent to the United States to discuss air tactics in support of ground forces and to fly and assess the latest American ground-attack fighters. A year later, in January 1944, he returned to Britain to join 83 Group. He was soon placed in command of 143 Wing, equipped with three RCAF Typhoon squadrons. 

In addition to his gallantry awards, Judd was also mentioned in despatches and received the Air Efficiency Award. In November 1945 he left the RAF. 

After the war Judd left Britain to set up home in Houston, Texas, where he established a partnership in oil exploration. When small production oil drilling became unprofitable he worked for a firm of stockbrokers, eventually joining the board. He retired at the age of 82. A keen golfer, he was particularly proud of his hole-in-one at Houston Country Club's ninth hole. 

Mike Judd died in Houston on August 22. With his first wife, whom he married in 1943, he had two daughters. With his second wife, Ann, whom he married in 1952, he had two sons and two daughters. 

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Sep 22, 2010)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Sep 22, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 23, 2010)




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## Smoke (Sep 24, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Sep 24, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Sep 24, 2010)




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## v2 (Sep 29, 2010)

Squadron Leader *Mohinder Singh Pujji* 
Squadron Leader Mohinder Singh Pujji, the last Indian fighter pilot to have served in the second world war, has died aged 92.
Video: The last of the second world war Sikh RAF fighter pilots | World news | guardian.co.uk


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## Gnomey (Sep 29, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Sep 29, 2010)

Wow, the last.......


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## RabidAlien (Sep 29, 2010)




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## diddyriddick (Sep 30, 2010)

Clair Cline who made a violin while at Stalag Luft I has died at 92. His obit is in the first link, and his story is in the second. Well worth a read.

WWII pilot who made violin in German prison camp dies | SoundLife - The News Tribune

WWII and the Prison Camp Violin


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## vikingBerserker (Sep 30, 2010)

Wow!


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## Gnomey (Sep 30, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 30, 2010)

Holy crap, I hadn't heard that story! Now I've got goosebumps!


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## diddyriddick (Oct 1, 2010)

RabidAlien said:


> Holy crap, I hadn't heard that story! Now I've got goosebumps!



Nor had I, RA. His son-in-law is a poster on another forum. He pointed me to the story some time back, and I thought about it when I saw the obit. Really a great story.


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## Wayne Little (Oct 2, 2010)




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## v2 (Oct 3, 2010)




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## v2 (Oct 12, 2010)

Air Commodore* 'Jack’ Frost* 

Air Commodore 'Jack’ Frost, who has died aged 89, was a fighter pilot throughout his long career in the RAF and flew Typhoons during the Battle of Normandy, achieving considerable success against enemy tanks and transports.
He joined No 175 Squadron in February 1944 as it was converting to the rocket-firing role. In April the squadron moved to the New Forest and started operations over northern France. In the period leading up to D-Day, Frost flew 12 sorties, attacking vital radar stations that had to be put out of action before the invasion. On June 6 he flew an armed-reconnaissance sortie to attack enemy transports taking reinforcements to the beachhead. 

Within 10 days many of the 18 Typhoon squadrons, including No 175, were operating from hastily prepared landing strips in Normandy. Flying in close support of the British and Canadian armies, the Typhoons became the scourge of the German Seventh Army’s armoured columns. 
On August 7 a major German counter-attack, spearheaded by five Panzer divisions, was identified moving against just two US infantry divisions. The Panzers were threatening to cut off the US Third Army near the town of Mortain. 

More than 300 sorties were flown by the squadrons on the “Day of the Typhoon”. Frost himself claimed a Tiger tank and a troop carrier, as well as two unidentified “flamers”. His aircraft was hit by 20mm flak but he managed to return to his airstrip. The intense effort of the Typhoon squadrons defeated the German counter-attack, which the Chief of Staff of the Seventh German Army reported had come to a standstill due to “employment of fighter-bombers by the enemy and the absence of our own air support”. 

Frost and his fellow pilots flew a “cab rank” of aircraft, available immediately to be called down over the radio by ground controllers as the Allied armies encircled the enemy at Falaise and the break out from Normandy that followed. Frost carried out many attacks against gun positions, tank and transport concentrations, all in the face of intense anti-aircraft fire. The Typhoon squadrons suffered heavy casualties. 

After the rout of the Seventh German Army at Falaise, No 175 Squadron leapfrogged across France in pursuit, attacking the retreating Germans and the V-1 flying bomb sites in the Pas de Calais before arriving in Belgium on September 17. Frost flew in support of the armoured thrust towards Eindhoven and Arnhem and, with a move to an airfield in the Netherlands, attacked trains and river traffic and gave close support to the Army as it headed for the Rhine. 
In mid-December, Frost flew his 100th and final operational sortie. He had suffered two engine failures and crash landings, and been hit by anti-aircraft fire on a number of occasions — but had always escaped injury. Eleven of his squadron colleagues had been killed, six were PoWs and a further seven had been wounded or injured. He was awarded a DFC and later invested with the Croix de Guerre and, by the Belgians, with the Order of Leopold II. 

The son of a potter, John William Frost was born in Stoke-on-Trent on July 30 1921 and educated at Longton High School, which he left at 16. He joined the earthenware and bone china manufacturers Samson Bridgwood as a trainee manager, at the same time attending North Staffordshire Technical College. 

In March 1941 he volunteered for the RAF as a pilot and trained in the United States. He was commissioned and retained as a basic flying instructor at Gunter Field, Montgomery, in Alabama, before returning to Britain in the spring of 1943. 

Immediately after the war Frost flew Typhoons and its successor, the Tempest, based in Schleswig-Holstein before moving to Kastrup in Denmark. He later commanded No 26 Squadron at Gutersloh in Germany in the fighter ground-attack role. 

In 1948 he was appointed RAF Liaison Officer to HQ BETFOR, responsible for air advice and control of air support for the British Army Brigade, based in the Free Territory of Trieste. During this sensitive period, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia was causing some difficulties and Frost led a four-aircraft dummy attack on his headquarters as a reminder of the RAF’s continued, and potent, presence in the area. It was at a dance in Trieste that Frost met his future wife, who had served as a radio operator in the WAAF. 

In May 1949 he returned to Britain to command No 222 (Natal) Squadron, equipped with Meteor day fighters, as air defences were rebuilt with the emergence of the Soviet threat. 

Frost served in Malaya at the Air Headquarters during the communist insurrection, when he was involved with planning the development of airfields and air defence radar. After service in Hong Kong he returned to flying duties when he took command of No 151 Squadron, flying the delta-wing Javelin night fighter from Leuchars in Scotland. 

In September 1964, Frost was appointed to command RAF El Adem in Libya, a staging post and weapons training base. This was always recognised as a potentially difficult appointment requiring tact and diplomacy but Frost was particularly successful at an increasingly sensitive time politically. He had many dealings with General Frost (of Arnhem fame) and they had a regular correspondence. To avoid confusion for their staffs they agreed to be referred to as 'Air’ Frost and 'Ground’ Frost. For his services at El Adem he was appointed CBE. 

After a series of senior appointments in the MOD, Frost was posted in August 1970 to the Joint Warfare Establishment. After a four-year appointment as Deputy and Chief of Staff to the UK Military Representative to Nato Headquarters in Brussels, he retired from the RAF in October 1976. 

In November 1977 he became a civil servant and was appointed to the MoD as Head of Protocol . 

After retiring in 1983 he remained very active in Berkshire. For 16 years he was chairman of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme in the county and he served as vice-president of the Burghfield branch of the Royal British Legion. In 1986 he was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Berkshire. 

Frost always remembered his many colleagues who lost their lives during the Normandy campaign, and gave strong support to the creation and maintenance of a memorial established at Noyers Bocage, near Caen, in honour of the 151 Typhoon pilots who were killed in the liberation of Normandy. 

Jack Frost died on August 7. He married, in 1950, Shelagh Baldock, who survives him with their son and two daughters. 

source: The Telegraph.


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## Wayne Little (Oct 12, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Oct 12, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Oct 12, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Oct 12, 2010)




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## v2 (Oct 16, 2010)

v2 said:


> *F/Lt Ludwik Martel *
> 
> Ludwik Martel was born on 5th March 1919.
> Ludwik arrived in England in early 1940 and was commissioned in the RAF in May and transferred to the PAF on 6th August.
> ...




A few words more about Ludwik:

Flight Lieutenant Ludwik Martel: Battle of Britain pilot | Times Online Obituary


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## v2 (Oct 22, 2010)

Flight Lieutenant *Denis Cayford *  

Flight Lieutenant Denis Cayford, who has died aged 92, was a specialist navigator in the Pathfinder Force during the Second World War; shot down and captured, he took part in the Great Escape and was near the exit of the tunnel when it was discovered. 
Cayford, a veteran of the earliest bombing campaigns, joined the Stirling-equipped No 7 Squadron in January 1943 and was immediately selected as one of the first navigators to be trained on the new H2S radar navigation and bombing aid. The radar "painted" a picture of the ground below the aircraft, highlighting towns, coastlines and major inland water features. By using offsets from a prominent feature, it was possible to mark and bomb the target. 

In the early months of 1943 Cayford and his crew attacked industrial targets in the Ruhr. Acting as one of the "marker" crews, they dropped flares and coloured indicators over the targets as aiming points for the bomber stream that followed. Cayford flew on the major raids that devastated Hamburg in late July 1943, when the H2S was particularly effective. The experience of the smell of burning at 17,000ft left a deep impression on him. 

Cayford's expertise was recognised by the award of the DFC, his commanding officer commenting: "He is one of the squadron's most experienced and capable navigators; such men are the backbone of the squadron." 

On the night of August 17/18 1943, Cayford and his crew were ordered on a "shift" attack of the Peenemunde rocket research establishment on the Baltic. Flying a Lancaster, their task was to check the earlier marking and "shift" the aiming point, if necessary, by dropping new markers. When the Lancaster arrived at the target Cayford, using his H2S radar, was convinced that earlier markers were too far south. After an altercation with his bomb-aimer, Cayford's view prevailed and the red markers were placed precisely over two production buildings, allowing the Master Bomber to give new instructions to the following bombers. 

With his flight commander, Squadron Leader Charles Lofthouse, Cayford took off on the night of August 23/24 to mark Berlin. On board as the second pilot was their group captain. As they approached the target, searchlights coned the Lancaster and a night fighter attacked and set an engine on fire. Cayford offered to climb on to the wing to extinguish the fire but Lofthouse realised he had no chance and refused. The fire spread and the crew started to bail out. 

All had left before Cayford returned to his compartment to retrieve a gold signet ring from his girlfriend, which he always took off when flying. He landed on the roof of a church and was soon captured and transferred to Stalag Luft III. 

Berkeley Denis Cayford was born in Wolverhampton on March 16 1918 and educated at Tettenhall College. He was a county swimmer and travelled with the British swimming team to the Berlin Olympics in 1936. He took up articles with a local solicitor before joining the RAF at the beginning of 1939. 

He trained as an air observer and by the end of 1939 joined No 77 Squadron, equipped with Whitley bombers. 

Cayford was soon involved in searching for German shipping and dropping leaflets over Germany. On one occasion he flew to Warsaw to drop leaflets, a round trip of 10 hours in his old, unheated bomber. His pilot was Sergeant Hamish Mahaddie, who later went on to be a Pathfinder leader and who would recruit Cayford to the force two years later. 

After flying 30 operations, Cayford left for Canada to take a specialist navigation course, before becoming an instructor at a bomber training unit in Scotland. 

On the night of November 17 1941 he was supervising a night navigation exercise in an Anson. The aircraft became badly iced up and lost power and the crew was forced to ditch in the Moray Firth. Cayford was injured and had to endure a very difficult and long night in freezing conditions in his dinghy before rescue arrived. A few months later, his bomber caught fire after a flare exploded and he was forced to bail out. In the space of a few weeks he had become eligible for membership of the Goldfish and Caterpillar Clubs. 

Soon after arriving in Stalag Luft III, Cayford joined the team of "penguins". In sacks suspended inside their trouser legs, they carried and dispersed the sand excavated from the three tunnels being dug for the Great Escape. He was allocated a place as an escaper and planned to travel across Germany to Bulgaria. 

On the night of March 24/25 1944 the escape started. Cayford was well down the tunnel when a German guard discovered the exit after 76 men had escaped. Three managed to return to Britain, but 50 were executed on Hitler's orders. 

Cayford and his fellow prisoners were forced to march westwards in the bitter weather of January 1945, and he was finally liberated in May. After recovering he was seconded to BOAC and spent almost two years navigating flying boats on the Far East service. 

Cayford left the RAF in May 1947 and remained with BOAC in ground appointments. He served in Shanghai and in Hong Kong before moving to Karachi. He became the manager of BOAC's southern routes between Pakistan and the Bahamas before becoming the general manager of Bahamas Airways. He retired in 1969 to establish his own aviation consultancy business. His clients included the Saudi Royal Family and the construction company Paulings, when they were involved in constructing airfields in Oman. 

A low handicap golfer, he was captain of the Aero Golfing Society in 1983. He enjoyed his garden and retained a keen interest in flying and classic cars. 

Denis Cayford died on August 30. He married Christabel Robson, a WAAF officer, in 1947. She died in 1996. He is survived by their two sons and by his partner, Gill Forrester. 

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Oct 22, 2010)

Wing Commander *'Butch' Barton* 

Wing Commander 'Butch' Barton, who has died aged 94, became a fighter ace during the Battle of Britain and went on to lead his squadron with distinction during the fierce air battles over Malta. 
Barton was flight commander of the Hurricane-equipped No 249 Squadron based in Yorkshire when it was transferred to Boscombe Down on August 14 1940; the aim was to reinforce the hard-pressed fighter squadrons in the south. He was immediately in action, and the following day shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter and damaged a second. 

On August 16, Barton's deputy, Flight Lieutenant JB Nicolson, was attacked and his Hurricane caught fire. Despite suffering burns, Nicholson immediately attacked another German fighter before baling out. He was later awarded a Victoria Cross, the only pilot in Fighter Command to receive the supreme award for valour. 

Over the next three weeks, Barton's successes mounted. On September 3, now flying from North Weald in Essex, his Hurricane was hit by return fire from a Dornier bomber and he was forced to bale out. On his return to the squadron later in the day he was ribbed by his colleagues for allowing himself to be shot down by a bomber. 

When his CO was wounded, Barton led the squadron into battle during the most hectic phase of the Luftwaffe's onslaught, sometimes flying four times in a single day. On September 15, the day of the greatest air battle, he shot down a Dornier bomber over the Thames Estuary and damaged a second. 

By the end of the Battle of Britain on October 31, Barton had accounted for two more enemy fighters and damaged two others. He was awarded a DFC for his "outstanding leadership". 

The son of a Canadian civil engineer and a Scottish mother, Robert Alexander Barton was born on June 7 1916 at Kamloops, British Columbia. He was educated in Vernon, requiring a weekly journey by steamship to and from his home at Penticton. When he was 19 he went to a recruiting office in Vancouver and was accepted into the RAF. He travelled to England to take up a short service commission in January 1936. 

After training as a pilot he joined No 41 Squadron, flying biplane fighters. Following the outbreak of war he joined the newly-formed No 249 Squadron, whose CO was Squadron Leader John Grandy, later Chief of the Air Staff and a Marshal of the RAF. 

In December 1940 Barton was promoted to take command of 249 Squadron, and he destroyed two more enemy fighters. In 1941 his squadron was ordered to prepare for service in Malta, and on May 19 its Hurricanes were transferred to Ark Royal in Gibraltar. 

Barton opened his account in Malta on June 3, when he shot down an Italian bomber, the squadron's first victory over the island. Five days later he destroyed another bomber, this time at night. At first light, he returned to the scene to search for the Italian crew. Two men were found and rescued. 

Under Barton's leadership, 249 Squadron was one of the most successful fighter squadrons on the island. But on July 31 he was lucky to survive when the engine of his Hurricane failed as he took off and he crashed through some sturdy Maltese walls. His injuries included second-degree burns, and he was kept in hospital for several weeks. Yet by September he was back leading the squadron, and was soon involved in a fierce battle with Italian fighters, during which he was credited with shooting down one and damaging another. On November 22 he achieved his final victory when he shot down a Macchi MC202 fighter near Gozo. 

After two years' continuous and intense fighting, in December he was rested and returned to England. His deputy, Tom Neil (himself a Battle of Britain ace), wrote: "I was very conscious of the squadron's debt to him. Small and slight in stature, in no way a heroic figure and unassuming almost to a fault, he was a wonderful leader and one of the best fighter pilots it would be my good fortune to meet." The citation for the Bar to Barton's DFC concluded that "his excellent leadership inspires the pilots under his command". 

Following a spell as chief instructor at a fighter training unit, Barton took command of the fighter airfield at Skaebrae in Orkney. He later commanded North Weald and served at HQ Fighter Command, where he was responsible for tactics. He was mentioned in despatches and in June 1945 was appointed OBE. 

In August 1945 he was posted to India, and then for two years helped in the creation of the Pakistan Air Force following Partition. 

Barton served on a number of fighter stations and commanded RAF Acklington in Northumberland. His final appointment was on the operations staff at the Air Ministry, and he retired in February 1959. During his career he had always tried to maintain the highest standards of chivalry, once severely reprimanding an inexperienced colleague who had finished off a damaged German aircraft, killing the pilot as he was attempting to crash land over England. 

On his return to Canada he lived a quiet life. Much of his time was devoted to caring for his wife, who for a long time was in poor health, and every year they wintered in Arizona. His great passion was fishing in the rivers and lakes of British Columbia, where he was regarded as one of the region's finest fly fishermen. 

"Butch" Barton died on September 2. His ashes were scattered on his favourite lake in British Columbia on the morning of September 15, Battle of Britain Day. 

He married, in 1939, Gwen Cranswick; she died in 1988, and he is survived by their son. 

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Oct 22, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Oct 22, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Oct 23, 2010)




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## vikingBerserker (Oct 23, 2010)




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## pbfoot (Nov 22, 2010)

Steve Butte of 403 Sqn RCAF passed away 11/11/10 in Western Australia\
here is a summary of hem from
Steve Butte
Canadian Fliers Down 36 German Aircraft in Luftwaffe Attack
London, Jan. 1, 1945 - (CP) - Canadian fighter pilots, in one of their greatest triumphs during the war, destroyed at least 36 of 84 Germans shot down today by the RAF 2nd Tactical Air Force.
The big Canadian score was rolled up as the German Air Force came out in its greatest show of strength for three years in an attempt to smash up Allied airfields in Belgium, Holland and France.

Five Planes Missing
Canadian fighter squadrons accounted for 35 enemy aircraft and the 36th was destroyed by a Canadian in an RAF Tempest Squadron Five. RCAF planes are missing.
Although the Huns' low-level strafings included RCAF airfields and caused some damage, the operational program of the squadrons was not interrupted and approximately 300 sorties were flown. Some enemy planes were destroyed white the airfields were under attack and others when the enemy fled for home.
The pilot of one RCAF reconnaissance squadron, whose name was not immediately disclosed, destroyed two ME190s and damaged two FW190s as he returned to base.
Spitfire fighter-bombers also were active and destroyed or damaged several locomotives and freight cars in the German supply area around St. Vith in Belgium south of Malmedy.
The Canadian Wolf Squadron alone knocked down five out of a formation of 60 enemy craft which strafed the squadron's airfield in the Brussels area. Two others probably were destroyed and another damaged in a low-level action that developed into the hottest dogfight for Canadian fighters in months. 

Bags 2 Focke-Wolfs
Four RCAF Typhoons returning from a reconnaissance flight met enemy fighters and destroyed three and probably destroyed a fourth. Two were destroyed by FO. A. H. Fraser of Westmount, Que., and the other by FO. H. Laurence of Edson, Alta. All were FW190s.
A Canadian Tempest pilot, Flt. Lt. J. W. Garland of Richmond, Ont., jumped two Focke Wulfs just 50 feet from the ground. He dived from 9,000 feet and destroyed both.
In the Wolf Squadron dogfight, PO. Steve Butte of Michel, B.C., and Mac Reeves of Madoc, Ont., each downed two planes and Butte also claimed one damaged. FIt. Sgt. Keith Lindsay destroyed one and also had a "probable."
These were the first scores for Butte and Lindsay.
Butte and Lindsay found themselves in a swirling mass of Huns as they took off on a morning patrol. Butte sent an ME-109 down in flames with cannon fire.
Next victim was an FW-190. "There were strikes on his wing and engine, and I saw him crash on the edge of a near by town," Butte said.

Out of Ammunition
Then he hit an ME-109, seeing strikes and smoke, but losing sight of the enemy plane as it dived steeply toward the ground.
"By this time all my ammunition was gone and a Hun got on my tail," Butte continued, "I managed to get on his tail, but couldn't do anything about it."
Lindsay shot one plane down in flames and registered a cannon hit on another, but couldn't determine whether it crashed.
Reeves and his namesake, Flt. Lt. Dick Reeves of 1507 Mt. Pleasant Rd., Toronto, who is no relation, plunged into a flock of enemy planes while returning from patrol. Dick Reeves had to land immediately because of a faulty motor, but Mac, his guns belching, closed on the plane which caught fire and crashed. He attacked the second victim from underneath and the pilot baled out.
It was announced tonight that the Canadian Mosquito Squadron on the Continent during Sunday night destroyed two Junkers planes while on defensive patrol.

_________________________________________________

Born in Waugh, Alberta, 7 November 1923
Enlisted in Calgary, 9 January 1942. 
Trained at No.5 ITS (graduated 20 June 1942), 
No.13 EFTS (graduated 10 October 1942) and 
No.1 SFTS (graduated 5 March 1943; wings that day). 
Arrived in UK, 4 April 1943 and 
underwent further training at No.17 (P) AFU 
(posted there 27 May 1943) and 
No.53 OTU (posted there 13 July to 31 December 1943).
Station Grangemouth, 31 December 1943 to 12 May 1944
Station Redhill, 12 May 1944. 
With No.403 Squadron, 10 June 1944 to 18 March 1945.
Repatriated to Canada 3 December 1945; 
released 17 January 1946. 
Award presented at Sea Island, 22 October 1949. 


_________________________________________________

Canadian Fighter Pilots Get Biggest Bag of Huns
London, Jan. 2, 1945 - (CP) - Canadian fighter pilots accounted for at least half of the 94 German planes destroyed by the RAF's 2nd Tactical Air Force New Year's Day when the Luftwaffe made an attempt to cripple west front airfield operations.
A compilation tonight, based on the latest reports received from the Continent, showed that RCAF fighters in their biggest day of the war destroyed at least 36 enemy aircraft and half-a-dozen others fel1 to Canadian sharpshooters in RAF Squadrons.
The top scoring wing in the 2nd Tactical Air Force during the day of close to 100 "kills" was the Canadian Spitfire unit which brought down 24 German machines, probably destroyed another three and damaged seven. An untold number of probables and damaged planes was claimed by other Canadians.
The wing’s scorers included two airmen who downed three planes apiece, both from the Ram Squadron. FO G. D. Cameron of Toronto destroyed a trio of ME-109s while Flt. Lt. John Mackay of Cloverdale, B.C. destroyed two ME-109s and an FW-190. Mackay got the last two without using his guns because they dived into the ground when he chased them.
Flt. Lt. D. Pieri of Toronto and Elmhurst, Ill., destroyed two ME-190s and probably destroyed two others.
Flt. Lt. Dick Audet of Lethbridge, Alta., who last Friday shot down five enemy planes in little more than five minutes, brought his total to seven with two FW-190s bagged as they roared low over his field. Friday's quintet were the first aircraft the 22 year-old Lethbridge airman had downed.
Others from the Canadian wing, who helped to set up the day's record - the previous top mark for the Canadians in a single day was 22 planes - included Sqdn, Ldr. Dean Dover, DFC, and Bar, of Toronto, who destroyed an ME-109 and shared another with FO. Dean Kelly of Peterborough, Ont. and Flt. Lt Donald Gordon of Vancouver with two ME-109's.
Double scorers included Flt. Lt. J. W. Garland. Richmond, Ont., PO. Steve Butte, Michel. B.C.; PO. Mac Reeves, Madoc, Ont.; and FO. A. H. Fraser, Westmount, Que.
Single scorers included Flt. Lt. W Banks, Toronto; Flt. Lt. B. MacPherson, St. Thomas, Ont.; Flt Lt. Basil Doak, Cowansville, Que.; FO. Vic Smith, Toronto; FO. J. C. Lee, Ottawa; PO. D. M. Horsburgh, Carnduff, Sask.; Flt. Lt. N. Keen, White Lake. B.C.; FO. H. Laurence, Edson. Alta.; and Flt. Sgt. Keith Lindsay. 10764 95th St. Edmonton. Lindsay also claimed one probable.
_________________________________________________

BUTTE, P/O Steve (J85829) - Distinguished Flying Cross - No.403 Squadron
Award effective 6 March 1945 as per London Gazette of that date and 
AFRO 625/45 dated 13 April 1945. 

One morning early in January 1945, Pilot Officer Butte was detailed to fly the leading aircraft of a section on a sortie over the battle zone. Just as the formation became airborne a large force of enemy fighters attacked the airfield. Pilot Officer Butte immediately engaged one of the enemy aircraft, shooting it down. A second and yet a third attacker fell to his guns before his ammunition was expended. He was himself then attacked by two fighters but outmaneouvred them. In this engagement against a vastly superior number of enemy aircraft Pilot Officer Butte displayed great skill, bravery and tenacity.

_________________________________________________

1 Jan 1945 
- 
two Me109s
one FW190 
Operation Bodenplatte 

Steve also assisted Andy MacKenzie on 3 of his kills
and help with an Me262 on Christmas day 1944

and in his own words
http://rcafspitfirepilot.tripod.com/
_________________________________________________


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## vikingBerserker (Nov 22, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Nov 22, 2010)




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## v2 (Nov 22, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Nov 23, 2010)

to all


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## pbfoot (Nov 30, 2010)

Leslie Neilson
Born: February 11, 1926 

Although his career stretches back half a century and includes over 100 films and countless TV programs, Leslie Nielsen gained true fame late in his career, when he starred in a series of comic spoofs beginning with 1980's Airplane!.

The son of a Canadian Mountie and the brother of Canada's future Deputy Prime Minister, Nielsen was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, on February 11, 1926. He developed an early knack for acting when he was forced to lie to his disciplinarian father in order to avoid punishment, and he went on to become a radio announcer after serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force during WWII (despite being legally deaf, the result of a childhood illness). To prepare himself for his future career, Nielsen studied at Toronto's Academy of Radio Arts, which was run by CBC commentator and future Bonanza star Lorne_Greene. After several years in radio, he won a scholarship to New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, where he studied acting under Sanford_Meisner and dance under Martha Graham. He then spent five years appearing on such live television programs as Tales From Tomorrow before making his film bow in Ransom! (1956). With the exception of his starring roles in the sci-fi classic Forbidden_Planet (1956) and the popular Debbie_Reynolds-vehicle Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), much of Nielsen's early work was undistinguished; he was merely a handsome leading man in an industry overstocked with handsome leading men. An attempt to do a "Davy Crockett" by starring as Francis Marion in the Disney TV saga The Swamp Fox resulted in a nifty title tune but little else. Nielsen went on to star in such series as The New Breed, Bracken's World, and Hawaii Five-O (1968), but found he was more in demand as a heavy than as a hero.

A notorious offscreen practical joker and cut-up, Nielsen was not given an onscreen conduit for this trait until he was cast in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spoof Airplane (1980). This led to his deadpan characterization of monumentally inept police lieutenant Frank Drebin on Z.A.Z.'s cult TV series Police_Squad, which in turn spawned the 1988 hit The Naked Gun and two sequels. Nielsen also found success in a number of other film spoofs, so much, in fact, that those familiar only with his loopy comedy roles are invariably surprised that, once upon a time, he took himself deadly seriously in films like Harlow (1965) and The_Poseidon_Adventure (1972). Hal Erickson, Rovi


_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8vtcHGdchE_


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## Njaco (Nov 30, 2010)

"Forbidden Planet" is a classic.


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## P40NUT (Nov 30, 2010)




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## Gnomey (Nov 30, 2010)

A star of many classics and a very funny man.


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## v2 (Nov 30, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Nov 30, 2010)

I heard several times today about his movies...this is the first mention I've seen of his RCAF service.


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Nov 30, 2010)




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## Vassili Zaitzev (Dec 2, 2010)

Rest easy Leslie, you made many people laugh.


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## wheelsup_cavu (Dec 5, 2010)

After watching Leslie Nielsen play serious roles for years the change to slapstick was unexpected. 
I do remember him for the the comedy roles first when I think of him now and it always brings a smile to my face.

RIP Leslie.







Wheels


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## v2 (Dec 23, 2010)

*Bill Foxley* 
Bill Foxley, who has died aged 87, was considered the most badly burned airman to survive the Second World War; his example and support became an inspiration to later generations who suffered similar severe disabilities. 
Foxley was the navigator of a Wellington bomber that crashed immediately after taking off from Castle Donington airfield on March 16 1944. He escaped unscathed but, hearing the shouts of a trapped comrade, went back into the aircraft despite an intense fire. Foxley was the navigator of a Wellington bomber that crashed immediately after taking off from Castle Donington airfield on March 16 1944. He escaped unscathed but, hearing the shouts of a trapped comrade, went back into the aircraft despite an intense fire. 

He managed to drag his wireless operator free, suffering severe burns in the process. “The plane was like an inferno,” he said later. “I had to climb out of the astrodome at the top and that’s when I got burned.” His sacrifice was not rewarded, however, as his comrade died shortly afterwards, as did two other crewmen. 

Foxley was admitted to Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, with horrific burns to his hands and face. The fire had destroyed all the skin, muscle and cartilage up to his eyebrows. He had lost his right eye and the cornea of the remaining eye was scarred, leaving him with seriously impaired vision . 

He came under the care of Sir Archibald McIndoe, the pioneering plastic surgeon, and over the next three and a half years underwent almost 30 operations to rebuild his face, including procedures to give him a new nose and build up what was left of his hands. 

He finally left hospital in December 1947, when he was discharged from the RAF as a warrant officer. Though he did his best never to let on, he was rarely free from pain for the rest of his life. 

A notable witness to his courage was Winston Churchill. During a brief convalescence in 1946 in Montreux, Foxley and a fellow burns victim, Jack Allaway, found themselves in the gardens of a house where Churchill was painting. After watching how the two men manipulated cups of tea with their disfigured hands, Churchill walked over and offered each a cigar. Allaway reportedly then dated Churchill’s daughter Mary. 

William Foxley was born in Liverpool on August 17 1923. He was 18 when, in 1942, he joined the RAF to train as a navigator. Posted to Bomber Command, he was nearing the end of his training course when his Wellington crashed. 

After being discharged from the RAF he worked in the retail trade in Devon but wanted to return to Sussex and be near to East Grinstead. For many years he had a distinguished career in facilities’ management at the London headquarters of the Central Electricity Generating Board, where he was the terror of contactors. Many of the workmen were unaware that he was nearly blind, and when a redecoration job had been completed Foxley would press his face up to within a few inches of the wall and glare at it, not letting on that it was the only way he could inspect the paint work.
Foxley had to overcome very public horror of his scarred features. Commuting daily by train from Crawley to London, the seat next to his often remained empty. Passengers who moved to take up the seat would change their minds at the last moment, prompting Foxley to tell them: “It’s all right. I’m not going to bite you.” 

In 1969 he appeared (with officer rank, for effect) in the film Battle of Britain, as a badly burned pilot who is introduced to a WAAF officer, played by Susannah York, in an celebrated scene set in an RAF operations room. 

The hospital ward at East Grinstead had been full of men who had suffered severe burns. Such was their indomitable spirit that they formed the association known as the Guinea Pig Club, in honour of McIndoe’s pioneering and unproven surgery. Considered by its members to be more exclusive than any smart London club, the Guinea Pig provided a support network for burns victims throughout their lives. Foxley once commented that being a “pig” meant “everything” to him. 

Nor did he restrict his support to veterans of the Second World War. Foxley also gave immense encouragement to those badly burned during the Falklands conflict as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan. With two fellow “pigs”, he set up the charity Disablement in the City, which grew into Employment Opportunities, of which the Duke of Edinburgh was president. After developing into a nationwide organisation, Employment Opportunities merged in 2008 with the Shaw Trust. 
Foxley also devoted a great deal of his time to raising funds for the Blond McIndoe Research Foundation, even getting sponsored, aged 80, to abseil down a fireman’s tower. “There’s nothing to it,” he said afterwards. 

Unable to play sport, Foxley took to long-distance running and would often run 12 to 18 miles a day, an activity he kept up until he was in his seventies. Twice he trained for the London Marathon, but minor injuries thwarted his participation on both occasions. He rode a bicycle to the supermarket until a few months before his death and regularly paraded at the annual service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph. 

The nature of Foxley’s injuries left him unable to smile or communicate his emotions. The most animated feature of his reconstructed face was its glass eye, which glinted when it caught the light. None the less, he never lost his positive approach to life. When asked how his experiences had affected him, he would reply: “It’s your personality that will come through, whatever. I’ve never let it worry me too much; I’ve just got on with it.” 

Bill Foxley, a remarkable and courageous man, died on December 5. He married his first wife, Catherine, who nursed him at East Grinstead Hospital, in 1947. She died in 1971. He is survived by their two sons and by a daughter from a brief second marriage. 

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Dec 23, 2010)

Air Commodore *John Sowrey* 

Air Commodore John Sowrey, who has died aged 90, was a member of a remarkable RAF family whose members fought in both World Wars; he himself became an ace fighter pilot in the Western Desert, and in the 1950s tested the latest jet fighters. 
Flying Hurricanes with No 73 Squadron, Sowrey had his first success on June 15 1941. Supporting the 7th Armoured Division near Halfaya, his section encountered two Messerschmitt Bf 109s. Sowrey engaged them and shot one down. He was back in action that afternoon, when he shot down another. 

A few days later Sowrey was distraught to learn that his younger brother, Jimmy, who was based at a nearby landing ground, had been shot down in his Hurricane and killed, just two weeks after joining his squadron. 

Sowrey joined No 213 Squadron and flew during the campaign in Syria against Vichy French forces before returning to the desert a year later as a flight commander with No 80 Squadron. On May 21 1942 he and his wingman shared in the destruction of a Junkers 88 bomber, which crash-landed in the desert; two days later they accounted for another, which came down in the sea. 

Near Bir Hacheim on June 10, Sowrey and his formation encountered a force of Stuka dive bombers. He shot one down but was then forced to crash-land in the desert and walk back to his base. Three weeks later, after engaging more Stukas, he once again found himself on foot in the desert. 

The Eighth Army had established a defensive line at El Alamein. Late in the afternoon of July 4, Sowrey and his section intercepted a force of enemy dive bombers attacking Allied troops. He soon shot down one but, while disposing of a second, he collided with his victim and was forced to bail out. Attacked while descending in his parachute, he took two days to regain friendly lines where, due to his dark complexion, he was taken for an Italian — and again shot at. 

Shortly afterwards he was rested, having destroyed five enemy aircraft and shared in the destruction of two others. 

John Adam Sowrey was born in Cambridge on January 5 1920 and educated at Tonbridge School. His father and his two uncles had distinguished careers in the RFC and RAF, and John was awarded a King’s Cadetship to RAF Cranwell, graduating in March 1940. 

Within weeks he was in action with No 613 Squadron, flying Lysanders on convoy patrols and dropping supplies to the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force at Calais. In March 1941 he became a fighter pilot flying Hurricanes and soon left for Egypt, where he was attached to No 73 Squadron. 

After 18 months of almost continuous operations, Sowrey instructed trainee fighter pilots before going to Kenya, from where he flew communications aircraft around East Africa and the Indian Ocean. In November 1943 he was made an adviser to No 336 Squadron of the Greek Air Force, and for eight months flew Hurricanes on shipping protection and air defence duties off the Libyan coast. 

After returning to Britain in June 1944, Sowrey joined No 131 Squadron to fly Spitfires on high altitude patrols, bomber escort sorties and offensive sweeps. For his long and sustained period of flying throughout the war he was awarded a DFC . 

After serving as adjutant of No 603 Auxiliary Air Force Squadron, Sowrey went to Farnborough in 1951 to attend the Empire Test Pilots’ School. For three years he tested the latest jet fighters, including the Hunter, Swift and Javelin. When he flew the only surviving prototype of the Javelin (the other two having crashed), the aircraft’s only hydraulic system failed, making the flying controls virtually immovable. 

Sowrey was ordered to bail out, but did not fancy a parachute descent into the Welsh mountains in winter. Instead he nursed the aircraft back to a safe landing at Boscombe Down. He was awarded an AFC, the fifth member of the Sowrey family to receive the decoration. The Gloster Aircraft Company presented him with a gold watch. 

In 1955 Sowrey commanded the fighter wing at RAF Wattisham, flying Hunter day fighters and Meteor night fighters. On one occasion he led the wing over Buckingham Palace for the annual Battle of Britain Day fly-past. 

After three years on the staff at Nato headquarters in Oslo, where he was able to indulge in his love of winter sports, he commanded the RAF station at North Luffenham, which housed a Thor nuclear ballistic missile squadron and a Bloodhound anti-aircraft missile unit. 

In the summer of 1963 he went to Delhi as air adviser at the High Commission. During a visit to India by the Duke of Edinburgh, Sowrey acted as his personal pilot, flying him to various venues in a Dakota. 

After a staff tour in the MoD, Sowrey retired from the RAF in 1968. He was awarded a Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. 

His first wife, Audrey, was an accomplished dress designer and established a small retail outlet, Regamus, in Knightsbridge . Sowrey worked in the background, and one of his tasks was to deliver an outfit to Buckingham Palace for Lady Diana Spencer to wear for her engagement photographs. 

Sowrey and Audrey bought properties in the French Alps and the Italian Riviera, later moving to Nice. He was thus able to continue skiing until late in life. He also competed in the national gliding championships in the early 1950s, and was an accomplished sailor. He owned a number of yachts and crossed the North Sea to Norway and Sweden, sailed to France and enjoyed regular sailing holidays in the Mediterranean. He was also an enthusiastic and competent painter in watercolours. 

John Sowrey died on November 30. His wife Audrey, whom he married in 1952, died in 1993. In 1994 he married, secondly, Lorna, who survives him with two daughters of his first marriage. His cousin is Air Marshal Sir Freddie Sowrey. 

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Dec 23, 2010)

Group Captain *Ron Duckenfield* 

Ron Duckenfield, who has died aged 93, flew Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain and shot down three enemy aircraft; later he spent over two years in Rangoon Jail as a prisoner of the Japanese. 
Duckenfield left for France on May 11 1940, a few days after joining No 501 Squadron. Flying in to reinforce the air component of the British Expeditionary Force, he was badly injured when the transport aircraft in which he was a passenger crashed on landing at Bethenville. Evacuated back to England, he noted that “on my first visit to France, my feet never touched the ground”. 

Duckenfield rejoined No 501 just as the Battle of Britain began. Flying from Hawkinge on the Kent coast he was soon in action and shared in the destruction of a Stuka dive-bomber over Dover on July 29. On August 15 he shot down a Dornier bomber and damaged a second. Flying almost every day as the Battle intensified, he shot down two Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters. He was mentioned in despatches. 

Byron Leonard Duckenfield was born in Sheffield on April 15 1917, the son of a cavalryman serving in Mesopotamia. He was educated at the city’s Central School (where he first demonstrated an aptitude for languages) and, after a brief period as an assistant milkman, joined the RAF . 

In September 1940 Duckenfield joined the Air Fighting Development Unit to test new fighters and captured enemy aircraft. After a year which he described as “the most rewarding of my RAF career” he was awarded the AFC. In February 1942 he was appointed to command No 615 Squadron flying Hurricanes and a month later sailed with the squadron for India. Flying from Jessore, operations against the Japanese commenced in December as the enemy advanced into the Arakan. 

Duckenfield flew armed reconnaissance sorties and on December 27 led eight Hurricanes to attack Magwe airfield. Over the target his engine failed and he was forced to crash land in a creek 200 miles behind enemy lines. He was soon captured and put in solitary confinement before being taken to the notorious Rangoon Jail. 
Despite the harsh treatment, Duckenfield decided to derive some benefits from his incarceration. With his flair for languages he started to teach himself Japanese and over the next two years created a Japanese/English dictionary: it was the beginning of a long association with the language and the people of Japan. Finally, on May 2 1945, an RAF reconnaissance pilot flying over Rangoon Jail saw “Japs Gone” painted in large letters on the roof. Within days the skeletal prisoners were liberated. 

After recuperating in England, Duckenfield returned to duty with the RAF. In 1947 he joined the British Forces of Occupation in Japan before attending the School of Oriental Studies, where he spent two years studying for a degree in Japanese. In 1950 he returned to flying when he commenced a two-year appointment commanding No 19 Squadron flying the Meteor jet fighter. 

After a number of staff appointments in the UK and overseas he returned to Japan to spend three years as the air attaché in Tokyo before retiring from the RAF in June 1969. 

Duckenfield joined Rolls-Royce and was appointed marketing manager for Japan, giving him many opportunities to return to the country. In April 1979 he became the company’s senior executive adviser for the Far East and was based in Tokyo for three years. His language skills and understanding of the country and its people was a great asset to the company. 

During his long postwar association with Japan, Duckenfield gained an increasing respect for the Japanese people. He made many friends in the country and was admired for promoting Anglo/Japanese relations. 

In retirement he was an avid walker, often covering fifteen miles a day. He also took on a number of commitments teaching and translating Japanese. 

Ron Duckenfield died on November 19. He married Diana Maidment in October 1939 and she died in 1979. In 1980 he married, secondly, Virgie, who survives him with a daughter from his first marriage. A son who served in the RAF predeceased him. 

source: The Telegraph


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## RabidAlien (Dec 23, 2010)




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## mikewint (Dec 23, 2010)

Rest in peace


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## Gnomey (Dec 23, 2010)




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## ETriggs (Dec 24, 2010)

My grandfather and hero. 


Eldon D. Triggs, Sr., 88, of Cheyenne died Oct. 11, 2010 at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center.

He was born March 11, 1922, in Ayrshire, Iowa, and was raised by his widowed mother, Lizzie Triggs. He married Beverly A. Freimuth on May 16, 1941, in Blair, Neb. He was a veteran of the U.S. Navy, serving aboard the USS Saratoga and wounded at Iwo Jima, during WWII, where he was awarded the Purple Heart. He later retired from the Department of the Treasury and later worked as a tax and management consultant.


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## RabidAlien (Dec 24, 2010)

Thanks for sharing that, E.


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Dec 24, 2010)




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## v2 (Dec 25, 2010)




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## Wurger (Dec 25, 2010)




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## mikewint (Dec 25, 2010)

Rest in Peace


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## Gnomey (Dec 25, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Dec 26, 2010)




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## v2 (Dec 27, 2010)

*Fred Hargesheimer* - WWII pilot who forever repaid rescuers dies at 94. 

Fred Hargesheimer, a World War II Army pilot whose rescue by Pacific islanders led to a life of giving back as a builder of schools and teacher of children, died Thursday morning. He was 94. 

Richard Hargesheimer said his father had been in poor health and passed away in Lincoln.

On June 5, 1943, Hargesheimer, a P-38 pilot with the 8th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron, was shot down by a Japanese fighter while on a mission over the Japanese-held island of New Britain in the southwest Pacific. He parachuted into the trackless jungle, where he barely survived for 31 days until found by local hunters.

They took him to their coastal village and for seven months hid him from Japanese patrols, fed him and nursed him back to health from two illnesses. In February 1944, with the help of Australian commandos working behind Japanese lines, he was picked up by a U.S. submarine off a New Britain beach.

After returning to the U.S. following the war, Hargesheimer got married and began a sales career with a Minnesota forerunner of computer maker Sperry Rand, his lifelong employer. But he said he couldn't forget the Nakanai people, who he considered his saviors.

The more he thought about it, he later said, "the more I realized what a debt I had to try to repay."

After revisiting the village of Ea Ea in 1960, he came home, raised $15,000 over three years, "most of it $5 and $10 gifts," and then returned with 17-year-old son Richard in 1963 to contract for the building of the villagers' first school.

In the decades to come, Hargesheimer's U.S. fundraising and determination built a clinic, another school and libraries in Ea Ea, renamed Nantabu, and surrounding villages.

In 1970, their three children grown, Hargesheimer and his wife, Dorothy, moved to New Britain, today an out-island of the nation of Papua New Guinea, and taught the village children themselves for four years. The Nantabu school's experimental plot of oil palm even helped create a local economy, a large plantation with jobs for impoverished villagers.

On his last visit, in 2006, Hargesheimer was helicoptered into the jungle and carried in a chair by Nakanai men to view the newly found wreckage of his World War II plane. Six years earlier, on another visit, he was proclaimed "Suara Auru," "Chief Warrior" of the Nakanai.

"The people were very happy. They'll always remember what Mr. Fred Hargesheimer has done for our people," said Ismael Saua, 69, a former teacher at the Nantabu school.

"These people were responsible for saving my life," Hargesheimer told The Associated Press in a 2008 interview. "How could I ever repay it?"

Hargesheimer, who was a native of Rochester, Minnesota, is survived by his son Richard of Lincoln; another son, Eric, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota; and a daughter, Carol, of Woodbury, Minnesota. Survivors also include a sister, eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Richard Hargesheimer said no services are planned.

He fell from sky, into their hearts - World news - Wonderful World - msnbc.com

source: msnbc.com


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## RabidAlien (Dec 28, 2010)




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## P40NUT (Dec 28, 2010)

R.I.P.


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## mikewint (Dec 28, 2010)

Pretty neat guy. Rest in peace


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## Gnomey (Dec 28, 2010)




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## v2 (Dec 31, 2010)

*Geraldine Hoff Doyle *

Geraldine Hoff Doyle dies at 86; inspiration behind a famous wartime poster
A news service photo of Doyle is believed to have been the model for the 'We Can Do It!' poster, a Rosie the Riveter image from World War II.
Geraldine Hoff Doyle, a World War II factory worker whose bandana-wearing image in a wire-service photo is said to have been the model for the woman depicted in the 1942 "We Can Do It!" poster, has died. She was 86. The iconic wartime poster became an enduring symbol of women's power from the Rosie the Riveter era.

Doyle died of age-related causes Sunday at Hospice House of Mid-Michigan in Lansing, said her daughter Stephanie Gregg.

Doyle was a 17-year-old high school graduate when she took a job at the American Broach Machine Co. in her hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1942, a time when millions of women across the country were going to work to replace men who had gone to war.

"She had just graduated, and some of the young men had left school to volunteer to fight," Gregg said. "A couple had been killed, and she felt she wanted to do something for the war effort."

Doyle was operating a metal-stamping machine when a United Press photographer took a picture of the tall, slender and glamorously beautiful brunet wearing a polka-dot bandana over her hair.

Her photo, according to an account on the Pop History Dig website, was seen by Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller, who was commissioned by the Westinghouse War Production Coordinating Committee to create a series of morale-building posters to inspire Westinghouse factory workers.

Miller's "We Can Do It!" poster portrays a woman in a red-and-white polka-dot bandana and a blue uniform, rolling up a sleeve over a flexed right bicep.

Gregg said her mother, who was not as muscular as the woman depicted in the poster, had no idea her photograph had been used as a model for Miller's poster until the mid-1980s.

"She was tickled to recognize that she was the inspiration for so many women," said her daughter.

Doyle, who was born July 31, 1924, in Inkster, Mich., actually worked in the factory only a couple of weeks; a cello player, she quit after learning that the woman she had replaced had injured her hand on the metal press, her daughter said.

She then got a job at a bookstore in Ann Arbor, where she soon met her future husband, Leo H. Doyle, who was in dental school. They were married in 1943 and had six children. Doyle also worked as the office manager at her husband's dental office until she was 75.

The "We Can Do It!" poster image has been reproduced frequently in recent decades on a variety of items, including on a U.S. postage stamp issued in 1992.

"You're not supposed to have too much pride, but I can't help to have some in that poster," Doyle told the Lansing State Journal in 2002 after she was invited to speak at the Michigan state Senate.

"It's just sad I didn't know it was me sooner," Doyle said. "Maybe it's a good thing. I couldn't have handled all the excitement then."

Doyle appeared at a number of poster signings and events at the Michigan Women's Historical Center and Hall of Fame over the years.

"She was a very gracious woman," said former executive director Gladys Beckwith.

The poster, Beckwith said, "represents Rosie the Riveter, a really strong woman who has taken on a non-traditional role and is happy in it and is contributing to the war effort. It's a very significant image, one that has endured."

Doyle's husband of 66 years died in February. A son, Gary, died in 1980.

In addition to her daughter Stephanie, Doyle is survived by her other daughters, Jacqueline Drewes, Deidre Doyle and Lauretta Doyle; her son, Brian Doyle; her sister, Virginia Watson; her brother, Clifford Hoff; 18 grandchildren; and 25 great-grandchildren.

source: Los Angeles Times


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## Gnomey (Dec 31, 2010)




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## RabidAlien (Dec 31, 2010)




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## imalko (Dec 31, 2010)




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## Wayne Little (Jan 1, 2011)




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## pbfoot (Jan 8, 2011)

Hap Kennedy
Squadron Leader Irving Farmer 'Hap' Kennedy WWII Veteran DFC Bar RCAF M.D. ). Bus was born on February 4, 1922 in the family home in the village of Cumberland. At the age of 18, Bus enlisted in the RCAF in July 1940. His ambition was to be a fighter pilot and after flying Hurricanes in England in 1941 (263 Squadron RAF), he was transferred to Spitfires in 1942 (421 Squadron RCAF). In late 1942, he arrived in Malta (249 Squadron RAF). In Malta, 'Hap' (as he was known to his fellow pilots) was awarded, as an Ace, with the Distinguished Flying Cross. Years later he wrote of enthusiasm for the Allied effort in the Malta days. Due to be posted back to the UK, "the Invasion of Sicily was on and was too good to miss." He was given permission to join 111 Squadron in Sicily (1943) then transferred to 93 Squadron as a flight commander. Posted back to the UK in 1944, with the invasion of France looming, Hap joined 401 Squadron RCAF and with morale high, soon was in France after the Normandy Invasion. He was awarded with the bar to his DFC. In July, leading a Squadron, he was hit by flak, bailed out, and evaded capture with help from a French family and the Maquis. In England, he learned that his younger brother, Tot, had just been killed (Bomber Squadron 434). Hap returned to Canada. Hap often said of his war experiences that "it wasn't the combat but the deep comradeship" that he recalled with fondness. Years later, Hap was decorated with the French Legion of Honour. After the war, Hap studied medicine at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1950. Following internship, he worked as a physician to the Inuit through Indian Northern Affairs and set up a general practice in Lanark. In 1961, returning to Cumberland, he built his own clinic where he practiced medicine for 37 years. He was greatly respected by thousands of patients throughout the township for his dedication and compassion as a country doctor. Retirement allowed Hap to further enjoy that which brought him greatest pleasure: his love of nature, reading, flying his aircraft out of Rockcliffe Flying Club, and his family. He was extraordinarily diverse in his interests and skills. He was a naturalist, a gardener, a philosopher, a teacher, an author, and a poet. He sang Robbie Burns, he quoted Robert Frost, he watched hockey; he was a thinker, advisor, listener, and a provider. He was a man of integrity and honesty, a humble man who shunned attention, yet drew people to him. He was gentle yet tough as nails. "I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by, And that made all the difference. - The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost. 
I believe this recent clip is of him being interviewed about Malta
beurling - Bing Videos


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## RabidAlien (Jan 8, 2011)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jan 8, 2011)




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## Gnomey (Jan 9, 2011)




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## mikewint (Jan 9, 2011)

Another WWII vet gone from us. Rest in Peace


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## ccheese (Jan 11, 2011)

Major "Dick" Winters, the CO of Easy Company, 506th Reg., 101st Airborne Division died
last week (date unknown). If you saw the mini-series "Band of Brothers", he was the
Captain [later Major] that lead Company E from the invasion to the end of the war.
Born on Jan 21, 1918, his bio is on the Penn State Website. He lived in Hershey, PA,
but died in a nursing home in Palmyra, NJ. at the age of 92.

RIP "Dick" Winters....

Charles


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## RabidAlien (Jan 11, 2011)




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## v2 (Jan 14, 2011)

Flight Lieutenant *Aubrey Niner* 

Flight Lieutenant Aubrey Niner , who has died aged 88, was in the middle of a bombing run over occupied France when he was forced to crash-land his bomber in the middle of the city of Lille. 
It was the afternoon of Sunday July 19 1942 when Niner took off in his Boston bomber of No 88 Squadron to carry out a daylight attack against a power station at Lomme, not far from Lille. During the low-altitude run-in to the target, his aircraft was hit by flak which disabled the starboard engine and set fire to the wing. With the fire getting very close to a fuel tank, and seeing the wing buckling under the heat, Niner looked for somewhere to crash-land. 

Over the centre of Lille, he spotted the only open area, the Champs de Mars park. With great skill he made a successful landing, attracting a sizeable crowd as he put down. Most of the aircraft's rudder had been shot away, and such was the difficulty of the manoeuvre that Niner was later commended by his captors. The crew survived without serious injury but, with the aircraft still on fire, they had to make a hasty exit – although Niner did remember to grab his hat. 

Local firemen arrived to extinguish the flames before the aircraft was overrun by souvenir hunters and German intelligence personnel. The whole event – the crashed aircraft, the crew's capture and their initial incarceration – was photographed by a German serviceman. Some 30 years later Niner received copies of the pictures, which the photographer had passed to the British embassy in Bonn. 

Aubrey Kelland Collins Niner was born at Southsea on June 10 1922 and educated at Sutton Valence School, near Maidstone. On his 18th birthday he volunteered for aircrew duties and joined the RAF in August 1940 to train as a pilot. 

Niner joined No 88 in early 1942 to fly the American-built Boston medium bomber. The squadron specialised in daylight low-level attacks against communications targets, power stations and oil depots in the Low Countries and northern France. When he took off on July 19 it was his 16th operation. 

After his capture and initial interrogation, he was sent to Stalag Luft III, scene of the Great Escape. In January 1945, during one of the coldest winters on record, the camp was evacuated as the Soviet armies approached, and he survived the "Long March" west. 

He finally returned to England in May and was discharged from the RAF at the end of 1945. 

Niner became managing director of the family firm, Harringtons, which marketed baby goods. In 1962 the company was awarded the Royal Warrant for its products. Niner subsequently became a divisional director within the Courtaulds Group and, later, chief executive of the National Children's Wear Association. 

Aubrey Niner died on November 26. He married his second wife, Rosemary, in 1976, and she survives him with their two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage. 

source: The Telegraph


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## RabidAlien (Jan 14, 2011)




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## mikewint (Jan 14, 2011)

Rest in Peace soldier


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## Gnomey (Jan 14, 2011)




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## P40NUT (Jan 14, 2011)




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## evangilder (Jan 20, 2011)

Frank Compton has passed 






> Frank Compton, 90, passed away January 15, 2011 in Torrance, CA. Frank was born on March 25, 1920 in Denver, Colorado and lived for the last 36 years in Torrance. Frank served his country in the U.S. Navy during WWII and worked at Northrop and North American Aviation as an aerospace engineer and executive for 45 years. Frank is survived by his sons, Frank Compton (Karen) of Torrance, CA, Jeff Compton (Libby) of Castle Rock, CO; daughters, Linda Compton of Santa Fe, NM, Terry Goodchild of Reno, NV; grandson, Dylan Compton of Castle Rock, CO; granddaughters, Noelle Compton and Danielle Compton, both of Castle Rock, CO; and grandson, James Throckmorton of Reno, NV. Frank was preceded in death by his mother, Ethelyn Compton, father Finis Compton and granddaughter, Anne Throckmorton. Memorial service will take place on Saturday, January 22, 2011 at 12:00 noon at the Western Museum of Flight, 3315 Airport Dr., Torrance, CA 90505. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to the Western Museum of Flight.


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## mikewint (Jan 20, 2011)

all is well, safely rest, god is near


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## Gnomey (Jan 20, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 20, 2011)




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## Wayne Little (Jan 21, 2011)




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## bobbysocks (Jan 21, 2011)

To all members of the 357th !

It is my very sad duty to report the death of my father James H Sehl. On Tuesday, January 18th, Dad died in his room at Bayside Assisted Living Facility in South Beach, Oregon. His death was somewhat sudden and somewhat unexpected. Based on what we have learned he did not suffer for any significant period of time.

As per his wishes, his body will be cremated and the remains taken to Dover, Ohio for burial next to Mother.

I can tell you that he had the fondest memories of the members of the 357th Fighter Group. He was especially delighted with the reunion at Luke Air Force Base several years ago.

As a retired military pilot I can truly relate to the closeness of such a group of pilots and crew members. I am so honored to have known all of you and I know you will join me in saying that my father will be dearly missed.

Ted, please feel free to forward this to anyone you feel knew my father.

With great sadness,

jim sehl jr


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## pbfoot (Jan 21, 2011)

Earlier this month I posted an obit on Hap Kenedy, his wingman Bill McRae passed on 72 hrs later
lovely articles on both at this link from Vintage Wings 
Hap Kennedy Tribute
Requiem for a Wingman


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## Gnomey (Jan 21, 2011)




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## vikingBerserker (Jan 21, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 21, 2011)




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## v2 (Jan 25, 2011)

Flight Lieutenant *Tom Hughes* 

Flight Lieutenant Tom Hughes, who has died aged 89, was almost certainly the only member of the wartime RAF to bail out of an enemy fighter – in his case a Messerschmitt Bf 109; later in the conflict (back in his Spitfire) he was shot down during the battle of Monte Cassino. 
Hughes had flown to Gibraltar in late 1942 to test Spitfires that had been shipped to the airfield in crates. He then joined No 72 Squadron ahead of Operation Torch – the invasion of north-west Africa. 

From January 1943 he was constantly in action, flying from desert airstrips in support of the British First Army as it advanced towards Tunisia. On March 2 the engine of his Spitfire failed and he had to crash-land. The next day a search party found him walking back to his lines and he was flying two days later. 

After victory in the desert, No 72 moved to Malta in June in preparation for the invasion of Sicily. On July 5 his formation was escorting USAAF bombers when they encountered a large force of Axis fighters. In the ensuing melee Hughes thought he damaged a Messerschmitt Bf 109, though postwar analysis suggests that it probably crashed. 

On July 12, two days after the Sicily landings, No 72 encountered another large mixed force of enemy fighters and bombers. Squadron pilots accounted for a number and Hughes was credited with destroying an Italian fighter-bomber. 

When the squadron moved to the Sicilian airfield of Comiso, RAF pilots discovered a number of flyable Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters. Hughes flew one against a Spitfire to compare their respective capabilities, but on another flight the German aircraft suffered an engine failure and he had to bail out. He ended up parachuting into a vineyard and, after convincing the locals that he was not a German, enjoyed their hospitality. Hughes thus had the unique distinction of qualifying for the Caterpillar Club having bailed out of an enemy aircraft. 
The squadron then moved to the Italian mainland, where Spitfires operated in the ground attack role. Returning from a dive-bombing sortie supporting the troops attacking Monte Cassino, Hughes’s aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he crash-landed, suffering severe burns to his legs. 

He was made a PoW and transported to Germany, where he was put into a hospital. Hughes later related that the patients on his ward were used by German staff as guinea pigs for drugs testing, and that some of them died. 

But he managed to escape, he said, after a visit from a German general whom he managed to annoy by claiming: “I have flown both the Me 109 and the Spitfire and can confirm that the Spitfire is the better aircraft.” His insolence saw him transferred to solitary confinement, but he always said that his quip had saved his life by getting him removed from the hospital. Finally, six months before the end of the war, he was included in a prisoner exchange and returned home. 

Thomas Bartley Hughes was born on November 23 1921 in Rugby and attended the school there as a day pupil. Aged 18 he joined the RAFVR and trained as a pilot. 

After gaining his wings he became a flying instructor, once leading a formation of three Oxford aircraft under the two bridges across the Menai Straights. In September 1942 Hughes converted to the Spitfire and, after a few operations with No 611 Squadron, left for Gibraltar. 

After the war Hughes went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and completed his Mechanical Sciences Tripos in 1948. He went on to pursue a career in electronic design and engineering, working for AEI and Ronson. 
For many years he was a member of the management committee of Matfen Hall – a Cheshire Home supporting the disabled. Leonard Cheshire wrote a forward to a collection of Hughes’s memoirs that were sold to raise funds for the Homes. 

A staunch supporter of No 72 Squadron Association for many years, Hughes was thrilled in 2006 to be invited to be the reviewing officer for jet pilots graduating from the RAF’s No 1 Flying Training School, which had been granted the title of 72 Squadron. 

A keen glider pilot, Hughes was a modest man who rarely spoke of his combat flying, or the injuries and imprisonment he endured. 

Tom Hughes died on December 31. He married, in 1949, Joan Harris, and she survives him. 

source: "The Telegraph"


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## Njaco (Jan 25, 2011)

*Ed Mauser, oldest living member of 'Band of Brothers,' dies at 94*

Ed Mauser, oldest living member of 'Band of Brothers,' dies at 94 - St. Petersburg Times

Oldest member of the 'Band of Brothers' dies

The oldest living member of Easy Company, the U.S. Army unit from World War II portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, has died at age 94. The Omaha funeral home Heafey Heafey Hoffman Dworak Cutler confirmed that Ed Mauser died Friday (Jan. 21, 2011) in Omaha. Mr. Mauser was not among the soldiers portrayed in the miniseries. A message left for his family wasn't returned. Terry Zahn of the Midwest chapter of the 101st Airborne Division Association said Mr. Mauser had been battling pancreatic cancer. Mr. Mauser was born Dec. 18, 1916, in LaSalle, Ill. He was drafted in 1942 and volunteered for the 101st Airborne. He was assigned to Company E, or Easy Company, which fought in some of the fiercest battles of the war. The miniseries followed the unit from its training in Georgia to the war's end in May 1945.


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## Gnomey (Jan 25, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 25, 2011)




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## v2 (Jan 26, 2011)

F/Sgt *Kazimierz (Kaz) Kijak *passed away on the 19th January 2011. 

Kaz was born in May 1919 in western Siberia about 130km east of Ekaterinburg, the city of the Czar’s murder. His father was a Pole who had been in Czar’s service as a blacksmith. His mother was the daughter of a southern Ukrainian Gypsy chief. They along with his baby brother took the long road back to his father’s hamlet, Zarudki, in central Poland during the winter of 1921/22. There he rose to the dizzy social heights of a farm boy,

Falling in love with aircraft when an Air Force plane touched down in the large wheat field nearby in the late 1920s, Kaz borrowed all the books he could, on any subject, so that he could learn enough to be able to join the Polish Air Force.

He was granted admission to the Polish Air Force’s Junior NCO’s Cadet School at Bydgoszcz in 1936. He trained to become a mechanic – although the school tried to make him an air-gunner. Kaz decided to do poorly at that as, if he was going to fly, he was going to be doing the driving.

After graduating, Kaz was assigned to 216 Squadron, a P37 bomber squadron in Warsaw shortly before the start of WWII. When war came, they had been sent to an out field and survived the initial bombings of Warsaw. The squadron was forced back, with Kaz and the other crews continually retreating while servicing their dwindling number of bombers. When the Russians invaded, they were told to run for the border with Romania. Kaz barely managed to make it to the Romanian border by road before it was closed by Russian tanks. He and many others escaped to France via Syria.

In France he was held in a camp in the south before being transferred to Paris, where he and many other sat around twiddling their thumbs. While in Paris, a circular came around asking for the names of personnel who had flying training. Kaz’s Mess only had three names. He and friend thought that wasn’t enough for the honour of the Mess so put their names down, thought up a believable number of flying hours and borrowed some instructor’s names. Honour satisfied, they forgot all about it.

He was transferred to England in early April 1940, where after being taught English and being able to speak it, after a fashion, he was posted to 316 Polish Squadron as ground crew, wielding a trolley acc’ with gay abandon, during the Battle of Britain.

Next he was posted to Brize Norton where he repaired ground support equipment – a dull and boring job - but cushy. Here he married an English girl. Shortly after that, he surprisingly, was posted to St. Andres in Scotland for flight school. That indiscretion in Paris had caught up with him. Kaz studied hard, passed well and was sent to Hucknall where he flew Tiger Moths – then to 16(P) SFTS at Newton, graduating on the 21st of October 1942. To gain experience, he was sent to 10 AGS on Walney Island, flying mostly Lysanders and towing targets for trainee air-gunners.

After that he was posted to 58 OTU at Grangemouth where he converted to Spitfires and on the 23rd of October 1943, Kaz reported to 315 (P) Squadron at Ballyhulbert in Ireland. 315 was there recuperating. In November 315 was transferred to Heston, outside London where they flew sorties and bomber escorts into France. Prior to D-Day, 315 moved to Coolham near the southern coast of England and converted to MkIII Mustangs. The squadron flew on D-Day, with Kaz being one of the rostered pilots.

During June and July 315 participated in many dive-bombing, Ranger, Rhubarb and Rodeo missions over France, as well as a stint at patrolling for V1s out of Holmsley. Kaz was credited with 2 kills.

On the 18th of August 1944, 315 Squadron was involved in the Battle of Beauvais, where 12 of 315’s aircraft spotted a large number of Fw190s taking off from Beauvais. They dropped down on them and destroyed sixteen, damaged one and claimed 3 probables for the loss of only one, their famous Squadron Leader, Horbaczewski. Kaz chased one for a long while before turning back and shooting one down and damaging another.

August, September and October were mostly daylight escort missions into Germany. Kaz also flew escort and did a little straffing during Operation Market Garden. 

In November 1944, 315 was transferred up to Peterhead in Scotland where they flew escorts for the Beaufighters and Mosquitoes of 133 Strike Wing. In later years Kaz has spent some enjoyable time over lunch and beer with Australian Beaufighter pilots from RAAF 455 squadron whom he escorted all those years ago. Flying at fifty feet above the North Sea in variable weather was not the most relaxing thing he’d ever done but they were given ten Woodbines and sardine sandwiches on every trip so it wasn’t all bad. Once, at fifty feet, Kaz’s engine coughed and he noticed that a drop tank had fallen off. With bum clenching alacrity, he flicked the fuel selector to the main tank, hit the boost pump and climbed back into formation. His mates later told him that they saw his prop wash on the waves as he recovered.

Mid-January 1945 saw 315 back down south again and in March, after sixty-seven combat mission, Kaz was posted out to 16 (P) SFTS at Newton and was there when the war ended.

Post-war Kaz went civil flying in England and was divorced in 1949. That year he joined the Royal Air Force, flying around the Empire’s lands in RAF Transport Command, moving to Bomber Command during the height of the Cold War before meeting some mahogany bomber pilots from London who arranged a posting to balmy Singapore in the late 1950s for his last flying job. Returning to England he was assigned office jobs where his considerable experience was used to keep several RAF Stations functioning correctly before being posted to a training section where his flying expertise was used to help young pilots from all over the Commonwealth gain competency in blind flying.

Kaz retired from the RAF in 1964 as a Master Pilot and with his wife and two daughters, emigrated to Canberra, Australia’s capital where his wife had relatives. They settled there and he turned his hand to a number of jobs during Canberra’s explosive expansion in the mid-1960s before he took up a position at NASA’s Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station which was being built as part of the tracking system for America’s moon-landing series of rockets. Kaz worked there for fifteen years as a power station mechanic, ensuring the electricity supply to the dish and the banks of computers used to communicate with and guide the astronauts in their space ships. After a busy time in the Polish and Royal Air Forces, Kaz was happy with a quiet and steady life.

His retirement involved a move to the sea and back, some travel, his grand and great-grand children and time developing a deep store of truly terrible jokes.

_Article researched and written for the Aircrew Remembrance Society by Alan Scheckenbach of Canberra, Australia._


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## RabidAlien (Jan 26, 2011)




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## Gnomey (Jan 26, 2011)




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## v2 (Feb 4, 2011)

*Hugh Goldie* 

Hugh Goldie, who has died aged 91, enjoyed a long a career as a theatre director after serving as a U-boat hunter with the RAF in the Second World War and winning two DFCs. 
The son of a doctor, Thomas Hugh Evelyn Goldie was born on December 5 1919 at Tywardreath, Cornwall. He was a chorister at Exeter Cathedral School before attending King’s College, Taunton. On leaving school he joined Sheffield repertory company as an assistant stage manager, and was called up in 1940. He volunteered for service with the RAFVR and trained as a pilot. 

After a brief spell flying Hudsons on operations over the North Sea, in August 1941 Goldie joined the newly-formed No 200 Squadron, which was sent to West Africa to seek out enemy submarines harassing the Allied convoys en route from the Indian Ocean and South Africa. 

On September 28 1942 he was on patrol when he sighted a lifeboat containing survivors from a ship that had been sunk. Despite failing light, appalling weather and a shortage of fuel, Goldie circled overhead until rescue arrived. For the rest of that year he flew constant convoy patrols and reconnaissance sorties, after which he was awarded his first DFC. 

In February 1943 he returned to England and converted to the Liberator before joining No 86 Squadron early the next year. From Northern Ireland and Iceland, he flew numerous anti-submarine patrols over the North Atlantic, some longer than 16 hours. 

Following the German capitulation on May 5 1945, U-boat commanders were ordered to surface and display a black flag of surrender. Coastal Command crews had orders to attack those that remained submerged. For the next few days the RAF sent their anti-submarine aircraft to patrol the Baltic and the approaches to the North Sea to prevent fanatical German submarine commanders escaping. 

On May 6 Goldie and his crew took off from an airfield in northern Scotland to patrol the Kattegat. A few hours later the radar operator picked up a contact 12 miles away, and Goldie headed his Liberator for the area. The schnorkle and periscope of a U-boat heading for the open sea was seen and Goldie attacked. He straddled the submarine with six depth charges before circling the area. Wreckage and oil rose to the surface and U-3523, on passage from Kiel, sank with all hands. It was Goldie’s last operation, and shortly afterwards he was awarded a Bar to his earlier DFC. 

In 1946 he returned to the theatre, joining the West Riding Theatre Company. He made his professional debut as a director in 1949 at the Sheffield Playhouse with Hobson’s Choice, with a cast that featured Paul Eddington and Patrick McGoohan. 

After a spell as director at the Liverpool Playhouse, in 1950 he was appointed associate producer at the Oxford Playhouse, where the company included Ronnie Barker. 

Goldie worked on the original production of Christopher Fry’s A Sleep of Prisoners, and in 1953 directed his first London production, Love’s Labour’s Lost, at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre. 

From 1954 to 1957 he was resident director at the Theatre Royal Windsor, and when he took Mrs Gibbon’s Boys to the West End in 1956 it was described by Kenneth Tynan “the best acted and directed American play since Arsenic and Old Lace”. 

Goldie then spent three years as artistic director at the Alexander Theatre in Johannesburg. On his return to Britain the plays which he brought to the London stage included Signpost to Murder (1961), starring Margaret Lockwood; Alibi for a Judge (1965), with Andrew Cruikshank; The Waiting Game (1966); Lady Be Good (1968); and A Woman Named Anne (1970), starring Moira Lister. 

In 1974 he returned to the Theatre Royal Windsor, where he later became executive director. Productions included Laburnum Grove (1977), starring Arthur Lowe, and The Business of Murder, which opened at the Duchess Theatre in 1981 and ran for more than a decade. Goldie retired in 1986, but remained on the board and worked freelance with the Derek Nimmo British Airways Playhouse. 

Goldie was passionate about cricket, playing in the minor counties for Oxfordshire whilst working at the Oxford Playhouse. He devoted much time to Richmond CC — as chairman in the late 1980s he was partially responsible for the arrival at the club of the 17-year-old Adam Gilchrist, who went on to be an outstanding Australian Test wicketkeeper/batsman and a family friend. 

In later life, Goldie revealed his talent as a watercolourist, enjoying considerable success at local exhibitions and galleries. 

Hugh Goldie died on December 23. He married his wife Janet, a Viennese refugee, in 1946. She survives him with their two sons and a daughter. 

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Feb 4, 2011)

*Ian Samuel* 

Ian Samuel, who has died aged 95, served with RAF Coastal Command during the Second World War before embarking on a diplomatic career in which he was a trusted adviser to two Foreign Secretaries. 
Adrian Christopher Ian Samuel was born on August 20 1915 in Colchester and educated at Rugby and St John's College, Oxford, where he read Modern Languages. Deciding on a career in the Foreign Service, he learnt Arabic to add to his French, German, Spanish and Turkish; his first postings were to Beirut, Tunis and Trieste. 
The war interrupted his progress, and in July 1940 he enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve to train as a pilot, later joining No 206 Squadron in its anti-submarine operations over the North Atlantic. 

On March 27 1943, Samuel was captain of a Fortress on a patrol 200 miles west of the Hebrides when a U-boat was spotted three miles away. Despite heavy anti-aircraft fire from the surfaced submarine, he dived from 2,000ft and dropped depth charges. His rear gunner saw the U-boat heel over and submerge. Then, as Samuel circled above, the submarine reappeared with its bows at an acute angle. He attacked again, and U-169, which had left Kiel to join a Seewolf group, sank vertically with all hands. 

Soon afterwards Samuel converted to the Liberator, and in June he was escorting an Atlantic convoy when he was forced to ditch. He managed to land close to a destroyer, and he and his crew were soon picked up. 

After serving for 15 months at Headquarters Coastal Command, in November 1944 he was released from the RAF as a flight lieutenant to return to duties with the Foreign Service. 

Samuel had spells at the embassies in Turkey, Egypt and Syria – recalling that, while in Damascus, he stayed up drinking one night with Kim Philby, who lamented (entirely cynically, as his later unmasking as a Soviet spy would prove) the loss of British operatives behind Soviet lines. 

In 1956 Samuel returned to the Middle East department in London and three years later was appointed Principal Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, and then to his successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. He accompanied both ministers on trips to Washington DC, staying at John F Kennedy's White House in 1961. 

It was a difficult period for Anglo-American relations, with Macmillan's administration split over whether or not to share British nuclear secrets with the French, thereby helping Britain's entry into the Common Market. Samuel warned the Prime Minister's office that encouraging French ambitions to become an independent nuclear power risked annoying the United States. In the end the British went ahead, but ultimately failed to win over de Gaulle and succeeded only in irritating the Americans. 

In 1963 Samuel embarked on a two-year posting as minister at the embassy in Madrid, after which he left the Foreign Service. 

He then started a new career representing various industries in their dealings with foreign governments and international organisations. He was also director of two British trade associations in the chemical and agrochemical fields. 

A man who enjoyed good food, good wine and genial company, Samuel was a popular member of the Garrick club. He suffered an unfortunate setback when, after winning a wine tasting competition, he lost much of his ability to taste and smell. These senses only partially returned over the years; in 1987 he wrote an article for The Spectator, "A Taste of Ashes", in which he described the experience. 

In retirement Samuel published An Astonishing Fellow, a biography of General Sir Robert Wilson (1777-1849). 

Samuel enjoyed reading, music and the theatre, and was a keen and competitive sportsman, playing hockey, cricket, tennis and golf. He also shot and skied and sailed his boat, Donna Sol, on The Solent. 

He was appointed CMG in 1959 and CVO in 1963. 

Ian Samuel died on December 26. He married, in 1942, Sheila Barrett, who survives him with their three sons and a daughter. 

source: The Telegraph


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## RabidAlien (Feb 4, 2011)




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## mikewint (Feb 4, 2011)

Sleep in peace, comrades dear,
God is near.


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## Gnomey (Feb 4, 2011)




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## GrauGeist (Feb 13, 2011)

Just saw this...it's sad to see the Greatest Generation past it's twilight. Soon, they will be no longer with us. 




> She was the fresh-faced 17-year-old who helped inspire the American home-front during World War II. Geraldine Hoff Doyle died Sunday at 84 (*26 December 2010*).
> You probably don't know her name, but you've seen her face. Doyle was 17 and working in a Michigan steelworks when her picture was taken by the United Press. That image - well, the face at least - became part of the 'We Can Do It' poster commissioned from artist J. Howard Miller during World War II, used to motivated a nation of female workers called into manufacturing jobs to support the war effort overseas.
> 
> Doyle appears with bulky biceps curled on the poster, but in real life, she was more svelte. "She was 5-foot-10 and very slender. She was a glamour girl. The arched eyebrows, the beautiful lips, the shape of the face — that's her," daughter Stephanie Gregg tells the New York Times.
> ...


‘We Can Do It!’: Geraldine Doyle, WWII Poster Inspiration, Dies - TIME NewsFeed


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Feb 13, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Feb 13, 2011)




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## Gnomey (Feb 13, 2011)




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## Wayne Little (Feb 16, 2011)




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## wheelsup_cavu (Feb 19, 2011)

Wheels


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## RabidAlien (Feb 28, 2011)

He was of the WW1 generation, but deserves to be here, too, I believe. Frank Buckles passed away Sunday 2-27-11. 

http://www.ww2aircraft.net/forum/world-war-i/generation-has-gone-28264.html


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## v2 (Apr 9, 2011)

Flight Lieutenant *Don Nelson *  

Flight Lieutenant Don Nelson, who died on March 20 aged 91, flew 33 bombing operations as a navigator with the Pathfinder Force having already completed a full tour with a Desert Air Force Wellington bomber squadron. 
Nelson joined No 7 Squadron in the spring of 1944 shortly before Bomber Command came under the direction of the Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy. For the next three months, the Pathfinders were heavily engaged in supporting the operation. 
The key to their success was accurate navigation and precise timing, placing great responsibility on Nelson and his fellow navigators screened off in the fuselage of their Lancasters. In the build-up to D-Day, Nelson attacked the French railway system and stores depots. Immediately before the invasion the huge coastal gun batteries were marked with flares and target indicators which the main bomber force used as aiming points. For his work over this period he was mentioned in despatches. 
Nelson flew with one of the squadron's flight commanders who frequently acted as master bomber. Orbiting the target to give aiming instructions to the following bombers, often under heavy anti-aircraft fire, was a perilous task, and 7 Squadron lost three commanding officers in the space of only a few months. 
In the weeks that followed the invasion, Bomber Command made many attacks against the V-1 flying bomb sites in the Pas de Calais. These small targets, often close to inhabited areas, had to be marked very accurately in order to avoid civilian casualties. Nelson also attacked Le Havre, where a large force of E-boats posed a serious threat to the shipping resupplying the Allied forces. 
Later he attacked the strongholds at Boulogne and Calais, ports that were vital in helping to resupply the armies advancing eastwards. At the end of September he was awarded a DFC. 
Towards the end of August, Bomber Command resumed its attacks against German industrial centres, and Nelson's crew marked Kiel, Bremen and Stettin and also acted as master bomber on a number of raids. He attacked Saarbrucken in October, his 70th and final operation. At the end of his tour he was awarded a Bar to his DFC. 
Donald Kenneth Nelson was born in north London on February 23 1920 and educated at Tollington School. Aged 19 he volunteered for flying duties in the RAF and trained as a navigator in South Africa. In March 1942 he joined No 37 Squadron, a Wellington bomber squadron of the Middle East Air Force. 
The arrival of Rommel and his Afrika Korps transformed the situation in the desert war, and Nelson and his colleagues attacked shipping in Tobruk and Benghazi in addition to supply dumps and advanced airfields as Rommel pushed towards Egypt. 
He also attacked Heraklion airfield on Crete and targets on the island of Rhodes. In September 1942 he completed his tour of operations and returned to England to be a bombing instructor. 
In the final months of the war, Nelson flew with a special RAF transport unit that maintained a regular route across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand. In January 1946 he was released from the Service. 
Nelson became a technical representative for large companies in the building trade, including Pilkingtons and Goodlass paints. Among his assignments was hanging lead doors at the Bank of England. Skilled at DIY, he once converted a mahogany dining table to a drop leaf table during the afternoon prior to an evening dinner party. He also made ball gowns for his wife. 
It always rankled with Nelson that Bomber Command's contribution to the defeat of Hitler was overlooked after the war. He was very active in the Pathfinder Association, serving as both its treasurer and its president. He also supported the initiative to build a memorial to Bomber Command in London's Green Park, personally raising more than £2,500 for the fund. 

Don Nelson married, in 1943, Edna Mather. She died in 1986, and he is survived by a son and a daughter; a second son predeceased him. 

Source: The Telegraph.


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## Gnomey (Apr 9, 2011)




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## Vassili Zaitzev (Apr 9, 2011)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 9, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Apr 9, 2011)




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## vikingBerserker (Apr 10, 2011)




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## pbfoot (May 26, 2011)

Dr. James Hannah who was a pilot in 115 sqn RAF in which he flew tour in Lancs and he also flew a tour in 6 group RCAF Halifaxs can't recall the Sqn passed away on the 15th of May. Here is a pic of him last year getting a ride in a Cornell taken last year in Ft Erie .


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## Gnomey (May 26, 2011)




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## vikingBerserker (May 26, 2011)




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## Wayne Little (May 27, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (May 29, 2011)




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## buffnut453 (Jun 14, 2011)

Geoff Fisken, leading Commonwealth ace in the Far East, passed away on Sunday. After flying training he was posted to flying boats at Seletar, Singapore, but hankered to fly fighters. When the Buffalos started to arrive in numbers, pilots were needed to ferry them to airfields on Singapore and Geoff gladly volunteered. He was then transferred to 243 Sqn with which he served throughout the Malayan Campaign. When 243 Sqn was disbanded at the end of January 1942, he was transferred to 453 Sqn and continued operations until the final Buffalos evacuated at the end of the first week in February. During the Malayan Campaign, Geoff attained as many as 6 kills, being one of only a very few Commonwealth pilots who attained ace status on the Buffalo. He subsequently flew P-40s, his personal aircraft wearing his well-known "Wairarapa Wildcat" marking.

Happy landings Geoff. You were one of a kind!


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## Wildcat (Jun 14, 2011)

A real legend has been lost, what a sad day


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## Wayne Little (Jun 14, 2011)

makes my recent P-40 build all the more important to me now.....RIP Sir!


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## Gnomey (Jun 14, 2011)

Really sad to hear of his passing. RIP


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## RabidAlien (Jun 14, 2011)

Fair skies, sir.


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## vikingBerserker (Jun 14, 2011)




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## v2 (Jun 15, 2011)

Have a blue sky, Sir!


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## T Bolt (Jun 15, 2011)

Wayne Little said:


> makes my recent P-40 build all the more important to me now.....RIP Sir!


 
Me too.


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jun 15, 2011)

Rest in Peace sir!


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## Airframes (Jun 15, 2011)

RIP Geoff Fiskin, one of a rare breed.


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## v2 (Jun 26, 2011)

F/Lt Ralph Barker 

Ralph Barker, who has died aged 93, served as a wireless operator and air gunner during the Second World War, surviving many hazardous anti-shipping operations in the Mediterranean theatre; he later became noted for his books about aviation and cricket. 
After completing his training in 1941 Barker joined a Beaufort torpedo bomber squadron, flying from Scotland, but was soon posted to the Middle East with Nos 47 and 39 Squadrons. Flying from airfields on Malta and North African desert landing strips, it was the task of these squadrons to sink the Axis ships supplying Rommel's Panzers in the Western Desert. They were highly dangerous missions, and losses among the Beauforts were high. 
Barker flew on many of these operations, but his career attacking convoys and their powerful escorts was terminated by a crash in which his pilot and navigator were killed. He returned to Britain, ending the war flying transport aircraft.

Ralph Hammond Cecil Barker was born at Feltham, Middlesex, on October 21 1917 and educated at Hounslow College. He joined the staff of the Sporting Life in 1934 but later went into banking. Meanwhile, he had begun writing, and several of his sketches were performed at the Windmill Theatre, some of them in the early years of the war.

After leaving the RAF in 1946, Barker returned to banking; but two years later he rejoined the Service as an administrative officer specialising in public relations. In December 1948 he moved to RAF Headquarters in Germany and was later based at Lubeck airfield to cover the Berlin Airlift. After two years broadcasting with the British Forces Network, Hamburg, he left Germany in 1952 for the Air Ministry; for two years he prepared official war records at the Air Historical Branch. He later saw service in the Persian Gulf and Aden on intelligence and PR duties.

By the time he retired from the RAF as a flight lieutenant in April 1961, Barker had already begun to establish himself as a serious author on RAF subjects. His first book, published in 1955, was Down in the Drink; this was followed by The Ship Busters (1957), an authoritative work in which he drew on his own experience of wartime operations. A succession of aviation books followed, among them The Schneider Trophy and Torpedo Bomber.

Barker's other great passion was cricket. An accomplished player himself, he turned out regularly for the RAF's Adastrians team, and for a number of years he captained West Surrey. His first book about cricket, Ten Great Innings, came out in 1964 and was followed three years later by Ten Great Bowlers. Reviewing the second of these, the broadcaster John Arlott described Barker as "a master of the reconstruction of past cricket matches".

Barker's most substantial book on the game is a history of the Test matches between England and Australia, published in 1969. It includes a report of every match and a summary of every Ashes series. He later wrote a further three books on cricket.

At the same time, Barker continued to write about aviation, and in 1982 turned his attention to the exploits of the Royal Flying Corps during the Great War, producing four books on the subject which are regarded as some of the most important reference works for that period of the RAF's history. His last book, Men of the Bombers, about the Second World War, came out in 2005.

Ralph Barker, who died on May 16, married, in 1947, Joan Harris. She died in 1993, and two years later he married Diana Darvey, who also predeceased him. He is survived by a daughter of his first marriage.

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Jun 26, 2011)

Air Commodore *Peter Cribb* 

Air Commodore Peter Cribb, who has died aged 92, was one of the most successful and gallant master bombers of the Pathfinder Force; he flew more than 100 wartime operations, including one when he made an unauthorised raid on Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden. 
Cribb was already a veteran of more than 70 missions when he returned to operations in May 1944 to fly the Lancaster. He attacked targets in the run-up to D-Day, often acting as the master bomber directing the main force against rail yards and gun emplacements. 
In July he was put in command of the newly-formed No 582 Squadron and flew 16 daylight sorties in support of the Normandy landings. On July 18 he was the deputy master bomber when more than 1,000 aircraft pulverised the German panzer divisions in front of Montgomery’s stalled army at Caen.
Cribb also controlled more than 700 bombers which attacked the V-1 sites before the bombing campaign resumed its efforts against major oil targets in Germany.
On October 3 he was master bomber for the attack on the sea walls of Walcheren Island. Coastal gun batteries dominated the approaches to the important port of Antwerp; the aim was to breach the walls and flood the island, most of which was reclaimed polder below sea level.
As the first to arrive at the head of 252 Lancasters, he orbited the target and directed eight separate waves of bombers, correcting the aiming point with flares and markers to widen the initial breach. The sea poured in, forcing the German defenders to abandon their carefully prepared positions. Cribb was the last to leave the target after a brilliantly controlled attack, which allowed Canadian ground forces to capture the island and open Antwerp to the Allies. Newspapers hailed the achievement with the headline “RAF sinks an island”.
On promotion to group captain at the age of 25, Cribb was appointed to command the Pathfinder airfield at Little Staughton in Bedfordshire, and shortly afterwards he was awarded a Bar to an earlier DSO. Frustrated at being desk-bound, he flew unofficially on a number of operations. On April 24 1945 he learned that a force of Lancasters was to bomb Hitler’s Bavarian retreat at Berchtesgaden, but the Lancaster squadron on his airfield was stood down.
Determined not to miss this final attempt to eliminate Hitler, Cribb commandeered a Lancaster and some bombs and made up a crew from the senior executives on his station. He took off at dawn, catching up with the main force as it was approaching the target. He dropped his bombs and obtained an excellent aiming point photograph.
Anxious to get back to Britain before anyone realised what he had had been up to , Cribb returned on a direct route at top speed — but to no avail. Air Vice-Marshal Donald Bennett, head of the Pathfinder Force, had tried to contact him and his deputy, only to be told that they were airborne on “a 10-hour navigation exercise”. It was said that, when he learned the truth, Bennett “hit the roof”.
The son of a wool merchant, Peter Henry Cribb was born in the Yorkshire Dales on September 28 1918 and educated at Prince Henry Grammar School, Otley, before gaining a cadetship to the RAF College, Cranwell, where he trained as a pilot.
Cribb joined No 58 Squadron to fly the Whitley bomber, and on the outbreak of war flew convoy patrols before the squadron reverted to the bombing role. He was involved in attacks on German-occupied airfields in Norway and Denmark.
Following the German blitz into the Low Countries, he bombed road and rail systems being used to transport reinforcements, and during a hectic period in June he flew numerous sorties in support of the British Expeditionary Force. After completing 25 operations he was rested.
In December 1941 Cribb was promoted to squadron leader and joined the RAF’s first Halifax squadron, No 35, as a flight commander. He attacked major industrial targets in Germany before turning his attention to the German battleship Tirpitz, which was at anchor in a fjord near Trondheim.
Bad weather and a smoke screen severely hampered the low-level attack and the force returned the following day. As he approached in poor visibility, Cribb’s Halifax hit the sea and the tail wheel was ripped off. After he had landed the intelligence officer asked him at what height he had delivered his attack. Cribb replied: “I don’t know. The altimeter reads in feet, not fathoms.”
Cribb flew on the first “Thousand Bomber” raid, against Cologne on the night of May 30 1942, and on the attacks on Essen and Bremen that followed. Shortly afterwards he was awarded a DFC.
No 35 became one of the founder squadrons of the Pathfinders, and Cribb — who was rated an “exceptional” pilot — flew on the first raid mounted by the new force when he attacked Flensburg on the night of August 18/19 1942. He went on to attack the heavily defended targets in the Ruhr, often returning with his Halifax damaged by enemy gunfire. By January 1943 he had completed 60 operations and was awarded his first DSO .
During this period he shared a bleak Nissen hut with his Canadian colleague, “Shady” Lane. The winter of 1942-43 was especially cold, and both men were anxious to avoid being the last into bed, and thus responsible for switching out the lights. Eventually Cribb circumvented this problem by shooting them out instead with his .38 revolver. Due to the cold and an alcoholic haze, he frequently missed. In the morning his batman would wake him with a cup of tea and inquire: “Shall I reload, sir?”
Cribb was given command of the Bomber Development Unit, working closely with the eminent scientist RV Jones to develop new bombing, navigation and electronic countermeasure aids. He frequently flew on operations unofficially to test new equipment and tactics. In May 1944 he returned to the Pathfinder Force to start a third tour of operations.
In May 1945 he left for Ceylon, from where he flew Liberators on mercy missions to drop food and medical supplies to the PoW camps spread across the Far East. He served in India and commanded the airbase at Peshawar during the difficult period of Indian Partition.
After a period with Coastal Command and at the Air Ministry, on technical intelligence duties, he served at HQ Bomber Command, responsible for operational plans and policy at a time when the V-bombers were entering service. He was appointed CBE.
In 1957 Cribb was sent to Germany, where he commanded three fighter stations and took every opportunity to fly the Meteor and Hunter fighters. In 1961, on promotion to air commodore, he served in Aden as the senior air staff officer, having responsibility for operations in the Radfan and along the Yemen border.
Two years at the MoD left him disillusioned with the Wilson government’s defence cuts, and disdainful of “the ponderous bureaucratic existence in Whitehall”. Accordingly, he resigned in 1967.
Cribb moved with his family to Western Australia, where he was manager of one of the state’s first giant iron ore mines before starting his own business in Perth. He was active as a Rotarian, magistrate and charity worker.
A keen sportsman in his youth, Cribb played rugby for the Yorkshire Wanderers, once breaking his nose during a warm-up match against the All Blacks. In later life he was a blue-water yachtsman and game fisherman. A modest man, he never spoke of his wartime experiences unless pressed to do so and then only to relate the episodes he had found amusing.
Peter Cribb died on June 20. He married, in 1949, Vivienne Perry, who survives him with their three sons.

Source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Jun 26, 2011)




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## vikingBerserker (Jun 26, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Jun 27, 2011)




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## Wayne Little (Jun 27, 2011)




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## Njaco (Jun 27, 2011)

To all....


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## v2 (Jul 8, 2011)

Wing Commander *John Beazley * 

Wing Commander John Beazley, who has died aged 94, was a Battle of Britain fighter pilot and saw almost continuous action during the Second World War. 
Beazley joined No 249 Squadron on its formation in May 1940 to fly Hurricanes. On July 8 he shared in the destruction of an enemy bomber over Yorkshire before the squadron moved to join the main Battle in the south of England. There the action was ceaseless, with pilots sometimes flying four sorties a day. 

On September 2 Beazley probably destroyed a Messerschmitt fighter but was attacked in turn; his Hurricane burst into flames. Beazley bailed out and landed safely near Gillingham – despite being fired on by the local battery. He was soon back in action, and four days later shared in the destruction of another enemy fighter. 

On the 15th he accounted for a Dornier bomber and two days later he shared in the destruction of a Junkers 88. During the hectic and confused fighting at the height of the Battle, it is probable that he also contributed to the destruction of other enemy aircraft. 

On September 27, when attacking a Messerschmitt Bf 110, Beazley was badly wounded in the foot but managed to nurse his aircraft back to North Weald. It was his last contribution in the Battle. 

The son of His Honour Sir Hugh Beazley, Hugh John Sherard Beazley was born on July 18 1916. He was educated at Cheltenham College and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he read History, began flying with the University Air Squadron, and played rugby for Richmond. 

He was called up on the outbreak of war and completed his training as a pilot before joining No 249 Squadron. After being wounded, he spent five months in hospital before rejoining the squadron in March 1941 in time to sail for Malta on the carrier Ark Royal. Despite having an unserviceable air speed indicator, Beazley, along with the rest of the squadron, was launched from the ship on May 21, arriving at Ta' Qali in Malta after a dangerous three-hour flight. 

The effort of defending Malta from incessant German and Italian air attack, making offensive forays to support the Navy, and attacking enemy bases and supply lines in Sicily, was relentless. Those pilots who had also flown in the Battle of Britain considered the fighting over Malta to be at least as intense and dangerous, perhaps more so. 

Beazley damaged an Italian bomber, a Messerschmitt Bf 109 and, on an intruder mission over Sicily, destroyed a train. On January 19 1942 his Hurricane was hit by ground fire during an attack on the Italian airfield at Comiso and he was forced to crash land on his return to Malta. A month later he probably destroyed a German Junkers 88. After the loss of the squadron commander in December, Beazley was made 249's commanding officer but, in February 1942, after 10 months of continuous action and 215 combat sorties over Malta, he was rested. 

After serving on Air Marshal Tedder's staff, Beazley returned to operations in December 1942, flying the twin-engined Beaufighter. He was posted to No 89 Squadron in North Africa before, in October 1943, travelling with it to join the fighting in South East Asia. In March 1944 he was awarded a DFC for "displaying the highest standard of courage and leadership" and appointed to command the operational airfield at Minneriya in Ceylon. 

In the final stages of the war Beazley was offered further promotion, but since this meant he would have to stop flying, he transferred to Transport Command and flew Dakotas in Europe, the Middle and Far East until 1946, when he left the RAF. 

He joined the Colonial Office and was posted to Nigeria, where he worked for 10 years, rising to become a Senior Resident. Beazley loved Nigeria and its people and remained lifelong friends with his Nigerian colleague, Chief Simeon Adebo – later Nigeria's permanent representative at the UN. After Independence, he took articles as a chartered accountant, qualifying in 1960. Thereafter he joined the BET group, where he worked as a finance director until his retirement in 1981. 

In Hertfordshire, where the Beazley family has lived for five generations, he was an important supporter of the Conservative Party, serving as a councillor and then as chairman of Hoddesdon district council. He was also president of the Broxbourne Conservative Association, returning an MP to Parliament on successive occasions. 

He was a trustee and treasurer of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust, playing a major role in establishing a permanent memorial to "The Few" at Capel-Le-Ferne on the white cliffs near Dover, a place of deep significance to pilots. 

A keen golfer, sailor and fisherman, his great passion was his adopted county of Cornwall, the home of his wife. Nothing gave him more pleasure than walking and maintaining the family land at Clerkenwater near Bodmin. 

He was unfailingly polite and helpful to those historians and aficionados of the Battle who visited him in his later years, trying to piece together his log book with those against whom he fought. 

A modest man, he always denied that he had been brave, insisting that on the whole he had been frightened. Despite retaining fond memories of the enormous generosity of the local people in Malta, he refused to return to the island after the war, saying that it had been a terrifying time and that he had lost too many friends there. 

When pressed by one visitor, who pointed out that he had accumulated a great number of medals, he paused and replied: "Well, it was rather a long war." 

John Beazley died on June 13. He married, in 1947, Mary Rawlings, daughter of Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings; she survives him with their two sons and one daughter. 

source: The Telegraph.


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## v2 (Jul 8, 2011)

Squadron Leader *George Glenn* 

Squadron Leader George Glenn, who has died aged 90, made a daring solo attack on the German battlecruiser Gneisenau, which earned him an immediate DFC, before completing another 51 operations with the RAF’s Pathfinder Force, for which he was awarded a second DFC. 
Glenn was coming to the end of his tour with No 144 Squadron, flying the outdated twin-engined Hampden bomber, when, at dawn on Christmas Eve 1941, the squadron was asked for three aircraft to attack the Gneisenau, berthed at Brest. 

The three crews were to make a daylight attack, and Glenn and his crew were one of those selected by the tossing of a coin. The aircraft were due to rendezvous at Start Point, Devon, but Glenn arrived five minutes late and, after waiting for 20 minutes, decided to press on, thinking he was behind the other two. He was not aware that his aircraft’s radio was unserviceable, so he and his crew failed to receive the general recall and they pressed on alone. 

Glenn flew at 600ft across the English Channel in poor weather. As he approached the target and descended through a patch of cloud, the starboard wing of his bomber hit the cable of a tethered balloon; the aircraft swerved violently and Glenn only just managed to retain control before heading for the target to drop his 2,000lb armour-piercing bomb. The anti-aircraft fire was extremely fierce and accurate, and the tailplane of his Hampden was badly damaged, making the aircraft almost uncontrollable. 

Glenn managed to get back to England, making an emergency landing on an airfield in Cornwall. The crew were collected by another aircraft and returned to their airfield, where the station commander insisted that they attend the Christmas party. A few days later he and his navigator were awarded DFCs . 

The son of Lieutenant-Colonel HW Glenn, a veteran of the Boer and First World Wars, George Hugh Wesley Glenn was born on October 19 1920 at Paignton, Devon. He left Newton College when he was 16 to become an apprentice with the Ellerman Hall shipping line and spent the next three years travelling the world. 
He volunteered for service in the RAF in 1939 and trained as a pilot before joining No 144 Squadron. During the summer of 1941 he flew more than 20 bombing operations against targets in Germany and also completed a number of sorties dropping mines in the Kattegat and off the Frisian Islands. 

After a rest period as a flying instructor, Glenn returned to operations in the Mosquitos of No 139 Squadron as part of the Pathfinder Force. He flew more than 50 bombing operations to the most heavily defended targets in Germany, including 21 to Berlin. On more than one occasion he flew his aircraft back to England from deep over enemy territory when one engine had failed due to enemy fire. 

Glenn remained in the RAF postwar and flew Mosquito photographic reconnaissance aircraft with No 13 Squadron in Egypt’s Canal Zone. He spent 12 years instructing student pilots and was the adjutant of Edinburgh University Air Squadron. He served as the senior administration officer at the RAF’s Initial Officer Training Wing for his last two years of service. 

Glenn was a passionate sailor and, after his retirement from the RAF in October 1963, all his activities revolved around this interest. He first established Westcoaster Yacht Charters on the River Dart, but after four years was offered the job of assistant harbour master for the upper reaches of the tidal River Dart. Subsequently he became harbour master. 

When the Dartmouth Harbour Commission amalgamated with the River Dart Navigation Commission, Glenn was offered the job of chief administrator, which involved a full-time office job at Dartmouth. This he endured for a couple of years until he resigned to start the Wyvern Sailing School with a six-ton yacht he had inherited, and three dinghies. 

He owned a number of yachts, including the 28ft gaff ketch Girl Eva and (his favourite) the nine-ton Gauntlet class 32ft Miranda of Lleyn. He was a member of the Royal Cruising Club for more than 10 years and, in later years, co-founded the Blandford Mariners Club. He also enjoyed model yacht building. 

Tired of the English weather, in 1983 he sailed his 24ft Felicity Al to Paphos in Cyprus, where he was joined by his wife. They spent three happy years on the island before, in 1986, moving to the Vendée region of France, where they renovated an old farmhouse. His wife died six years later and Glenn returned with his dogs to live in Dorset, where he was closer to his son, David Glenn, the editor of Yachting World. 

George Glenn died on May 30. He married, in 1948, Elaine Smith, who was then serving with the Princess Mary’s RAF Nursing Service, and is survived by their son and daughter.


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## Gnomey (Jul 8, 2011)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jul 8, 2011)




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## vikingBerserker (Jul 9, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Jul 9, 2011)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 10, 2011)




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## v2 (Jul 15, 2011)

Group Captain *Gerry Blacklock * 

Group Captain Gerry Blacklock who has died aged 96, joined the RAF just 13 years after its formation, and enjoyed a distinguished career as a founder member of the RAF's first squadron of four-engine heavy bombers. 
On completion of a tour of operations on the Wellington in July 1940, Blacklock joined three other pilots at Boscombe Down to form the Stirling Development Flight. Once they had become used to flying the ungainly aircraft, the small team left for an airfield in Yorkshire as the nucleus of No 7 Squadron, as it was re-equipping with the Stirling. 
On February 10 1941 three of the bombers took off to attack oil storage tanks at Rotterdam, the RAF's first bombing operation in the Second World War by a four-engine bomber. Blacklock flew as a second pilot, but all his subsequent operations were as a captain. 
He bombed Berlin on the night of April 9, but most of No 7 Squadron's operations during this period were in daylight, sometimes with a fighter escort but on other occasions relying on cloud cover to mask their outbound route. 
On June 28 three Stirlings took off for a daylight attack on Bremen. One soon turned back, but Blacklock and his flight commander pressed on despite the lack of cloud. As they approached the target, they were attacked by nine enemy fighters. Blacklock skilfully manoeuvred his aircraft to allow his gunners to engage the enemy; at least one was shot down, and probably a second.
On the return flight, he realised that the second Stirling had been severely damaged and he turned back to escort it. Eventually the crippled aircraft was forced to ditch near the Frisian Islands, and, despite the threat of more enemy fighters appearing on the scene, Blacklock orbited the spot for 10 minutes looking for survivors. The Stirling had, however, disappeared along with its crew. Blacklock was awarded an immediate DFC. 
On July 23 there was a report that the battlecruiser Scharnhorst had left Brest for La Pallice, and three Stirlings – flown by the three original pilots to join No 7 Squadron – were sent to attack with armour-piercing bombs. 
They encountered heavy flak and were attacked by fighters, forcing an escape at very low level. This was the last daylight raid by the Stirlings, and Blacklock completed his tour of operations at night attacking industrial centres in the Ruhr. On August 28, after his last operation to Duisburg, he was rested, having completed two full tours. 
Graham Baptie Blacklock, always known as Gerry, was born on June 23 1914 near Skipton, Yorkshire, and educated at Queen Mary's Royal Grammar School, Clitheroe. In 1931 he joined the RAF as an aircraft apprentice (affectionately known as "Trenchard Brats") and trained as a metal rigger. 
After service in England and at the RAF's aircraft depot at Aboukir, near Alexandria, he volunteered for pilot training during the rapid expansion of the Service prior to the Second World War. He was posted to No 99 Squadron to fly the Heyford, an biplane bomber he described as "a mechanical praying mantis". In 1938 it was replaced by the Wellington, and on the outbreak of war the squadron moved to the Rowley Mile on Newmarket racecourse. 
Operations during the "Phoney War" were limited, but an attack on December 14 1939 met with disaster when six of the 12 Wellingtons were shot down. Blacklock, however, returned safely. He continued to fly North Sea sweeps and also dropped leaflets on German cities. After the German invasion of Norway he attacked Stavanger airfield, and on May 10 bombed the recently captured airfield at Rotterdam. On May 23 his squadron was diverted to support the retreating British Expeditionary Force, before attacks were resumed against oil targets in Germany. At the end of his tour he was awarded a DFM. 
After completing his time on the Stirling, Blacklock, as an ex-aircraft apprentice, was well-qualified to establish the formal training of a new aircrew category, the flight engineer. For the remainder of the war he filled numerous technical training appointments. 
After the war he was an instructor on bombers before being appointed to the Far East to survey potential staging posts on the Indian Ocean islands of Gan, Diego Garcia and Christmas Island. At the works and finance branch of the Air Ministry in 1956, he helped to relocate RAF forces from Egypt to Cyprus. In October 1958 he conducted a survey of Ascension Island. 
On promotion to group captain, Blacklock commanded the RAF airfield at Hullavington, where the RAF's air electronic officers were trained. He took retirement in 1961.
In addition to his gallantry awards, Blacklock was appointed OBE in 1953. 
He was financial secretary at the Institute of Metallurgy in London before taking up a similar appointment with a quantity surveyor in Essex. 
Gerry Blacklock died on April 28. He married, in 1941, Joan Coleman, who died in 1997. In 1999 he married his second wife, Margaret, who survives him with three sons of his first marriage and a stepson. 

source: The Telegraph.


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## v2 (Jul 15, 2011)

Polish World War II battle hero *Aleksy Kowalik *dies at 96. 

Aleksy Kowalik, one of the three surviving heroes of Poland's first World War II battle has died. He was 96.

Kowalik's daughter Jadwiga Bucz told Polish news agency PAP that her father died on Sunday in the southern city of Blachownia, where the family has lived for over 60 years.

Kowalik was among the 205 Polish troops guarding the navy's arsenal on Westerplatte peninsula, on the Baltic coast, who on Sept. 1, 1939 put up an uneven fight against German warship Schleswig-Holstein. Kowalik operated an anti-tank gun and was wounded.

Cut away from munitions and food supplies, they resisted for seven days in what was Poland's first battle of the five-year war. When they eventually surrendered, their clout prompted the German troops to salute them, when taking them prisoner.

As a POW, Kowalik worked on German farms.

He returned to Poland in 1947, got married and settled in Blachownia. He had four daughters.


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## Wayne Little (Jul 15, 2011)




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## Gnomey (Jul 15, 2011)




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## v2 (Jul 25, 2011)

Major *Werner Hoffmann *of NJG 3, died on 8th July aged 93. 

He was awarded the Knight's Cross and recommended for the Oak Leaves, however, the war came to an end before it could become official.

more: Aces of the Luftwaffe - Werner Hoffmann


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jul 25, 2011)




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## v2 (Jul 25, 2011)

Squadron Leader (Major) *Boleslaw "Mike" Gladych*- last polish fighter ace- passed away. 

Boleslaw Gladych was one of the few who flew for four air forces--the Polish, French, British and US--during WWII. Born in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland, Gladych shaved eight years off his age in order to gain entrance to the military preparatory school. In 1937, he was accepted into the Polish Air Force Academy in Deblin where he graduated summa *** laude, receiving his commission and wings on the first day of WWII. Gladych defended Poland from the air before fleeing to Romania where the Nazis jailed him. After escaping to France, he joined a Polish unit Groupe de Chasse I./145 flying Caudron Cr-714 Cyclone fighters. 

In June 1940, he was engaged in a dramatic duel with a ME-109. During the dogfight, the German managed to severely damage Gladych's plane. The pilot of the ME-109 (call-code 13) realized Gladych's hopeless situation, waved his wings and disengaged. Later, following the French surrender, Gladych escaped to Britain and joined the Royal Air Force No. 303 Squadron. On 23 June 1941 while flying a RAF Supermarine Spitfire Mk V, he was credited with four victories over ME-109s and one probable when he rammed his last opponent. This collision and subsequent crash left Gladych severely injured. 

In 1943 after scoring a victory over a Focke-Wulfe 190, he was damaged by another FW-190 (call-code 13) that flew close aboard, waved his wings and disengaged. About that time, Gladych met Major Francis "Gabby" Gabreski, commander of the 61st Fighter Squadron, who offered him flights in the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. Gladych finagled a leavethe of absence from the RAF and soon was training American replacement pilots. On 8 March 1944, while escorting bombers to Berlin, Gladych engaged three FW-190s, which earned him the USAAF Silver Star. Low on fuel, he attempted to disengage after earning one victory, but the other two fighters boxed him in and ordered him to land. 

As he approached the German airfield configured for landing, Gladych suddenly opened fire on the airfield with his remaining ammunition. German flak gunners responded, but missed Gladych and shot down the two FW-190s, one of which was marked call-code 13. Gladych met call-code 13 after the war and confirmed their engagements. While flying with the 56th Fighter Group, Gladych was credited with 10 aerial victories. Due to his successes in WWII, he was awarded the Polish Virtuti Militari (U.S. Medal of Honor equivalent), three Crosses of Valor, Croix de Guarre, Silver Star, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, and 11 Air Medals. After WWII, he immigrated to the U.S., returned to school, and became a licensed psychotherapist. Gladych passed away on the morning of July 12, 2011.


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jul 25, 2011)




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## Gnomey (Jul 25, 2011)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jul 25, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Jul 25, 2011)




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## rochie (Jul 26, 2011)

.


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## vikingBerserker (Jul 26, 2011)




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## v2 (Jul 27, 2011)

Lt-Cdr *Bill Henley * 

Lieutenant-Commander Bill Henley, who has died aged 88, was one of the few pilots whose war career spanned the age of the biplane and the jet; on one occasion he hunted down and destroyed a German U-boat. 
In the early hours of December 13 1944, Henley was flying Swordfish L of 813 Naval Air Squadron from the carrier Campania, part of the escort for convoy RA-62 from Murmansk to Loch Ewe. Oberleutnant zur See Diether Todenhagen in U-365 had already attacked the destroyer Cassandra and blown off her bows, but in disclosing his presence had initiated a long search. 
Henley and his observer, Lt David Chapman, continued their hunt despite the failure of Swordfish L's radar. Under the radar control of a second aircraft, Swordfish Q, piloted by Lieutenant WJL Hutchinson, Henley carried out a textbook attack. By the light of his flares, Henley saw U-365 running on the surface and immediately dived to attack. He straddled the boat with three depth charges, one of which bounced off the casing before sinking to explode underneath the U-boat. More flares showed an oily patch of water strewn with flotsam and what Henley thought was the upturned hull of his enemy. Postwar analysis showed that U-365 was lost with all hands. Henley and Hutchinson were awarded DSCs. 
Maurice William Henley was born in London on March 25 1923 and educated at the John Roan School, Greenwich. He started work at the National Provincial Bank, and aged 18 enlisted in the Royal Navy as a naval airman 2nd class. He learned to fly in Canada. 
Postwar Henley was seconded to the Royal Australian Navy, to help build up its air arm, and flew in an exchange appointment with the US Marine Corps at Cherry Point, North Carolina. 
In the early 1950s he flew the de Havilland Sea Hornet (a development of the RAF's wartime Mosquito) in 809 Naval Air Squadron, which specialised in night operations, and he commanded 809 NAS in its last months in 1954. 
In 1956-57 he commanded 893 NAS of Sea Venom fighter jets in the carrier Eagle. His marriage, planned for August 1956 in London, was postponed due to the Suez crisis, when his squadron was sent to the Mediterranean. 
The ceremony took place instead in Gibraltar, while the carrier was under maintenance, and Henley was on honeymoon in Spain when he heard that tension over Suez had erupted. He hired a car and hurried back to Gibraltar to pick up an aircraft that had been left behind for him, and caught up with Eagle, which was steaming towards Egypt.
His squadron carried out strafing and rocket attacks during the invasion of Suez, destroying many aircraft on the ground, and Henley was awarded a bar to his DSC. 
Henley retired in 1968, when in order to continue flying he joined Loganair ("Teeny-weeny airlines", he called it), eventually becoming chief training captain for 70 pilots. 
Flying between Glasgow and the Highlands and the Western Isles, he opened several new routes, including to Barra, where he pioneered a scheduled service which used the beach at low tide for a landing field. When he flew newspapers to Stornoway, he called himself "the best-paid paper boy in the business". 
He also helped to develop the air ambulance service in Scotland, and during his hours on standby he studied for a master's degree in Geography and Geology from the Open University. 
Once he flew to Benbecula to collect a pregnant mother. Doubting whether the air ambulance's nurse was fully qualified in midwifery, Henley included among his passengers a nun from the island, who duly helped (at 7,500ft over Mull) to deliver Vanessa Margaret MacAskill. 
He was chairman of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society's Glasgow branch, and he supported both the Scottish and the Glasgow Chamber Orchestras. He had a lifelong interest in railway timetables. 
Bill Henley, who died on June 11, married Hazel Wright in 1956; she survives him with their daughter and two sons.

source: The Telegraph.


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## Wayne Little (Jul 27, 2011)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jul 27, 2011)




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## Gnomey (Jul 27, 2011)




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## rochie (Jul 27, 2011)

.


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## vikingBerserker (Jul 27, 2011)




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## wheelsup_cavu (Jul 30, 2011)

Wheels


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## RabidAlien (Jul 30, 2011)




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## v2 (Aug 21, 2011)

Warrant Officer *Tom McLean* 

Warrant Officer Tom McLean, who has died aged 89, was one of Bomber Command’s outstanding air gunners, credited with destroying at least seven enemy fighters, and was twice decorated for gallantry. 
During an attack on Mannheim on the night of December 6 1942, McLean was the rear gunner of a Halifax of No 102 Squadron. A Junkers Ju 88 night fighter opened fire on his aircraft from 600 yards, wounding McLean in the left hand. With the mid-upper gunner, he returned fire and, after a five-second burst, the port engine and wing of the fighter burst into flames and it dived earthward. 
Almost immediately, two more fighters moved in for a coordinated attack. Both gunners opened fire again, destroying one of the enemy aircraft and forcing the other to break away. The Halifax pressed on to the target to deliver its attack, and on its return both gunners were awarded immediate DFMs. 
Thomas Joseph McLean was born on January 22 1922 at Paisley, and aged 18 he joined the RAF and trained as a ground gunner; his knowledge of machine guns proved of great benefit when he volunteered for the air gunner’s role. 
He took a deep interest in accurate sighting, range estimation and deflection shooting and throughout his long career worked closely with the pilots and gunners in his crew to devise evasion tactics, which they practised assiduously on training flights. This attention to detail resulted in numerous successes in air-to-air engagements. 
On his first operational sortie with No 102, in August 1942, McLean shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 109 . Two months after the raid on Mannheim, his aircraft was returning from Lorient when it came under attack from two night fighters. The pilot began evasive manoeuvres under the direction of McLean, who then shot down one of the enemy, claiming the second as a “probable”. Intelligence later received from France confirmed that the second aircraft had been destroyed. 
After completing 30 operations McLean was rested and spent some months as an instructor before joining a Coastal Command air-sea rescue squadron. But, frustrated at the lack of action, he volunteered to join No 617 Squadron, under Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire. 
On March 15 1944 McLean’s Lancaster was returning from Metz in France when it came under sustained attack from two night fighters. McLean was wounded but he opened fire and the enemy aircraft burst into flames under the combined fire of the two gunners. The second aircraft then closed in and the Lancaster was badly damaged . McLean’s fire hit the night fighter, which also crashed to the ground. The tracer fire during these combats attracted a Messerschmitt Bf 109, but the two gunners beat off the attack. 
After a spell in hospital, McLean returned to his squadron and flew on the operations leading up to D-Day. Finally, after completing 51 operations, he was rested and awarded a DFC. 
McLean briefly tried civilian life at the end of the war, but in 1946 decided to rejoin the RAF. He served as an instructor at the Central Gunnery School before re-mustering as a photographic interpreter and serving at Ballykelly in Northern Ireland. 
In 1955 he retired and worked for a number of years as a barber before moving to Middlesbrough, where he undertook caretaker duties, continuing to work until the age of 80. 
He was an accomplished landscape and seascape artist and a keen photographer. In his younger days he had been a proficient boxer, representing the RAF at the sport. 
Tom McLean died on July 20. After his first marriage was dissolved, he married, in 1981, Kay Thompson. He is survived by both his wives, four children from his first marriage, a daughter from his second and by two stepchildren. 

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Aug 21, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Aug 21, 2011)




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## v2 (Aug 30, 2011)

Group Captain *Billy Drake*

Group Captain Billy Drake, who died on August 28 aged 93, was one of the leading Allied “aces” of the Second World War. 
Five days after the outbreak of war, Drake and his colleagues of No 1 Squadron flew their Hurricanes to a French airfield to provide support for the British Expeditionary Force. Throughout the bitter winter of the “Phoney War” there was little action, but on April 19 1940 Drake met the enemy for the first time. His formation attacked a flight of Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters and, in the ensuing melee, Drake claimed one, the first of many successes. 
When the Blitzkreig was launched on May 10, No 1 Squadron was thrown straight into battle, its Hurricanes trying to provide support for RAF bombers that were suffering terrible losses. In three days, Drake, always a highly aggressive pilot, shot down three Dornier 17s and shared in the destruction of another. 
Three days later he had just succeeded in setting a Dornier on fire when he was attacked from the rear; despite being wounded in the back, he managed to bail out of his blazing Hurricane. After a spell in a French hospital he returned to England to be reunited with the survivors of his squadron. He admitted that the situation on the French front was “total chaos”. 
Drake spent much of the Battle of Britain training fighter pilots but, after badgering old friends, he was allowed to join No 213 Squadron, flying out of Tangmere. On October 10 he probably shot down a Bf 109 before heading to Gravesend to join a reconnaissance flight whose job was to fly over the English Channel looking for incoming German raids. Flying a Spitfire, he shared in the destruction of a bomber and damaged a number of others. In December he was awarded a DFC. 
Drake joined No 1 Squadron and flew the elegant Fury biplane fighter. In late 1938 the squadron received Hurricanes, and nine months later it arrived in France. 
In October 1941 Drake left for Freetown, Sierra Leone, as a squadron leader to command No 128 Squadron and to provide defence for the nearby naval facilities. Vichy French bombers occasionally strayed into the airspace, and on December 13 he intercepted one which refused his orders to land; with some regret he shot it down. 
Life in Sierra Leone was too quiet for the restless Drake, and his efforts to see more action paid off at the end of March 1942 when he left to join a Kittyhawk fighter bomber squadron in the Western Desert. Two months later he was given command of No 112 (Shark) Squadron, and so began a period of intense action during which Drake accounted for more than 30 enemy aircraft, 15 of them during strafing attacks against enemy landing grounds. 
On June 6 he was leading his squadron on a bombing attack over Bir Hacheim in support of the Free French. Spotting four Bf 109s, he dived on them; all four were shot down, one of them by Drake. The French commander signalled “Bravo! Merci pour le RAF!” to which the RAF commander responded: “Merci pour le sport!” 
The son of an English doctor who had married an Australian, Billy Drake (a direct descendant of Sir Francis Drake) was born on December 20 1917. After attending a number of schools that failed to cope with his lively temperament, he was sent to be educated in Switzerland — a country he came to love greatly, not least for the opportunities it gave him for skiing. On seeing an advertisement in Aeroplane magazine, he joined the RAF just before his 18th birthday and was commissioned a few months later having qualified as a pilot. 
Over the next few weeks Drake destroyed at least five aircraft on the ground, and in mid-July he was awarded an immediate Bar to his DFC, for a raid on Gazala which “grounded the German fighter force for three days”. 
During the retreat to El Alamein, Drake was in constant action, destroying at least three more aircraft in the air and two on the ground. After a brief respite, operations gathered momentum again, and in September and early October he added to his score as he attacked enemy airfields; among his victims in the air were two Italian Macchi fighters. 
In the latter part of October, Drake claimed a German bomber and a fighter. Over the next few days he destroyed more fighters, two Stuka dive bombers and two transport aircraft on the ground. At the end of October, two months before he was rested, he was awarded a DSO. During his time in command of No 112 he had destroyed 17 aircraft in the air with two others shared, a total exceeded in North Africa only by one other pilot, the Australian-born Group Captain Clive “Killer” Caldwell. 
After six months in a staff post Drake was back on operations commanding a Spitfire Wing in Malta. Providing escort to USAAF bombers attacking Sicily, he claimed two enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground; and on July 7 he shot down an Italian fighter, his 25th and final victim in air combat (having shared in the destruction of three others). He added an American DFC to his decorations. 
After returning to England in December 1943, Drake commanded a Typhoon Wing and attacked the German V-1 sites in the Pas de Calais. With his great experience of fighter and ground attack tactics, he was sent to instruct at the RAF’s Fighter Leaders’ School. Despite being in a training appointment, he frequently absconded for a day to take part in attacks against targets in France. His operational career finally came to an end in August 1944, when he was sent to the US Command School in Kansas before returning to join the staff of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. 
Drake spent the first few years after the war in operational headquarters, first in Japan and then in Singapore, but his great love was the fighter environment. In 1949 he was posted to the Fighter Leaders’ School as a senior instructor, an appointment much to his liking and where he converted to jets. This was followed by his appointment as wing commander at Linton-on-Ouse near York, where he commanded three Meteor fighter squadrons. 
In 1956 Drake became the Controller of Fighter Command’s Eastern Sector. But he still found time to persuade colleagues to allow him to fly their fighters two or three times a month. Two years later he left to be the air attaché in Berne, Switzerland, spending the next three years in the country, a period he enjoyed greatly. 
Returning to England in 1962, Drake took command of the RAF’s fighter training base at Chivenor in Devon, where he flew the Hunter. A dedicated fighter pilot who had little interest in administration and staff work, he recognised that his flying days would soon be over. He thus decided to retire, leaving the RAF in July 1963. 
Drake went to live in Portugal, at a time when the Algarve was starting to become popular as a holiday destination, and acquired several properties there. He contracted cerebral meningitis, which forced him to give up drinking (something he did not regret), but none the less established Billy’s Bar. Initially this venture was successful, but in 1993 he decided to return to England. 
Billy Drake was held in high estimation in the RAF as one of its most colourful and successful fighter pilots, and as a man who led from the front and inspired all those who flew with him. His great professionalism was accompanied by an infectious enthusiasm for life and mischievous sense of humour . 
His great passion was skiing. He captained the RAF ski team, and made annual trips to the home of one of his sons in Switzerland, taking to the slopes until he was in his early nineties. 
He was twice married (both dissolved), and is survived by two sons of his first marriage. 

source: The Telegraph


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## Njaco (Aug 30, 2011)

Wow!


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## Gnomey (Aug 30, 2011)

Indeed.


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## vikingBerserker (Aug 30, 2011)

Agreed


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## RabidAlien (Aug 30, 2011)

Quite the resume there!


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## pbfoot (Aug 31, 2011)

Duke Warren passed away, he was a pretty neat guy an identical twin who both flew Spits in 165 aqn RAF in WW2 (Gemini Flight) and Sabres in Korea , he was one of the main guys who helped convert the LW to the F86 including Galland, Hartman etc 
Warren Twins - Bruce and Douglas Warren
A decorated Spitfire pilot who served during the Second World War is being remembered as a gentleman and a role model after passing away this weekend.



Douglas (Duke) Warren, who flew a Spitfire fighter as part of No.165 Squadron at Dieppe with his twin brother Bruce — also nicknamed Duke — passed away Saturday in Comox at the age of 89.



Born in Nanton, Alta., in 1922, the Warren twins joined the Royal Canadian Air Force​ (RCAF) at the age of 18.



The twins loved aviation from an early age and in late 1940 joined the RCAF, training in Canada until proceeding to England in January 1942, according to Warren's obituary.



After advanced training, the Warren twins flew two tours of operations with Royal Air Force Spitfire squadrons, it noted.



In 1945, they were both awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses by King George VI at Buckingham Palace.



After returning to Canada in May 1945, Warren married Melba Bennett.



The Warren twins joined the permanent RCAF in October 1946.



Bruce was killed in 1951, as a test pilot for the CF-100 jet fighter.



Duke became Commanding Officer of the F-86 Sabre-equipped 410 Squadron in 1952. The following year, he was attached to the United States Air Force and flew Sabres in Korea.



He became chief flight instructor at the RCAF's Operational Training Unit at Chatham, N.B., and then served in a similar role in Germany, assisting the post-war Luftwaffe in forming their Sabre Operational Training Unit at Oldenber as part of a Chief Canadian Aid Team, says Veterans Affairs Canada.



In 1970, Warren came to CFB Comox, accepting his final posting as operations officer.



Warren served a total of 37 years with the Canadian Forces​, including his time in the RCAF Reserve.



He retired in 1973, and he volunteered in the community with various organizations for many years.



Active with Royal Canadian Legion Branch 160 in Comox, Warren served as Branch Padre for 24 years, and he served in the same capacity with 888 Wing of the Air Force Association of Canada and the Korean Veterans Association.



Retired colonel Jon Ambler first met Warren when Ambler was wing commander at 19 Wing Comox.



"His story is like so many Canadians during the Second World War," said Ambler, who is now the volunteer co-ordinator/program manager of the Comox Air Force Museum. "Kids from the Prairies joined the Air Force, became Spitfire pilots.



"What made Duke's story unique from hundreds of other Canadians was that he did it with his twin brother. I've never heard of anyone else doing this — they flew together, and when he was flying with his twin, they were naturally called the Gemini Flight."



Ambler speaks highly of Warren.



"He was one of those guys that if you asked him to come around and talk to people about being in the Air Force and his experiences, he would always come and talk to people, and he was always happy and proud of it," he said. "He was a lovely man, very engaging."



Ambler saw Warren a lot at the Comox Air Force Museum.



"He was always a very affable and chatty person," he said. "He'd come to the museum and hang out and look at pictures of the Spitfires. He was always happy to be with people. He was a gentleman.



"He was very much part of the Air Force fabric of the Valley. We'll miss him for sure."



Bud Wilds, immediate past president of 888 (Komox) RCAF Wing of the Air Force Association of Canada, knew Warren socially, as he believes Warren was a member of 888 Wing for at least 25 years.



"He was a fine gentleman who did many things for other people," he said. "He was quite involved in Legion events and the Air Force Association and doing things for cadets and children in school.



"He loved to go to schools and speak to young people, not about his exploits, but about World War Two and about why it happened and why they should go out of their way to remember it and make sure it didn't happen again."



James Francis (Stocky) Edwards, who also flew Spitfires in the Second World War, considers Warren a role model for young people.



"He was a good pilot," he said. "He was a good husband and father and a very good officer, an example to all the young people. He was always a gentleman.



"He was a good-living man, and particularly, he was an example to the young officers and young people and the cadets."



Warren received many honours in recognition of his accomplishments and his service to his country and his community.



He was recognized for his community work when he was awarded the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award in 2002.



In 2006, he was awarded the Minister of Veterans Affairs Commendation and was accorded the Freedom of the Town of Comox. Warren was also awarded the Legion of Honour by the president of France.



Warren's funeral service will be held this Friday at 2 p.m. at St. Michael and All Angels Protestant Chapel. Following the service, there will be a reception at 888 Wing at 1298 Military Row in Comox.



[email protected]


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## RabidAlien (Sep 1, 2011)




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## v2 (Sep 2, 2011)

Lieutenant-Commander *Peter Twiss* 
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Twiss, who died on August 31 aged 90, was one of Britain's foremost postwar test pilots and the first man to fly faster than 1,000mph.
At the controls of the Fairey Delta 2 (FD 2), a supersonic research aircraft, Twiss did not just creep past the post – he smashed the previous world air speed record, setting a new benchmark of 1,132mph. 
The FD 2 had been produced in response to a call from the Ministry of Supply for investigation into flight behaviour and control at transonic and supersonic speeds. The elegant craft, a modified version of which would later help in research for the Concorde project, featured a long "droop snoot" nose and razor-thin delta wings, and seemed to mark a moment of unrivalled British aeronautic superiority.
Its maiden flight, with Twiss in the cockpit, came on October 6 1954. During the next two years he made more than 110 flights, with 50 faster than the speed of sound (which is about 761mph at sea level). Fairey was certain that the aircraft could reach a four-figure speed, however, and the idea of making an official attempt on the world speed record crystallised in November 1955 when cockpit instruments suggested the FD 2 had reached Mach 1.56 (almost 1200mph). 
A month previously a new air speed record of 822mph had been set by a US Air Force pilot in a F-100 Supersabre. Certain that the FD 2 could demolish this, Twiss and Fairey decided to make their official British attempt in March 1956.
The course was laid out along the coast south of Chichester, close to the aircraft's base at Boscombe Down, near Salisbury. The height for the runs was fixed at 38,000ft, not only because this was the optimum level for performance, but also because it was likely to ensure a good condensation trail – essential for ground tracking by telescopic cameras.
All was ready by March 8, and Twiss flew eight runs over the next few days. On the final sortie, on March 10, he achieved speeds of 1,117mph and 1,147mph on the two required runs, giving a mean of 1,132mph. The USAF record had been beaten by over 300mph, and Twiss had become the first pilot to exceed 1,000mph in level flight. 
Not everyone rejoiced at this British triumph, however. Greenhouse owners across the south were agitated as the sonic boom broke glass windows. One market gardener even threatened to sue Twiss for £16,000.
Lionel Peter Twiss was born on July 23 1921 at Lindfield Sussex and educated at Sherborne School. After a brief period as a tea taster with Brooke Bond, he turned his hand to farming before joining the Fleet Air Arm in 1939.
After a few months learning seamanship as a naval airman, second class, he trained as a pilot. Initially he flew Hurricanes with the Merchant Ship Fighter Unit, an early attempt to provide convoy support. Catapulted from a merchant ship, the pilot either bailed out or ditched alongside a ship at the end of his mission. 
By early 1942 he was flying Fairey Fulmar fighters with 807 Squadron from the aircraft carrier Argus. In June he flew patrols in support of the Malta convoys during Operation Harpoon and escorted RAF fighters which were launched from the carrier to fly to Malta to reinforce the depleted air defences of the beleaguered island. During this period he shot down an Italian fighter and damaged an enemy bomber and was awarded the DSC.
Later in the year, after his squadron had converted to the Seafire (the naval derivative of the Spitfire), he was in action in support of the Operation Torch landings in Morocco and Algeria, flying from the carrier Furious. These operations brought the award of a Bar to his DSC. In March 1943 he returned to Britain and transferred to night fighters before joining the RAF's Fighter Interception Unit at Ford on the south coast. From here he flew Mosquitoes on intruder sorties over France and in the period after D-Day shot down two Junkers 88 bombers.
Late in 1944 he left for the United States to join the British Air Commission, where he had the opportunity to test naval fighters. He returned in 1945 to join No 3 Course at the Empire Test Pilots' School before a loan period with Fairey Aviation as a test pilot.
Leaving the Royal Navy as a lieutenant-commander, he remained with Fairey and advanced with the company to become, in 1954, chief test pilot. There he tested all the company's aircraft, which included the Firefly, Gannet and the Rotodyne compound-helicopter.
By its nature this was hazardous work. During the FD 2's fourteenth flight the aircraft suffered an engine failure due to fuel starvation at 30,000ft. Twiss could have ejected to safety but decided to glide back to Boscombe Down. He broke cloud at 2,500ft but had insufficient hydraulic pressure to lower the undercarriage fully. Still with the option to eject, he continued and made a successful forced landing on the nose-wheel at 170mph. He was awarded a Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. 
After the successful record flight, Twiss continued to fly the FD 2 exploring high supersonic speeds and in 1956, for his services to test flying and for breaking the world speed record, he was appointed OBE. The aircraft is now on display at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton.
In 1959 Fairey Aviation was sold to Westland Aircraft, the helicopter manufacturer, and Twiss decided to retire from test flying. He had flown over 4,500 hours in 148 different types of aircraft. In retirement he spent many hours at a more leisurely speed with the Lasham Gliding Club.
A year after leaving Fairey Aviation he joined Fairey Marine and was responsible for development and sales of the company's day-cruisers. He was a director from 1968 to 1978, then director and general manager of Hamble Point Marine until 1988.
Twiss appeared in the Bond film From Russia with Love (1963) at the helm of a Fairey Marine Speedboat and also in the film Sink the Bismark (1960), when he flew a Fairey Swordfish torpedo aircraft. His autobiography, Faster than the Sun, was published in 1963.
Peter Twiss was married five times. He is survived by two daughters and a number of step children. A daughter predeceased him. 

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Sep 2, 2011)




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## Wayne Little (Sep 3, 2011)




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## pbfoot (Sep 16, 2011)

OTTAWA — For years, Ottawa’s Donald McLarty was the last local member of a storied and exclusive club: the Canadian branch of the Royal Air Forces Escaping Society.

Its members were all Second World War airmen who had found their way home after being shot down behind enemy lines. Most of the society’s members — they once numbered more than 200 — had evaded capture, while others had escaped POW camps to reach Allied territory. McLarty, an RCAF flight lieutenant shot down over North Africa, escaped twice.

He was the last man to lay a wreath on behalf of the Escaping Society at the National Remembrance Day Ceremony in 2005. The group officially disbanded the next year, its few remaining members increasingly infirm.

Their ranks grew still thinner still last week when Donald William “Bunny” McLarty died after a long battle with melanoma. He was 89.

McLarty will be buried Wednesday in Ottawa’s National Military Cemetery. Among those in attendance will be Ray Sherk, another member of the society, and the man with whom McLarty engineered his epic escape from Nazi-occupied Italy.

“We met as POWs,” Sherk, 89, said in an interview earlier this week from his home in Toronto. “We escaped the camp together; we were recaptured together; we escaped again; we were hidden in a cave for three weeks; we survived a raid by the Germans; and we spent another six weeks climbing the mountains to get back to our lines. All of it together.”

McLarty, an RCAF pilot on loan to the British, was shot down during a low-level attack on a German air strip at El Daba, in western Egypt. It was Oct. 9, 1942, and McLarty had by then flown 199 sorties. The 20-year-old pilot needed just one more to complete his tour of duty.

“I was packed and ready to go home the day I was shot down,” he once told an interviewer.

On his approach over El Daba — he was flying a Hawker Hurricane fighter-bomber — McLarty felt ground fire slam into his plane’s engine. Oil covered his windscreen. “All I could do was fly in formation with the guy next to me,” McLarty said. “And then my tail was blown off.”

He crash landed on the German airfield, smashing into two parked Messerschmitt fighters.

Days later, he met Flight Officer Sherk in the back of a truck carrying prisoners to Benghazi, Libya. Sherk had been forced to land his plane behind enemy lines after his Spitfire engine failed.

The two men would spend the next year as roommates, first in a prison camp in the Italian port city of Bari, then in the Sulmona POW camp, east of Rome. They talked often about how to escape.

They seized the opportunity on Sept. 12, 1943, days after the Italian government announced an armistice, and two days before the Germans moved in to take prisoners north.

The two pilots fled into the Apennine Mountains without a compass or map. Nazi-occupied Italy was then flooded with POWs on the run and the Germans pursued them with brutal efficiency.

McLarty and Sherk were recaptured three days after their initial escape by a German patrol that surprised them high in the mountains. But the two escaped again later the same day when they convinced guards to let them move to a shady area next to a cliff during a rest stop.

They leaped over the edge and tumbled down the mountainside. The stunned Germans, with other prisoners to guard, did not give chase.

The two pilots moved deeper into the mountains. Near the town of Roccacasale, some shepherds hid them in a small cave and brought them food and clothing.

The Germans raided the town in search of escapees, but none of the Italians revealed Roccacasale’s secret. Two German soldiers stopped outside the cave’s entrance, concealed by vegetation, and urinated.

McLarty and Sherk continued their journey south towards the front lines of the Allied advance, sometimes working as shepherds. Six weeks after their escape, in late October 1943, they met up with the 1st Canadian Division north of Foggia. The men had walked more than 500 kilometres.

“It was a moment of high relief,” recalled Sherk. “Incredible, it was just incredible.”

Both men ended up in hospital: McLarty with malaria; Sherk with bronchitis. McLarty was later assigned duties in Canada, while Sherk went to Europe for another tour. (In March 1944, Sherk was forced to bail out over Nazi-occupied France when his Spitfire engine again failed; he evaded capture by walking over the Pyrenees to Spain.)

Back in Canada after the war, McLarty and Sherk renewed their friendship, which endured for a lifetime. “He was well-spoken and kind and generous and loyal,” Sherk says of McLarty, who spent his entire career in aviation, first as an aerial surveyor, then as a manager of several surveying companies. He was president of Ottawa’s Spartan Air Services, and later, the Canadian Association of Aerial Surveyors.

Born May 21, 1922, in Newcastle, England, McLarty was a toddler when his family moved to Argentina, where his father worked as a railway engineer. As an 18-year-old, he took a freighter to Canada to enlist in the RCAF.

During his flight training, he met the beautiful daughter of an army officer, but Hope McSloy would not agree to a commitment until after the war. McLarty returned to pursue her and they married in 1947.

The couple lived in Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, Vancouver, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Oakville and Ottawa as they raised four children: Judy, Doug, Susan and Christine.

In addition to airplanes, McLarty had great fondness for sports cars, fine wine, tailored clothes and life on Big Rideau Lake, where the family had a cottage.

He never forgot the Italian villagers who risked their lives to help him escape. The Canadian branch of the Escaping Society brought more than 200 “helpers” to visit this country, among them the heroes of Roccacasale.

Earlier this year, in February, Hope McLarty died from Alzheimer’s disease. Her husband’s melanoma, which had been kept in check for 11 years, spread quickly after her death, his daughter said.

Susan McLarty says she will remember her father as a meticulous, charming, witty, loving man devoted to his wife and children. “He never, ever let us down,” she said. “He was always there for us.”

Veterans Affairs Canada estimates that 125,000 of the one million Canadians who served in the Second World War remain alive today. Their average age is 87.


here is Crimearivers pics of the Hurricane dedicated to him by VintageWings Canada


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## Gnomey (Sep 16, 2011)




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## Wayne Little (Sep 17, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Sep 17, 2011)




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## v2 (Oct 11, 2011)

Flight Lieutenant *Wallace Cunningham* 

Flight Lieutenant Wallace Cunningham, who has died aged 94, flew Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, when he was awarded the DFC. 
Cunningham joined No 19 Squadron just before the opening phase of the Battle of Britain. The initial weeks were quiet, but by mid-August the squadron, flying from Duxford, was heavily involved in the fighting. On August 16 Cunningham destroyed a Messerschmitt Bf 110 near Clacton. 
On September 7 the Duxford Wing of three squadrons flew its first offensive patrol under the leadership of Douglas Bader. The controversial “Big Wing” took off in the late afternoon to head towards London. A large force of enemy bombers, with their fighter escort, was intercepted and Cunningham shot down a Heinkel 111 bomber over Ramsgate and damaged a second. His next success came two days later when the Big Wing scrambled in the afternoon. After attacking a bomber force, Cunningham found a stray Messerschmitt Bf 109, which he shot down. 
September 15 saw the most intensive fighting and the turning point of the Battle, with all fighter squadrons in the south of England scrambled. Cunningham shared in the destruction of a Bf 110 and destroyed a second fighter over the Thames Estuary. Before the battle was over at the end of October, he shared in the destruction of two more enemy aircraft. In October he was awarded the DFC for “great personal gallantry and splendid skill in action”. 
Wallace Cunningham, known as Jock during his time in the RAF, was born in Glasgow on December 4 1916. He studied Engineering part-time at the Royal Technical College (later to become the University of Strathclyde) and joined the RAFVR in 1938, learning to fly at Prestwick. When war was declared he was commissioned.
After the Battle of Britain, Cunningham remained with No 19 as a flight commander. In July 1941 he damaged a Bf 109 but on August 28, while escorting a force of Blenheim bombers, he was shot down by flak near Rotterdam and taken prisoner. 
Cunningham was initially sent to Oflag XC at Lubeck before joining a large RAF contingent at Oflag VIB at Warburg. He was soon involved in escape activities. The tunnelling fraternity he joined was almost ready to break out when its efforts were discovered. Within weeks he was on the digging team of another tunnel and was one of 35 PoWs selected for the escape. But when the tunnel broke the surface on April 18 1942 it was well short of the intended spot. Only five prisoners were able to escape before the tunnel was discovered next morning. Later in the year Cunningham was transferred to Stalag Luft III. 
Boredom was the main feature of prison and Cunningham used his considerable talent to make a series of cartoon sketches of camp life, many used after the war to illustrate a book on PoWs. Among the inmates of the camps there was a huge array of talent, not least among academics who organised official courses of instruction and education classes. Cunningham took advantage of these opportunities and studied Engineering. While in Stalag Luft III he sat, and failed, the examination for the Institute of Electrical Engineers, his excuse being that he was distracted by the noise of guns from the Eastern front as the Russians came closer. 
At the end of January 1945, the camp was evacuated and the PoWs were forced to march westwards in atrocious winter weather. In late April, British forces liberated the prisoners and Cunningham was flown back to England. He was released from the RAF in 1946. 
He worked as a technical sales director for Winget, which specialised in heavy, mobile cement and concrete mixers for the construction industry. The company was run by George Dixon, a management visionary and social thinker who made Cunningham his personal assistant and worldwide trouble-shooter. After a few years Cunningham returned to Glasgow to become chief engineer at John Dalglish and Sons. There he designed machines which were at the cutting edge of engineering, based on the new science of polymer chemistry. He travelled the world seeking sales opportunities and providing high-level technical support for the new machinery. 
The firm was taken over by Proctor and Schwartz, an American company, and Cunningham became a vice-president, working for the company until his retirement. He remained with the firm for some years in a consulting capacity and continued to travel the world. 
He and his wife threw themselves into bridge and bowls and Cunningham became vice-president and then president of his bowling club. 
In his eighties he visited various universities and RAF bases giving talks to students and pilots. With his wit and rich fund of anecdotes about his experiences as a RAF pilot and a PoW, he was a popular speaker. 
Wallace Cunningham died on October 4. He married Mary “Molly” Anderson in August 1945. She died in 1998 and he is survived by their daughter. 
Flight Lieutenant Wallace Cunningham, born December 4 1916, died October 4 2011.

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Oct 11, 2011)

Group Officer *Jan Bannatyne*

Group Officer Jan Bannatyne, who has died aged 100, worked with Bomber Command’s Pathfinder Force as a code and cipher officer before becoming only the second woman to command an RAF station. 
Jan Bannatyne’s ability had already been widely recognised during service at Bomber Command stations and Group Headquarters, for which she was mentioned in despatches, when she was transferred to the headquarters of Air Vice-Marshal Don Bennett’s Pathfinder Force in March 1943. The force had been in existence for a few months only, and Jan Bannatyne was to remain in her post for the remainder of the war. 
As Pathfinder techniques grew in sophistication, the raid plans for the main bomber force, often totalling 1,000 aircraft, became increasingly complex. It was crucially important that the details remained secret and were transmitted rapidly to the many bomber airfields, requirements that placed great demands on Jan Bannatyne and her staff, almost entirely members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). 
Janet Arderne Bannatyne was born on February 2 1911 at Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, to a Scottish father and an English mother. She was educated at Malvern Girls’ College and graduated from St Anne’s College, Oxford, with a degree in History. On leaving Oxford she was for a time assistant secretary to the National Council of Women. 
The day after the Second World War broke out she joined the WAAF as a clerk; she was commissioned a few months later, having qualified as a codes and cipher officer. 
In 1946 she was promoted to squadron officer (squadron leader) and held various administrative posts before serving in the Air Ministry with responsibility for WRAF career planning and promotions. The WRAF had been established in February 1949, replacing the WAAF and marking the formal creation of women’s branches within, rather than as an adjunct to, the RAF. 
After a series of staff appointments, Jan Bannatyne left for Cyprus in February 1957 to serve on the staff of the HQ Middle East Air Force as the Command WRAF Administrative Officer. On her return in September 1959, she was promoted to group officer to take command of the RAF Station at Spitalgate, near Grantham, the home of WRAF recruit training and for courses for RAF and WRAF officers on service accountancy and administration. 
After service at the headquarters of Technical Training Command, Jan Bannatyne was appointed Inspector of the WRAF, which gave her a wide remit to travel to many stations, at home and overseas, to meet senior commanders and discuss WRAF issues. 
She retired in 1964 and was appointed CBE. 
She settled at Bibury, Gloucestershire, where she cared for her widowed mother and played an active part in village life, becoming a fund-raiser and treasurer of the village hall trustees, a stalwart supporter of the British Legion and a member of (and assiduous fund-raiser for) the Conservative Association. She was secretary of various committees until well into her nineties. She travelled widely, including annual trips to Norway to visit cousins until 1997.
The whole village celebrated her 100th birthday earlier this year with a special tea party. She was thrilled to receive her card from the Queen. 
Jan Bannatyne, who was unmarried, died on August 28. 
Group Officer Jan Bannatyne, born February 2 1911, died August 28 2011.


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## Gnomey (Oct 11, 2011)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Oct 11, 2011)




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## vikingBerserker (Oct 11, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Oct 16, 2011)




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## michaelmaltby (Nov 20, 2011)

Rayne Shultz 1922-2011: Canadian war ace shot down three German bombers in one night in 1943

MM


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## vikingBerserker (Nov 20, 2011)




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## Njaco (Nov 20, 2011)

to all!


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## Airframes (Nov 20, 2011)

Farewell to all.


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## Wayne Little (Nov 24, 2011)




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## v2 (Nov 24, 2011)

to all...


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Nov 24, 2011)




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## v2 (Dec 1, 2011)

Flight Lieutenant *Charles Palliser* 
Flight Lieutenant Charles Palliser, who has died aged 92, shot down four enemy aircraft and shared in the destruction of seven others while flying Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain and, a year later, over Malta.
Palliser was a sergeant pilot when he joined No 249 Squadron on September 14 1940. The following day, which saw the fiercest fighting during the Battle of Britain, he shared in the destruction of a Dornier bomber south of London. 
After a brief lull in the fighting, he was in action again on September 27, when he engaged a large force of Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters south of Redhill. He pursued a single aircraft and fired two bursts from his machine guns. The enemy aircraft caught fire and dived into the sea. Palliser then returned to the main fight and a second Bf 110 fell to his guns. He damaged a third but ran out of ammunition.
On October 21 he damaged a Dornier bomber, but six days later had a narrow escape. As he was taking off, the airfield at North Weald came under attack by bombers, and debris hit his aircraft, damaging the propeller. With the Hurricane shaking violently, he managed to circle the airfield and land. 
No 249 was scrambled during the late morning of November 7 to intercept bombers attacking a convoy in the Thames Estuary. Palliser engaged the fighter escort and shot down a Bf 109 . A few days later his Hurricane was damaged during a dog fight; it quickly leaked fuel, but he managed to crash land in a field in Kent.
During the early part of 1941 Palliser shared in the destruction of two Bf 109s as the squadron went on the offensive, with patrols over northern France. Shortly afterwards he was commissioned and the squadron was taken out of the front line to prepare for overseas service.
George Charles Calder Palliser (known as Charles) was born at West Hartlepool on January 11 1919. He was educated at Brougham School before studying Mechanical Engineering at technical college. He joined the RAFVR in June 1939 to train as a pilot and was called up on the outbreak of war. 
In May 1941, No 249 Squadron left for Gibraltar, where it embarked on the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. On May 21, 23 Hurricanes took off from the carrier and headed for Malta, some 500 miles away, arriving with their fuel almost exhausted. Palliser was soon in action, and during early June shared in the destruction of two Italian bombers and a fighter.
In September the squadron received new Hurricanes, and for a few nights went on the offensive, Palliser bombing and strafing Comiso airfield in Sicily. A few nights later he bombed the railway at Gela .
On December 19 the Luftwaffe made its long-expected appearance over Malta. During an attack on Grand Harbour by Junker 88 bombers, Palliser attacked one of the enemy head on, shooting off a wing and watching the bomber dive into the sea. Two days later he shared in the destruction of two more.
At the end of January, Palliser was awarded a DFC. A month later he left Malta to be a flying instructor in South Africa, where he met his future wife . 
After the war he was a flight commander at the Central Flying School, and in October 1946 he went to the RAF training unit in Southern Rhodesia. A year later he retired from the RAF and received the Air Efficiency Award.
Palliser settled in South Africa, where he worked as a design draughtsman. He joined Vickers Hydraulic Division, which represented the Sperry Rand Corporation, rising to managing director. In 1967 he became chairman of Sperry Rand South Africa, and in 1974 was transferred to Australia as managing director of the Far East division . He retired in 1984, and remained in Melbourne for the rest of his life.
A keen golfer, he was also active in his local bowls club .
Charles Palliser married, in 1943, Ruth Smith; she died in 2005, and he is survived by their daughter. 
Flight Lieutenant Charles Palliser, born January 11 1919, died September 24 2011.

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Dec 1, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Dec 1, 2011)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Dec 1, 2011)




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## v2 (Dec 3, 2011)

Colonel Henry *Gaston Lafont *- last surviving French BoB Pilot has died 
...last Polish,last French,they are getting fewer and fewer...

Ordre de la Libration


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## Gnomey (Dec 3, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Dec 10, 2011)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Dec 10, 2011)

Even though they have left us we still need to remember and never take it for granted.


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## v2 (Dec 14, 2011)

v2 said:


> Colonel Henry *Gaston Lafont *- last surviving French BoB Pilot has died
> ...last Polish,last French,they are getting fewer and fewer...
> 
> Ordre de la Libration



Col Henry Lafont, who has died aged 91, made a dramatic escape from Vichy-held Algeria and reached England to fly Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain; he was the last of the 13 French fighter pilots to fly in the Battle. 
When France capitulated in June 1940, Lafont was at the fighter school in Oran, Algeria, and was said to be “mad with rage” to see France occupied. Although he and his fellow pilots were ordered not to attempt to escape, six of them — including Lafont — decided to steal an aircraft and fly to Gibraltar. 
They were led by René Mouchotte, who would later command a Spitfire squadron and be awarded a DFC before failing to return from a sweep over northern France in August 1943. Mouchotte identified a twin-engined six-seat Caudron Goeland aircraft, which had sufficient fuel. What he and his comrades were unaware of, however, was that the propellers had been sabotaged in an attempt to prevent the aircraft taking off. 
They stole aboard during the night and, at first light, started the engines. In the event, Mouchotte managed to drag the aircraft into the air at minimum speed and made a laborious climb. Using a map torn from a geography book, the crew reached Gibraltar, where they received a warm welcome. A few days later they sailed for England .
Henry Gaston Lafont was born at Cahors in the Lot region on August 10 1920. On leaving school he gained his pilot’s licence and joined the French Air Force in November 1938 . 
On arrival in England, Lafont and his colleagues converted to the Hurricane and were sent to a squadron in Northern Ireland before joining No 615 Squadron at Northolt, from where he flew patrols during the Battle of Britain. 
Over the next few months he flew more than 100 patrols and was credited with shooting down two enemy aircraft. On February 26 1941 he was the first of the pilots who had escaped to England to achieve a success, although he was the only one in his formation of six aircraft to return safely to base. 
In July 1941 Lafont became an instructor, and trained more than 60 Free French Air Force fighter pilots. Six months later he joined the Groupe Alsace flying Hurricanes on convoy patrols and fighter cover over Tobruk, when he probably shot down an enemy bomber. In May 1942 he volunteered for service in Russia with the Normandie Squadron, but before joining he was shot down and wounded. He returned to England.
Throughout 1943 Lafont flew with No 341 Squadron on operations over France and the Low Countries. By war’s end he had completed 230 operational missions, and he was one of the few to be awarded the Ordre de la Libération, instituted by General de Gaulle. He also won the Croix de Guerre with three palms and the Croix de la Valeur Militaire. 
Lafont remained in the French Air Force, serving at the 5th Air Region Headquarters in Algeria during the conflict there and for six years in London. After losing his fighter pilot medical category, he turned to helicopters. He retired from the French Air Force in 1966. 
In 1967 Lafont was appointed Director General of the Paris Air Show , the world’s oldest and largest air show and held at Le Bourget since 1909. He remained in the post until 1984. 
In addition to his wartime awards, Lafont was appointed Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur. In 2002 he published Aviateurs de la Liberté. Mémorial des Forces Aériennes Françaises Libres. 
At his funeral at Les Invalides in Paris, the colours of the French Fighter Pilots’ Association were carried in his honour in the presence of senior French Air Force and RAF officers. 
Henry Lafont was twice married, and is survived by two sons and a daughter. 



source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Dec 14, 2011)

Captain *Jeff Gledhill * 

Captain Jeff Gledhill, who has died aged 90, divebombed the German battleship Tirpitz and fought to preserve the Australian carrier Melbourne. 
Gledhill was a sub-lieutenant when, shortly after 0430 on April 3 1944, he took off from the carrier Victorious in his Fairey Barracuda dive-bomber as part of an attack (code-named Operation Tungsten) on the German warship. On his final approach to the Norwegian fjords, where the ship was hiding, Gledhill climbed over mountains to 2,500ft, then started a 45 degree dive and released his 1,600lb armour piercing bomb. Operation Tungsten was considered a great success: the enemy battleship was badly crippled by 15 direct hits, and rendered incapable of interfering with the D-Day landings two months later. Postwar analysis showed that Gledhill’s bomb had struck one of Tirpitz’s two 15in guns. 
After further operations that April, he was awarded a DSC. Jeffrey Allan Gledhill was born on November 11 1921 in Wellington, New Zealand, and joined the RNZVR in 1941. 
Post-war, he returned to New Zealand, but after study at university he joined the Royal Australian Navy in 1948, and was promptly sent to Britain to form 817 squadron of the Australian Fleet Air Arm. He became the squadron’s senior pilot, and flew from the Australian carrier Sydney in 1951-52 during the Korean War. 
In the late 1950s he saw loan service in the Royal Navy and attended the staff course at Greenwich from 1958 to 1960; by 1961, when he was a commander, he was appointed Director of Air Warfare Organisation and Training (DAWOT) in the Royal Australian Navy. 
Gledhill’s experience of operational flying had convinced him of the value of naval aviation — not least because Australia had no other means of defending her interests in the north against threats from Indonesia. As DAWOT, he found the future of Australian naval aviation in doubt (even some senior Australian naval officers thought it should go), but he staunchly defended the Service. Working with his supportive minister, John Gorton (who would be prime minister from 1968 to 1971), Gledhill drew up a plan to fund the refit of the carrier Melbourne and to replace its ageing British aircraft. He was so successful that in 1963 Melbourne marked her 20,000th deck landing, and she remained in service until 1982. 
Later, Gledhill became Naval Officer in Charge, Northern Australia, and then commanded the training establishment HMAS Penguin. In 1968 he returned to New Zealand as defence adviser at the Australian High Commission. In retirement he lived at Avalon, northern Sydney, where he enjoyed sailing in the harbour and worked as a consultant to Lamoore Yacht Sales. 
Jeff Gledhill married Third Officer Margaret Armstrong, whom he had met in 1944 when she was Captain’s Secretary at the naval air station at Grimsetter, Orkney; she survives him with their two daughters. 
Jeff Gledhill, born November 11 1921, died November 24 2011. 

source: The Telegraph


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## vikingBerserker (Dec 14, 2011)

Depressing.......


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## Thorlifter (Dec 16, 2011)

I post this for two reasons. One, he served in the Coast Guard but also because his comic character, Captain America, took on the Nazi's.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Comic book artist Joe Simon, who created Captain America with the late Jack Kirby, has died at age 98, a family spokesman said on Thursday.

Simon died of natural causes on Wednesday at his home in New York surrounded by family, said Steve Saffel, who worked with him on autobiography "Joe Simon: My Life in Comics."

The first issue of Simon and Kirby's Captain America comic, released in late 1940 by a predecessor of Marvel Comics a year before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, sold nearly one million copies.

While the United States had not yet entered World War II, the American public was concerned about the threat of Nazi Germany led by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

The comic had the fictional Captain America take on Hitler, and punch him in the jaw.

"Joe's feeling was the comic books often succeeded or failed based upon the quality of the villain ... and he realized that they had the best villain you could have in Adolf Hitler," Saffel said.

Captain America is a superhero clad in the red, white and blue of the U.S. flag who gains extraordinary strength from an experimental serum and wields an indestructible shield.

"Among many accomplishments in the comic book field, Joe Simon co-created one of the most enduring superhero icons -- indeed, American icons -- of the 20th Century. If there ever were a superhero who needed less explanation than the red, white and blue-clad Captain America, I've yet to see him," Axel Alonso, editor in chief of Marvel, said in a statement.

This year, Hollywood movie "Captain America: The First Avenger," which prominently credited Simon and Kirby as the character's creators, made over $368 million at worldwide box offices.

Simon was born to a Jewish family in Rochester, New York. He moved to New York City as a young man in 1939, and quickly became involved in the comic book industry.

He single-handedly illustrated and wrote his earliest comic books, before teaming up with artist Jack Kirby.

That versatility made Simon a "Renaissance man" of comics, because he could do everything from lettering to coloring, Saffel said.

Simon served in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II and later created the satirical magazine "Sick" which ran through the 1960s and 1970s.

This year, the book "The Simon and Kirby Library: Crime" collecting the duo's work in the 1940s and 1950s, made the New York Times bestseller list, Saffel said.

Simon is survived by his five children and eight grandchildren.


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## vikingBerserker (Dec 16, 2011)




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## Gnomey (Dec 16, 2011)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Dec 16, 2011)




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## Wayne Little (Dec 17, 2011)




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## RabidAlien (Dec 21, 2011)




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## v2 (Dec 30, 2011)

*Kenneth Dahlberg* 

Kenneth Dahlberg, who has died aged 94, was an American fighter ace during the Second World War, later becoming a multi-millionaire and playing a significant, if unwitting, role in the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency. 
Dahlberg was the Midwest finance chairman of Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign. After collecting donations of $25,000 he wrote a cheque which he delivered to the president’s re-election committee in Washington. The cheque then surfaced in a bank account of one of the five Watergate burglars – who had been paid by Republicans to break in and plant listening devices in the headquarters of their political rivals. As a result an article appeared in the Washington Post on August 1 1972 headlined: “Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds”. The story immediately triggered three separate investigations and helped seal Nixon’s fate. As one Post reporter commented: “It [the cheque] was the first real connective glue between Watergate, its funding and the Nixon campaign.” 
As a result Dahlberg became an object of intense scrutiny by federal investigators. Though they cleared him of any wrongdoing, his role in Watergate was turned into a moment of high drama for the film that documented the scandal, All the President’s Men (1976). While Dahlberg admitted the scandal “made good copy”, he thought it was unfortunate that incident overshadowed his many other accomplishments. 
Kenneth Harry Dahlberg was born on June 30 1917 in St Paul, Minnesota, and graduated from St Paul Harding High School in 1935. His first job was at the Lowry Hotel washing pots and pans. He rose quickly, and by 1941 was in charge of food and drink at almost two dozen hotels owned by the Pick chain across the United States. Dahlberg was drafted in 1941, some months before the United States entered the war, and trained as a pilot. One of his instructors was the future Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, who remained a lifelong friend. 
Dahlberg completed his flying training in 1942 and, like many other graduates early in the war, was immediately assigned to be an instructor, serving in Arizona. Finally, however, he was selected to be a fighter pilot in 1944, arriving in England in May. He joined his squadron on June 2 and flew his first mission four days later, on D-Day, having had just 30 minutes flying experience in the P-51 Mustang (he had trained on the P-47 Thunderbolt). 
During August he was leading his flight when it encountered a force of 40 Messerschmitt Bf 109s. In the ensuing dog fight he shot four of the fighters down but a fifth hit his Mustang and he was forced to bail out near Paris. He was sheltered by the Resistance and, after donning a disguise, bicycled back to Allied lines, then only 40 miles away. 
Rejoining his squadron, his successes mounted until he transferred to a unit equipped with the P-47 Thunderbolt, which he thought much inferior to the Mustang. Attacking enemy tanks in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge, his aircraft was crippled by ground fire and he was forced to crash land. He was picked up by a forward patrol of American tanks. By early 1945, just six months into his operational flying career, Dahlberg had crashed two aircraft and twice escaped capture by the enemy. But he had also shot down 15 aircraft, placing him 23rd on the list of fighter aces in Europe during the war and making him a “triple” ace. 
On February 2 1945, Dahlberg’s aircraft took a direct hit and blew up; he was thrown clear and parachuted down. Despite being wounded he managed to avoid capture; eventually, however, he was taken prisoner and marched more than 100 miles to Stalag VIIa at Moosburg near Munich. Patton’s Third Army liberated the camp in May.
Dahlberg returned to the United States and joined Telex, a maker of hearing aids and hospital communications equipment. Soon afterwards he joined an Air National Guard unit in Duluth and suggested that Telex should use its audio expertise in military flight helmets. The company duly became a leading maker of headsets for aviators. 
In 1948 Dahlberg and his brother began their own business. Over the years, he developed and marketed the Miracle Ear hearing aid, a pioneering all-in-the-ear device, which became the largest selling brand of hearing aids in the United States. In 1994, the firm was sold to Bausch and Lomb and he began a venture capital company called Carefree Capital. 
In addition to his business career, Dahlberg also became involved in politics – a result of his wartime friendship with Barry Goldwater. Dahlberg was deputy chairman of fund-raising for Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964. Dahlberg remained an active pilot, flying with the Minnesota Air National Guard until 1951 and as a civilian into his 90s. He was a generous supporter of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, and was a director of both the Air Force Academy Foundation and the American Fighter Aces Association. 
For his wartime services he was awarded the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross with cluster, the Bronze Star, 15 air medals and two Purple Hearts. In 1945 he was awarded one of the United States’ highest awards for gallantry, the Distinguished Service Cross but, as he was a PoW, he could not collect it. In the end, the medal was presented in 1967 in Washington, DC, by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff also present. 
Kenneth Dahlberg married Betty Jayne Segerstrom in 1947. She survives him with their son and two daughters. 
Kenneth Dahlberg, born June 30 1917, died on October 4.

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Dec 30, 2011)




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## vikingBerserker (Dec 30, 2011)




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## v2 (Jan 13, 2012)

Flight Lieutenant *Eric Atkins* 

Flight Lieutenant Eric Atkins, who has died aged 90, flew 60 low-level bombing raids with a Polish Mosquito squadron and was twice decorated with the DFC; he also won the Polish Cross of Valour on two occasions. 
Atkins was transferred to No 305 Squadron in April 1944 after it had suffered heavy losses. Most of the crews were Polish, and he usually flew with a Polish navigator, Flight Lieutenant Jurek Meyer.
The squadron flew night intruder missions over northern France and Belgium as a prelude to the D-Day landings, attacking enemy road traffic, railways and canals. On D-Day itself, Atkins attacked trains in the Cherbourg area; thereafter he was in action every night, targeting the German reinforcements making for the Normandy bridgehead .
As the Allied armies prepared to break out of Normandy, Atkins attacked a German Panzer Division, and on August 25 he took part in a major assault on enemy troops massing near the river Seine. That night he completed three sorties, and five days later his was one of six crews which severely damaged a fuel storage depot near Nancy. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the first of his DFCs. 
As the Allied armies prepared to break out of Normandy, Atkins attacked a German Panzer Division, and on August 25 he took part in a major assault on enemy troops massing near the river Seine. That night he completed three sorties, and five days later his was one of six crews which severely damaged a fuel storage depot near Nancy. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the first of his DFCs.
The Allies were now moving eastwards, and Atkins and his Polish colleagues bombed troop movements in Belgium and western Germany, then ranged deeper into Germany to bomb and strafe railways, road convoys and troop reinforcements. He was awarded a Polish Cross of Valour. In November the squadron moved to an airfield in France, from where it continued to attack trains and canal traffic. After suffering damage from anti-aircraft fire, Atkins was forced to land his Mosquito at night without the undercarriage and with fused bombs still in the bomb bay. It was half an hour before the crash rescue crews would venture close to the wrecked aircraft. 
After a highly successful operation against Panzer units at Wassenburg in December, Atkins was rested. He had completed 78 operations, most of them alongside the Poles. He was awarded a Bar to his DFC, and a Bar to his Cross of Valour. The Poles also awarded him the Squadron Badge of Honour and the Polish Air Force Medal. (He received his two DFCs from a clerk in the Air Ministry.) Atkins greatly admired his Polish comrades, later writing of them; “[They] were magnificent people and fierce warriors, and their ground crews were devoted and dedicated.”
The son of a mining engineer, Eric Granville Albert Atkins was born at Mansfield on March 19 1921. After the family moved to Essex, he went to South-East Essex College, leaving when he was 14 to work for Unilever. 
A keen Boy Scout, he was curious about the Hitler Youth and arranged a holiday in Germany. He was escorted to a number of camps but became increasingly uncomfortable with the atmosphere and anti-British feeling. Then he received a telegram from home reading “Brother very ill, return home immediately, Father”. He had no brother, but excused himself, hitchhiked to Calais and landed at Dover to find newspaper billboards declaring “War with Germany”.

Atkins joined the Civil Defence before being accepted for service as a pilot with the RAF. In September 1941 he joined No 139 Squadron, flying Blenheim bombers on anti-shipping patrols off the Dutch coast and daylight bombing operations over northern France. In November he and his crew flew a Blenheim to Gibraltar. Their next task was to rendezvous in the Mediterranean with the carrier Ark Royal, wait for 26 Hurricanes to be launched and then escort them on the long flight to Malta.
After returning to England, Atkins flew night operations but was injured when his Blenheim crash-landed after being badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire. He became an instructor on medium bombers and was commissioned. 
Early in 1944 he returned to operations to fly the Mosquito with No 464 (RAAF) Squadron in the low-level attack role. During the spring he attacked the V-1 launching sites in the Pas de Calais region before transferring to No 305 Squadron in April.
After completing his service with the Poles, Atkins became a test pilot with a repair and salvage unit before becoming personal pilot to General GI Thomas, GOC 1st British Corps in Germany. He left the RAF in 1946.
Atkins returned to Unilever, becoming regional sales manager in south London before moving as a manager to the European sales division.
In his sixties he took up climbing, and he was founder-chairman of the Mosquito Aircrew Association.
Eric Atkins married, in 1950, Sheila Finlay-Day, who survives him with their son and daughter.

Flight Lieutenant Eric Atkins, born March 19 1921, died November 22 2011.

source: The Telegraph


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## Wurger (Jan 13, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Jan 13, 2012)




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## Glider (Jan 13, 2012)

All these people deserve our respect but I admit, its someting a bit special to take up climbing in your sixties!!


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## vikingBerserker (Jan 13, 2012)




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## RabidAlien (Jan 14, 2012)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jan 14, 2012)




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## Wayne Little (Jan 19, 2012)




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## Airframes (Jan 19, 2012)

Farewell Eric.
Really sorry to hear this news, as I had the privilege of spending a week with Eric, and other former Mosquito crews, in Copenhagen, during the 50th anniversary ceremonies of the Shell House raid, the attack on Gestapo HQ. 
He was a real gentleman; amusing, friendly and helpful.


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## v2 (Jan 22, 2012)

Clarence "Red" Eudaily (Flight Engineer) passed away today, January 21, he was full of warmth, humor and courage, humility and pride in his country. He won Distinguished Flying Cross medals for what he did to save his plane and crew one August 1944 day with the 464th Bomb Group over Pardubice, Czechoslovakia...

Have a blue sky, Sir!


_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUNLiqsu0q0_


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jan 22, 2012)

R.I.P. sir.


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## Gnomey (Jan 22, 2012)




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## vikingBerserker (Jan 22, 2012)




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## Wayne Little (Jan 23, 2012)




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## v2 (Feb 10, 2012)

Wing Commander *'Mac’ Furze* 

Wing Commander 'Mac’ Furze, who has died aged 83, was a Cold War bomber pilot, competed in the London to Christchurch Air Race and was involved in trials of the British airborne nuclear weapon. 
Furze’s most dramatic mission came in 1954, when three RAF crews set off on an intelligence gathering flight over the Soviet Union. A similar mission had been successfully undertaken in 1952, under the command of Squadron Leader John Crampton, and Furze was selected to accompany Crampton as his co-pilot on the second spying sortie. 
Three aircraft took off late on the evening of April 28 and headed for the Kattegat, off Denmark, over which they refuelled from airborne tankers. Crampton, Furze and their navigator flew the longest of the three routes, penetrating 1,000 miles into southern Russia to gather radar and photographic intelligence on 30 targets. Unknown to the crews, however, Russia’s air defence system had detected them and fighters were scrambled to intercept. 
As Crampton and Furze approached Kiev it was clear that accurate anti-aircraft fire was being directed at them and, after a near miss, they turned immediately to return. They took the shortest route, at maximum speed, out of Soviet airspace and so were unable to rendezvous with their airborne tanker. Very short of fuel, they landed at a US airfield in southern Germany . 
Robert McAlastair Furze was born at Bishop’s Stortford on November 9 1928 and educated at Pangbourne College before gaining a cadetship to the RAF College, Cranwell . 
After graduating in 1949 he flew Lincoln bombers with No 617 Squadron, and in 1951 he joined the RAF’s first jet bomber squadron, No 101, flying the Canberra . 
In 1953 he was selected as a reserve pilot for the London to Christchurch Air Race . Just 24 hours before the off, a pilot was declared unfit and Furze took his place to fly a Canberra PR 3 aircraft. Five Canberras were among the entrants and they took off at five-minute intervals from Heathrow Airport during the late afternoon of October 8 . 
Furze routed via Basra, Iraq, and Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where a main wheel had to be changed. From there he aimed for the Cocos Islands and then on to Perth, where the aircraft was on the ground for just 11 minutes. Furze and his navigator landed in New Zealand after completing the 12,300 mile journey in 24 hours 35 minutes — 44 minutes longer than the winner. 
After his overflight of the Soviet Union, Furze spent some months at Weybridge with the aircraft manufacturers Vickers Armstrong, becoming one of the first RAF pilots to fly the Valiant . In February 1955 he helped establish 1321 Flight Trials Unit for the introduction of the Valiant into RAF service and for integrating the Blue Danube nuclear weapon. The trials successfully determined the parameters used for the live nuclear tests carried out at Maralinga (Australia) in 1956 and at Christmas Island a year later. In the meantime, 1321 Flight had been disbanded, and Furze left to join No 214 Squadron as a flight commander. 
In addition to operating in the strategic bomber role, the Valiants of No 214 pioneered air-to-air refuelling with trials that culminated in a non-stop flight to Cape Town. Furze flew a Valiant tanker to support this record-breaking flight. 
In July 1966 he assumed command of No 14 Squadron, based at Wildenrath in Germany. His Canberra bombers operated at low level, with one maintained at 15-minute readiness armed with a tactical nuclear weapon. One of his officers commented: “On 14 Squadron we had a real gentleman for a CO and his manner made for a happy squadron.” 
During the 1970s Furze filled staff appointments at HQ 1 (Bomber) Group, the MoD and the Officer and Aircrew Selection Centre before retiring in 1983. 
A tall, handsome man, Furze had a quiet and gentle nature. He restored antique furniture and had a particular interest in old clocks. 
He was very active in his village at Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, where he organised a Neighbourhood Watch scheme; was treasurer for the village fete; and served as a church warden for many years. 
Mac Furze married his wife Marna in 1955. She died in 1995, and he is survived by their daughter and his partner Gillian. 

Wing Commander Robert “Mac” Furze, born November 9 1928, died December 4 2011 

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Feb 10, 2012)

*Florence Green* 

Florence Green, who has died aged 110, was the last veteran of the First World War, though she saw no action. 
Instead she served with the embryonic Royal Air Force at a base which, like many military establishments, was suffering severe personnel shortages following the astonishing casualty rate on the front line and the introduction of conscription in 1916. 
Florence Patterson, as she was then, was one of those who stepped in to fill the breach, volunteering for the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF). Though it was created just months before the end of the war, the WRAF counted 25,000 women in its ranks by the end of the conflict. 
Florence Beatrice Patterson was born on February 19 1901 to Frederick and Sarah Patterson. Her early years were spent at Edmonton, north London, but she lived for most of her life at King’s Lynn, Norfolk. 
She was 17 when, on September 13 1918, just two months before the Armistice, she began work at the East Anglian aerodrome of Narborough (later called Marham, and today the home of a large force of RAF Tornado bomber aircraft). Her duties largely involved waitressing at the officers’ mess, and she remained until July 18 1919, when she was demobilised. Her personal character was described as “very good”. 
The aerodrome at Narborough had been opened in August 1915 and was initially home to a number of squadrons, some involved in night operations against Zeppelins. At the time that Florence arrived, ancient biplanes were being used to train pilots and observers who were later transferred to squadrons in France. The aerodrome closed in 1919, but was reopened before the Second World War. 
Florence’s story came to light in 2009, after a local newspaper story about her great longevity. The article was spotted by Andrew Holmes, a British researcher who tracks and verifies reports of so-called “supercentenarians” – people who live well beyond 100. He tracked down her service record at the National Archives, and she was subsequently recognised as a veteran of the war. At that time there were thought to be three other surviving veterans; she outlived them all. 
To celebrate her 110th birthday, last February, the catering staff at RAF Marham baked her a special cake which was presented to her by officers who had travelled to see her at her daughter’s home in Kings Lynn. 
Even at her great age she had detailed memories of her time in uniform: “I had the opportunity to go up in one of the planes, but I was scared of flying. I would work every hour that God sent. I had dozens of friends on the base and we had a great deal of fun in our spare time.” 
A year after leaving the WRAF, Florence married Walter Green, a railway porter; they were married for 50 years before Walter died. They had two daughters and a son. 

Florence Green, born February 19 1901, died February 5 2012 

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Feb 10, 2012)

Air Marshal Sir *Alfred Ball* 

Air Marshal Sir Alfred Ball, who has died aged 91, was one of the RAF’s outstanding reconnaissance pilots in the Second World War and later filled senior national and international appointments. 
Ball joined No 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) in May 1941. His early targets were the Channel ports, but he was soon ordered to photograph targets deep inside Germany in his single-engine, unarmed Spitfire. 
In October that year he took off for the Continent but flew into a thunderstorm. At 25,000ft the aircraft became uncontrollable and, when he attempted to bale out, the canopy jammed. Such was the turbulence that he was thrown through the canopy; recovering consciousness at 3,000ft, he opened his parachute and landed in Norfolk. 
A month later his unit was ordered to Cornwall to fly daily sorties to Brest to monitor Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The German fighter force became familiar with the tactics of the high-flying Spitfires and set up patrols to intercept them. Ball — always prepared to be innovative — devised his own tactics to deal with the threat and on the afternoon of February 11 1942 photographed the German capital ships still at Brest — the last sighting of them before they sailed a few hours later on their audacious “Channel Dash” home. From Cornwall he flew sorties to the Spanish border photographing the French Biscay ports . Assessed as an exceptional reconnaissance pilot, he was awarded a DFC. 
On promotion to squadron leader, Ball was made commanding officer of No 4 PRU and in October 1942 left for Gibraltar to provide support for Operation Torch. Within days his unit was flying operations from Maison Blanche in Algeria and encountering the latest German high-performance aircraft. Losses to the enemy mounted, and the 22-year-old Ball sought a meeting with Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, the Air C-in-C, to plead for the latest Spitfires. Tedder listened patiently, then dismissed Ball and told him to carry on . A few days later three of the latest Spitfires arrived. 
Early in 1943 Ball was sent to photograph a crucial target in Tunisia prior to a large-scale attack by the Army. When he was at 24,000ft four Focke Wulf 190s closed in on him, and he repelled eight attacks before he finally escaped. He was forced to land his damaged aircraft at a forward airfield, where he commandeered a Spitfire and flew back to base with his film. Within hours, the Army mounted a successful attack. 
For his work in North Africa, Ball was awarded a DSO and a US Air Medal. The DSO citation described him as a “fine leader who displayed brilliant airmanship”. 
The only child of Captain JAE Ball, MC, chief engineer of the Bengal Nagpur Railway, Alfred Henry Wynne Ball was born at Rawalpindi on January 18 1921. He was educated at Campbell College, Belfast, before going to the RAF College Cranwell in 1939. Having seen his parents only rarely, he grew up self-sufficient and independent-minded — characteristics that were to be evident throughout his life. Commissioned in December 1939, he completed his training as an Army co-operation pilot before joining No 13 Squadron in northern France. After the Blitzkrieg on May 10 1940, he flew road searches but soon realised that employing peacetime techniques in the face of intense German fighter activity was suicidal, and flew the rest of his sorties at treetop height. After suffering heavy losses, the squadron’s Lysanders were withdrawn to England, but Ball had to find his own way back; he commandeered a lorry, and, with 20 airmen aboard, drove to Cherbourg, from where they escaped by ship. 
Ball volunteered for the photographic reconnaissance role, which required experience on the Spitfire. He therefore persuaded a friend to allow him to fly three sorties, and at his interview told the squadron commander he was an “experienced Spitfire pilot”. To his surprise and delight, he was accepted. 
After returning from North Africa in July 1943, Ball was given command of No 542 Squadron, equipped with Spitfires and based at Benson in Oxfordshire. His most urgent task was to photograph the building of the V-1 launch sites in the Pas de Calais. Before the Normandy invasion he photographed enemy dispositions and movements and, after the landings, identified targets ahead of the Army’s advance into Germany. 
On his final Spitfire sortie, his engine failed when he was at 38,000ft over Cologne. Ball was able to coax the engine into giving short bursts of power during the long glide to England, and he broke cloud at 600ft over the Thames Estuary, scraping into the airfield at Eastchurch. 
On promotion to wing commander in September 1944, he took command of No 540 Squadron to fly Mosquitos to targets in Norway and deep inside Germany. 
On October 7 1944 Lancaster bombers attacked a vital dam on the Rhine just north of the Swiss border, and Ball was sent to photograph the damage. As he flew over the target at 200ft he was attacked by four fighters, later reporting: “We held our own to begin with, but soon things got a bit tricky. I decided to disappear into the Swiss mountains.” 
This appeared to work, so he ventured out again; but the fighters were waiting, and he ducked back into Switzerland. He then tried to give the impression of departing by flying west, using the hills to mask his route. The ruse failed, and the German pilots closed in for another attack — so Ball made his third detour into Switzerland. Eventually he managed to escape and return to base. 
Ball remained with No 540 for the rest of the war, flying into eastern Germany to photograph rail traffic and troop movements in addition to regular sorties to Norway, photographing U-boat sanctuaries. At the end of the war he was mentioned in despatches for a second time. 
In January 1946 Ball left for the Middle East to take command of No 680 Squadron (later No 13). Flying Mosquitos, the squadron carried out survey work over Palestine, Egypt and Iraq. On one occasion, while Ball was in Haifa, terrorists sprayed the room he was in with machine-gun fire, but he escaped injury. 
After converting to the Canberra jet in 1953, Ball commanded the reconnaissance wing at Wyton, taking a Canberra to the Pacific to monitor an American atomic test, and flying photographic sorties along the East German border. 
After a period at HQ Bomber Command and on the British Defence Liaison Staff in Washington, he was appointed in February 1962 to command the V-bomber base at Honington, Suffolk, flying the Valiant and the Victor. 
On promotion to air commodore in November 1964, Ball left for Aden as air officer administration. His arrival coincided with a significant increase in terrorism, which included attacks against civilians, and security issues occupied much of his time. It was also announced that British forces would leave their large base in two years’ time, and Ball became deeply involved in the early stages of planning a very complex withdrawal operation. On leaving Aden at the end of 1966 he was appointed CB. 
After attending the Imperial Defence College, he held a series of senior appointments at the MoD. He was Assistant Chief of Staff of the Automatic Data Processing Division at SHAPE Headquarters in Belgium. 
In 1975 Ball left for Ankara to take up the post of UK Representative of the Permanent Military Deputies Group at the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO). With some member countries facing political and economic difficulties, political guidance for military planning had, for a number of years, been lacking. Ball aimed to improve this situation, and made some progress, notwithstanding the withdrawal of British forces from the region. 
On his return he was expecting to retire, but the untimely death of a senior RAF colleague resulted in his appointment for two years as Deputy C-in-C at RAF’s Strike Command, where he supervised the day-to-day activities of the many operational units. 
He was appointed KCB in 1976. 
After retiring in 1979, Ball spent four years as military affairs adviser with International Computers. He maintained close links with his wartime photographic reconnaissance colleagues and rarely missed the annual reunions at Benson. He was particularly proud to be Honorary Air Commodore of No 2624 (County of Oxford) Royal Auxiliary Air Force RAF Regiment Squadron. 
Of slim build and always immaculately dressed, Ball was a man of great energy. Known to his staff as “Fiery Fred”, he could be a hard taskmaster — but he was equally hard on himself. He had a strong sense of humour, was good company, and showed skill on the golf course and at the bridge table. 
He married, in 1942 (10 weeks after they met), Nan MacDonald. She died in 2006, and he is survived by their daughter, and by their sons, all three of whom served as officers in the RAF. 

Air Marshal Sir Alfred Ball, born January 18 1921, died January 25, 2012.

source: The Telegraph


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Feb 10, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Feb 10, 2012)




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## RabidAlien (Feb 10, 2012)

Was Ms Green the last living WW1 vet in the world, or is there still one left (New Zealand, I think?)?


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Feb 10, 2012)




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## Wayne Little (Feb 11, 2012)




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## v2 (Feb 16, 2012)

Air Vice-Marshal *Don Hills *

Air Vice-Marshal Don Hills, who has died aged 95, was an RAF equipment officer and ensured that Allied aircraft could take the fight to the skies in the Second World War, no matter what the conditions; his work included developing the Takoradi supply route, which was crucial for victory in North Africa. 
Hills joined No 1 (Fighter) Squadron in August 1939, and on September 3 (the day after war was declared) flew to Le Havre with an advance party to establish an airfield for the squadron’s 15 Hurricanes, which arrived a few days later. 
There he was responsible for procuring fuel and ensuring that ammunition and spare parts were always available – a difficult job made more complicated by a bitter winter . Activity increased in the spring, and fighting started in earnest when the Germans invaded the Low Countries on May 10. For the next five weeks the Hurricanes were involved in intensive combat, claiming 80 enemy aircraft destroyed or damaged. 
After providing support for the Dunkirk evacuation, No 1 was forced to move seven times in quick succession, creating serious supply problems for Hills . Damaged aircraft and equipment had to be stripped of parts and abandoned in order to keep others serviceable. After a final patrol from Nantes, the surviving aircraft returned to England on June 17. 
Hills was left in charge of 42 ground crew and headed west. During the retreat he was wounded by a bomb blast, but got his men to La Rochelle, where they boarded two Welsh colliers which took them to Plymouth. Hills was appointed MBE, a rare award for one so junior. He was also mentioned in despatches. 
The son of a sergeant killed at Passchendaele, Eric Donald Hills was born at Wrotham, Kent, on January 26 1917 and educated at Maidstone Grammar School. He joined the RAF in January 1939. Within weeks of his return from France, Hills was on his way to East Africa. On arriving in Nairobi, he was ordered to take a convoy of many dozen trucks to Juba on the White Nile in southern Sudan, a journey of six days. There he was put in charge of the remote airstrip, and one of his first visitors was General Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief. 
While at Juba, Hills was required to transport a battalion of Belgian Congo troops to Egypt. To do so he requisitioned a paddle steamer and some flat barges for a journey that took two weeks. 
As the war against the Italians in Eritrea and Abyssinia developed, Hills moved to the headquarters in Nairobi. The bulk of the (largely obsolescent) aircraft involved were from the South African Air Force, and included biplane fighters and even a squadron of German-built Junkers 86 bombers. As a result, equipment issues were a major problem. 
In addition to resolving these difficulties, Hills also helped develop and organise equipment and supplies for the crucial 3,500-mile air resupply route from Takoradi on the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to Khartoum and on to Cairo. 
This provided a shorter alternative to the long sea route around the Cape of Good Hope to the Red Sea, and as many as 180 aircraft (many single-engine fighters) were ferried through remote airstrips in the French Saharan colonies and Sudan which had been carved out and were manned by small maintenance parties of RAF men. Air commanders in the Middle East considered it vital; Philip Guedalla, the historian, noted that “victory in Egypt came by the Takoradi Route”. 
In February 1943 Hills was posted to Egypt and, as the North African war reached a climax, crossed the desert through Libya and Tunisia to Algeria, where he commanded a maintenance unit resupplying air forces in Africa and Italy. He returned to Britain in December 1944. 
A series of staff appointments followed. He was an instructor at RAF Digby, where a separate wing of the RAF College at Cranwell had been set up to train officer cadets for the RAF’s Equipment and Secretarial Branches. 
After two years in Washington, DC, with the USAF’s Military Air Transport Service, Hills served at HQ Transport Command (when he travelled to Christmas Island to witness the nuclear tests). In January 1963 he was Senior Equipment Officer at the HQ Middle East Air Force in Aden at the time of the Radfan campaign. 
Returning to Britain in April 1965, he took command of No 16 Maintenance Unit at RAF Stafford. This was the beginning of a long relationship with the town and the people in the area and ultimately led to his retirement to nearby Coton. 
In September 1971 he was made Senior Air Staff Officer of Maintenance Command, responsible for the RAF’s maintenance and support organisations. He retired in September 1973. He was appointed CBE in 1968 and CB in 1973. 
Hills became a permanent president for the Department of the Environment on inquiries dealing with planning disputes. For a number of years he was Midland Area president of the Royal Air Force Association, and he and his wife threw themselves into working in the community of Staffordshire. A generous host, he lived life to the full and liked nothing more than a chat over a whisky or a good bottle of wine. Don Hills married, in September 1945, Pamela Sandeman . She died in 1989, and in 1991 he married, secondly, Cynthia Way, who died in 2001. He is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage and a stepdaughter. 
Air Vice-Marshal Don Hills, born January 26 1917, died January 27 2012 


source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Feb 16, 2012)




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## Thorlifter (Mar 1, 2012)

*Lynn "Buck" Compton*

World War II veteran Lynn D. "Buck" Compton, whose military heroics were chronicled in the 2001 HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers," died Saturday at his daughter's home in Burlington, Wash., after suffering a heart attack in January, the Los Angeles Times reports. He was 90.

Compton, who was portrayed by Neal McDonough in the miniseries, was a first lieutenant in Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

Compton, who was among those who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, was part of the group that destroyed German artillery during the battle at Brecourt Manor. During his tour in World War II, Compton also took part in Holland's Operation Market Garden and the Siege of Bastogne in Belgium.

Compton was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his service.

In later years, Compton -- as a Los Angeles deputy district attorney in Los Angeles -- was part of the team that prosecuted Sirhan B. Sirhan for the assassination of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. He was later appointed as a judge on the 2nd District Court of Appeal by then-California governor Ronald Reagan.

Compton's daughter, Syndee Compton, told the Times that her father was caught off-guard after gaining fame from the miniseries, which was based on historian Stephen E. Ambrose's 1992 book of the same name.

"I think it probably shocked all of them," Compton said. "I don't think any of them in their wildest dream thought at 80 years of age they'd be getting this attention."

Compton is survived by his two daughters, Tracy and Syndee, and four grandchildren


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## Gnomey (Mar 1, 2012)




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## v2 (Mar 6, 2012)

Polish hero *Michael Issajewicz *dead at age 91 

Michael Issajewicz, who went by the nom-de-guerre "Mis" during WW2, died yesterday at age 91. Issajewicz was a soldier in the Polish Home Army and a member of the team that assassinated SS Police general Franz Kutschera in 1944.

Kutschera, noted even among Nazis for his brutality, was the SS Police commander in German-occupied Warsaw. He was sentenced to death by a special underground Polish court for crimes against the Polish nation, in particular for the mass murder of civilian hostages. The Polish government-in-exile approved the sentence and it was carried out on February 1, 1944.

Kutschera's residence was less than 150 meters from his office, and was surrounded by a high wall topped with razor wire. The area was heavily guarded, since headquarters for the Warsaw Gestapo headquarters, the Warsaw garrison and police headquarters were all located nearby. (For safety reason, Kutschera always traveled the 150 meters from home to office by car)

Issajewicz drove the vehicle that blocked Kutschera's car from entering the secure compound. Two AK soldiers, Bronisław Pietraszewicz Zdzisław Poradzk, ran up to Kutschera's limousine and opened fire at point-blank range with Sten guns. Issajewicz then jumped out of his vehicle, ran up to Kutschera, and killed him with a single Luger shot to the head.

Issajewiecz was later captured, tortured, and sent to Stutthof concentration camp, but survived the war to be awarded Poland's highest decoration for bravery, the Virtuti Militari.


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## evangilder (Mar 6, 2012)

A brave hero of Poland.


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## Gnomey (Mar 6, 2012)




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## Airframes (Mar 6, 2012)

Farewell to a brave soldier.


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## vikingBerserker (Mar 6, 2012)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Mar 6, 2012)




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## Wayne Little (Mar 9, 2012)




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## v2 (Mar 10, 2012)

Flight Lieutenant* Richard Jones* 

A FIGHTER pilot who battled Nazis over the skies of Britain has died at the age of 93.
Flight Lieutenant Richard Jones, of Witney, fought in the Battle of Britain, a conflict in which pilots had a life expectancy of just a week.
The battle took place between July and October 1940 and ensured Hitler’s forces were unable to invade the UK.
His friends and family last night paid tribute to a “very popular” man who loved to fly. He died in his sleep on Tuesday night.
Mr Jones was brought up in Grazeley in Berkshire and joined the RAF reserves in 1938 before the outbreak of war. He was selected for the 19 Squadron in Cambridgeshire, which became the first to fly the legendary Spitfires, and later joined 64 Squadron at RAF Kenley, Greater London. He joined the Battle of Britain on September 16, 1940, after just 17 hours’ flying experience in a Spitfire. 
Mr Jones flew up to four raids a day and was shot down by the Luftwaffe while flying over Kent. He was unscathed in the attack and went on to become one of the very few pilots to fly for the entire duration of the Battle of Britain.
In 1941, Mr Jones was posted to the De Havilland Aircraft Company, based in Witney, and test-piloted repaired Spitfires and Hurricanes. 
He was awarded six wartime medals and, in 1944, was given the King’s Commendation for valuable services in the air.
After the war, Mr Jones was a sales director at Hartford Motors in Oxford and an usher at Witney Magistrates’ Court.
In 1989, he met and became friends with Gunther Domaschk, a former Luftwaffe fighter pilot who had fought against him during the Battle of Britain.
Mr Jones was a regular feature at Armistice Day services in Witney.
Speaking to the Oxford Mail about his war experiences in 2010, he said: “We knew we were in a pretty grave situation as nobody else was available at the time. We had a pretty good idea we were in for it. We knuckled down and accepted it.” 
He leaves three children, Frances, 70, Christopher, 68, and Susan, 59, three grandchildren and three great grandchildren. His wife, Elizabeth, died in 2009. Christopher Jones said: “My father was a very popular and extremely affable gentleman who was liked by everyone.”
Mr Jones’s friend Gordon Clack, 82, of Ducklington, also a former RAF pilot, said: “Richard was a great chap. As a young lad, I would cycle up to the airfield and sit on the boundary wall for hours watching Richard taking off and landing.”
Battle of Britain Fighter Association secretary Patrick Tootal said: “Richard was a great supporter of the fighter association and a great colleague for all the surviving few.”
Mr Tootal said there were now only about 60 veterans of the Battle of Britain still alive.
A funeral service for Mr Jones will take place at High Street Methodist Church in Witney on Friday at 1pm. 

source: Oxford Mail


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Mar 10, 2012)

To one of the Few. Rest In Peace sir.


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## Thorlifter (Mar 10, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Mar 10, 2012)




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## v2 (Mar 22, 2012)

Admiral Sir *Raymond Lygo* 

Admiral Sir Raymond Lygo, who has died 87, was a successful Fleet Air Arm pilot during the war and Acting First Sea Lord after it; in his second career he was chief executive of British Aerospace and played a small but key role in the “Westland affair” of 1986, which brought down two ministers and, very nearly, the government of Margaret Thatcher. After retiring from BAe he caused further ructions when he admitted that the company routinely quoted unrealistically low prices for defence hardware, then put up the prices once the MoD had awarded it the contract. 
“It’s a well-known fact, whether anybody admits it or not, [that] you’ll never get any programme through government if you ever revealed the real cost,” he told the BBC in 2004. “Whatever you want to get through government, you have to first of all establish what is the Treasury likely to approve in terms of money? And then you think, what can you offer for these terms within the parameters that have been set?” 
As a result, Lygo said, BAe would bid low and then inflate its prices after the contract had been agreed. “And so then the price goes up and they have a decision whether they are going to continue or cancel. And the cancellation costs will be greater than continuing with it. So normally you say 'OK, we’ll continue.’ But that’s life in Whitehall, I’m afraid.” 
Raymond Derek Lygo was born at Ilford, Essex, on March 15 1924. His father was a compositor on The Times, and after intermittent education at Ilford County High School, Essex, and Clark’s College, Bromley, Ray left without qualifications at 14 to become a messenger boy for the paper’s editor, Geoffrey Dawson. In November 1940, inspired by the news of the Fleet Air Arm’s successful attack on Taranto, he resolved to join the Service , and practised reading without the glasses he had worn since childhood: he was passed into the Royal Navy as a Naval Airman 2nd Class in 1942 . 
Lygo crossed the Atlantic in the troopship Queen Mary, earned his wings at Kingston, Ontario, and was soon flying Seafire IIcs in 887 Naval Air Squadron from the aircraft carrier Indefatigable on Russian convoy duties, and during attacks on the German battleship Tirpitz. 
In 1945 he flew fighter cover during raids on oil refineries in Indonesia and on the Sakashima islands. On April 1 1945 Indefatigable became the first British ship to be hit by a kamikaze pilot: Lygo saw “the great red spot on the side of a Japanese Zero” hit the carrier’s island as he himself launched from the flight deck and climbed away. Though the ship recovered quickly and he was able to land-on normally at the end his sortie, he could never forget the smell of blood, steam and oil when he returned. 
After the war Lygo decided to stay on in the Navy, qualifying as an instructor and transferring to a permanent commission. He converted to jets, learned to fly helicopters and was type-qualified in the four-engine Lancaster bomber, noting with glee that the only other four-engined vehicle he operated was the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. 
His first seagoing command was the frigate Lowestoft, where he introduced aviation-style checklists for all procedures, unknown until then in the Navy; these did not help prevent one mishap in Trinidad, however, when the engine room artificer forgot to follow his checklist and Lowestoft crashed through a hut at the end of the pier. 
Later Lygo took command of the new Leander-class frigate Juno, where his insistence on the highest possible standards of efficiency and cleanliness led to her being nicknamed the “Royal Yacht”. 
He commanded Ark Royal from 1969 to 1971, becoming a national figure after he was exonerated by an official board of inquiry, following a collision with a Soviet destroyer. The Soviet Kotlin class ship had been aggressively shadowing Ark Royal during a Nato exercise, but cut one manoeuvre too fine. Lygo avoided cutting her in half only by going full astern, but seven Soviet sailors were thrown into the sea by the collision, and two were killed. 
Senior appointments in the Navy followed, as Flag Officer Commanding Carriers and Amphibious Ships, Director General Naval Manpower and Training, Vice-Chief of Naval Staff, and acting First Sea Lord. 
He was appointed KCB in 1977 and left the Navy, aged 54, the following year. 
Lygo went on to join British Aerospace as managing director of its guided missile manufacturing division, later known as the Dynamics Group, advancing to divisional chairman and membership of the BAe board in 1980. He became a forceful salesman of Rapier ground-to-air missile systems (dismissing reports that one major sale was in difficulties as “codswallop”) and an enthusiastic advocate for UK aerospace as a whole. The industry was, he declared, “leaner, more aggressive and more viable than at any time in its history”. In 1983 he was named by Aviation Week Space Technology as one of the industry’s most significant contributors, the citation reading that he had introduced “the ginger of private enterprise” after consolidation and nationalisation had threatened to stultify it. (Ginger was also the colour of his hair.) 
In 1983 he became chairman of BAe’s US subsidiary and a group managing director. He was a prominent spokesman for BAe during the 1985 privatisation sale of the government’s remaining stake in the group, and in the campaign to secure state “launch aid” for BAe’s participation in the Airbus A320 project. He was promoted again, to group chief executive, at the beginning of 1986. 
But Lygo immediately found himself painfully entangled in the politics of Westland, Britain’s last helicopter manufacturer, which had come close to bankruptcy and was about to form an alliance with Sikorsky, the American helicopter maker, as its new major shareholder.
The defence secretary Michael Heseltine strongly favoured an alternative “European solution” — a bid from a consortium of French, German and Italian companies, belatedly joined and led by BAe. Margaret Thatcher and her Trade Secretary, Leon Brittan, declared it a matter for Westland itself to decide. 
Heseltine famously stormed out of the Cabinet over the Westland issue, and Brittan resigned after admitting misleading the House of Commons over the matter of a letter he had received from BAe’s chairman, Sir Austin Pearce, referring to a late-night meeting between Brittan and Lygo, at which the latter understood Brittan to be saying that BAe should withdraw from the European consortium as a matter of national interest. 
Lygo’s notes of the meeting were explicit on the point, but Brittan denied having said any such thing — and a few days later Lygo felt obliged to withdraw his assertion, suggesting instead that Brittan might have advised him to lower his own profile as a spokesman for the consortium. It was apparent that Lygo’s straightforward naval style put him at a disadvantage amid such sinuous and heated political machinations. 
The last strategic move of Lygo’s BAe tenure was the acquisition in 1988 of the Rover car company — which later came to be seen as a distraction from the group’s aerospace investment priorities. He retired in 1989, but took up the chairmanship of TNT Express, the delivery service, and a number of other directorships. 
He also involved himself in a number of bodies which encouraged management education and enterprise, including the Industrial Society and the Prince’s Youth Business Trust, and undertook a review of the management of the Prison Service. 
As president of the St Vincent Association, Lygo proudly took the salute at annual reunion marches through Gosport to HMS St Vincent, where thousands of young naval airmen had entered the Service. He was also a keen fundraiser for the National Deaf-Blind and Rubella Association.
His autobiography, Collision Course: Lygo Shoots Back, was published in 2002. He maintained his love of flying and sold his personal aircraft only a few months before his death. 
Ray Lygo married, in 1950, Pepper van Osten, of Florida. She died in 2004, and he is survived by their two sons and a daughter. In 2009 he married Janette Brown, who also survives him. 

Admiral Sir Raymond Lygo, born March 15 1924, died March 7 2012 

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Mar 22, 2012)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Mar 22, 2012)




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## Wayne Little (Mar 23, 2012)




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## herman1rg (Apr 3, 2012)

One who many may have forgotten has passed away

Air Commodore Ted Sismore - Telegraph


Rest In Peace Sir.


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## Airframes (Apr 3, 2012)

Very sad news. I had the great pleasure of corresponding with Ted for some time, and then the honour and privilege of spending a week with him, and other Mossie and Mustang crews, In Copenhagen for the 50th anniversary of the Shell House raid. 
A real gentlemen of the old school, modest and warm-hearted, and with some incredible anecdotes, especially about his early war service.
RIP Ted.


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## Gnomey (Apr 3, 2012)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 4, 2012)




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## ontos (Apr 5, 2012)

Another hero of the great generation passed on 20March2012. 

John "Jack" Wesley Starr

John Jack Wesley Starr 
John “Jack” Wesley Starr, 90, born July 26, 1921, passed away on March 20, 2012.
Jack was a resident of Banning for 11 years. He passed away at home surrounded by his daughters and son-in-law.
Jack was a P-38 Pilot during WWII stationed in Okinawa, Japan. He was a member of the 28th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron. He flew the P-38 F-5 airplane without armor or guns.
He was honorably discharged as a 1st Lieutenant of the United States Army Air Corps in 1946.
Jack was born and raised in Brush, Colorado by Charles William and Dora Corbett-Starr. School in Brush held his favorite memory, “Found my true love, Virginia Mae Scott” to whom he was married 70 years. They married in 1940 in Brush before he was drafted in June 1942.

He became an Air Force Aviation Cadet on April 1, 1943. Jack graduated from the University of Denver in 1949 majoring in business management. He worked in the trucking industry as management for Sealand, Time-DC and Transcon.
Jack was predeceased by his wife, Virginia, who died on 11-1-09.
He is survived by daughter, Pamela Phillips and husband Ken Phillips, daughter, Julianne Starr, grandchildren Julianne Dawkins-DeSpain and husband Mike DeSpain, Wyman and wife Erika Lancaster, Tiffany and husband Tracey Gunneman, Lindsey and husband Greg John and great-grandchildren Ty Dawkins, Abigail Dawkins and Walter and Adam DeSpain, Jason and Stacie Webster and four great-great grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held on April 10, 2012, 1 p.m. at the Riverside National Cemetery where he will be awarded full military honors.
A Celebration of Life will immediately follow the ceremony at the March Air Reserve Base Museum, P-38 Hanger where he was one of the original docents.
In lieu of flowers the family suggests donations be made to the P-38 National Association at the March Air Reserve Base, 22550 Van Buren Blvd., Riverside, Ca. 92518.


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## vikingBerserker (Apr 5, 2012)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Apr 5, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Apr 6, 2012)




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## Airframes (Apr 6, 2012)

Another of the "faded photos, enclosed in brown leather frames" who has sadly passed.
R.I.P. 'Jack'.


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## Bernhart (May 4, 2012)

just passed yesterday

Friends and acquaintances of Len Wilson were mourning his death and recalling his affable manner and quiet determination as a former Stratford city councillor, school teacher and veteran of the Second World War.

Wilson, who was 88, died Tuesday in the presence of his family, including his wife Mary.

Harry Nesbitt, himself a Second World War vet and a former teacher, recalled that Wilson taught with him years ago at Stratford Northwestern Secondary School.

"I used to chat with him quite often. I used to meet him at the legion every Remembrance Day," said Nesbitt. "First of all, he was a fine gentleman, a person you could trust. I held him in high regard."

Coun. Keith Culliton, who was Stratford's mayor back in the 1970s when Wilson was an alderman for a couple of terms, said he and Wilson held similar political views.

"I felt he had a very quiet understanding of the city's problems, but if he had a good idea he was determined to sell it. He provided a tremendous service to the citizens of this city as a councillor."

Culliton recalled Wilson's more recent and impassioned presentation to city council about removing the evergreen tree in front of city hall. (Wilson felt the tree obscuring the view of the heritage building was ill-advised.)

"He was a great councillor.... I'm sorry that he has passed away," said Culliton.

As a city alderman, Wilson was an advocate for preserving the city's 19th-century buildings.

Bob Cassels, a past president of the Dominion Command of the Army Navy and Air Force Veterans Association and current president of the Ontario Command, said Wilson was "a fine gentleman."

He recalled Wilson had taught his daughter at Northwestern.

"He was very meticulous about everything. He kept records of everything," said Cassels. "He was quite a guy. I always found him very nice to talk to."

Cassels was instrumental in arranging a D-Day trip to Normandy in 2009 for Wilson with Veterans Affairs.

A fighter pilot with RCAF 442 Squadron, Wilson's Spitfire squadron supported the Allied invasion as it moved across northern France and into the Netherlands. The squadron later converted to Mustangs in support of Bomber Command and participated in the last RCAF operational sortie of the war during the liberation of the Channel Islands on May 9, 1945, a day after the Allied victory had been declared.

In a 2009 interview recalling his wartime experience, Wilson credited a U.S. pilot for saving his life when his aircraft came under attack from German planes on New Year's Day 1945.

Wilson re-enlisted in the RCAF during the Korean War and served at RCAF Centralia as a flying instructor before moving on to other military postings during the Cold War.

He taught high school business subjects in Stratford and Elmira from 1970-85.

The veteran would also share his wartime experiences with students as a guest speaker at Remembrance Day assemblies.

A celebration of Wilson's life is scheduled for 3 p.m. Saturday at St. John's United Church.

A full obituary was published Wednesday in The Beacon Herald.


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## Gnomey (May 5, 2012)




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## Njaco (May 6, 2012)

to all who have gone before.


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## vikingBerserker (May 6, 2012)




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## B-17engineer (May 16, 2012)

Don Bryan 328 FS 352nd FG ace passed away. Was just informed by email from Punchy Powell another 352nd pilot


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## gumbyk (May 21, 2012)

Phil Lamason, DFC Bar 


Phil Lamason, the New Zealand World War II bomber pilot who saved a large group of Allied airmen from death in the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp, has died at the age of 93. 

Lamason died at his home on the farm outside Dannevirke where he lived yesterday afternoon, his son, John, said. 

Lamason, a squadron leader, ranked as the senior officer among the 168 airmen marched into the notorious camp in August 1944 and risked his own life to get word to the Luftwaffe, the German air force, that the men were being held there illegally. 

The tough, determined New Zealander learned the Gestapo had ordered the execution of the group of flyers and worked desperately to smuggle out news of their incarceration.

On October 19, 1944, Luftwaffe officers, who had no time for the Gestapo, arrived at the camp gates and demanded the release of the airmen. The flyers were freed and taken to Sagan, a regular Prisoner of War camp. 

The majority of the 168 had been shot down in raids over France and, like Lamason, had been on the run in civilian clothes before being captured and held in Fresnes prison outside Paris. 

Because they were not in uniform they were regarded as enemy agents or saboteurs and not accorded POW rights. 

On 15 August 1944, five days before Paris was liberated, the men were herded into grossly overcrowded railway cars and five days later delivered to Buchenwald in eastern Germany, southwest of Leipzig. 

Buchenwald wasn't an extermination camp but thousands of prisoners slaving in nearby munitions plants died from disease and hunger and countless others were killed by random acts of brutality and their bodies thrown in the camp ovens. 

One RAF man wrote later that Lamason "epitomised all that is good in a leader and there is no doubt in my mind that his sustained effort as the front man for our group ... was a major contributing factor in us ... getting transferred to a recognised POW camp." 

SS guards manned Buchenwald but much of the administration was run by inmate factions and Lamason had to make many contacts and tread carefully to succeed in getting word of their plight to the Luftwaffe. 

A Dutchman was particularly helpful. Lamason said years later: "I told him just to say we were here and to get us out. He achieved it but I don't know how. I never inquired and I didn't want to know. I'd seen how the Germans handled people. If you didn't know something they couldn't get it out of you." 

Two of the 168 - two New Zealanders, nine Australians, 29 Canadians, 47 Britons and 81 Americans - died from sickness in Buchenwald and the airmen's shaven heads and emaciated frames shocked POWs in Sagan. 

The second New Zealander was Malcolm Cullen, from Maungaturoto, Northland, a Typhoon pilot shot down over Amiens in May 1944. He was on the loose until picked up in Paris two months later. Cullen died in 2003. 

Lamason joined the RNZAF in September 1940, learned to fly here and sailed for England in April 1941. 

He flew his first tour on Stirlings with 218 Squadron, winning an immediate Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) in April 42 for beating off German night fighters with some skilled flying on the way home from Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. 

He then instructed other pilots at 1657 Heavy Conversion Unit and while there was twice mentioned in dispatches for "bravery and distinguished service" before joining 15 Squadron on Lancasters for his second tour as a flight commander and squadron leader. 

Lamason flew the tough targets in early 1944 - Berlin, Leipzig, Nuremberg - and was awarded a second DFC for "gallantry, leadership and enthusiasm". 

The New Zealander, a solid six-footer, was not afraid to speak his mind. Before the Nuremberg raid in March 1944, the RAF's worst night of the war when 100 Lancasters were lost, Lamason tackled the station commander. He was hugely critical of the route chosen and forecast heavy losses. 

Lamason was proved correct and was dismayed to watch bombers going down all along the route. 

The New Zealander survived that raid unscathed but his Lancaster was shot down while bombing a bridge outside Paris the night after D-Day, June 7, 1944. He and his navigator parachuted together and were sheltered by French patriots until they were captured by the Gestapo in Paris seven weeks later and locked away in Fresnes Prison. 

After he got back to England in May 1945, Lamason was chosen to lead one of the Lancaster squadrons for "Tiger Force" for the final battle against Japan. 

He was on his way home on furlough before the assignment when the war was ended by the atomic bomb. 

Lamason was tempted by English peacetime flying jobs offered to him but he and his wife Joan, whom he'd married before going overseas, settled on the farm at Dannevirke. 

Lamason's role in the Buchenwald affair was first publicised in the 2005 book Night After Night - New Zealanders in Bomber Command - and that led to several documentaries about his story, one an American-made programme, Lost Airmen of Buchenwald, shown recently on Prime. 

Born in Napier on September 15, 1918, Philip John Lamason is survived by two sons and two daughters. His wife died in 2009.


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## Wayne Little (Jun 8, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Jun 8, 2012)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jun 8, 2012)




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## v2 (Aug 6, 2012)

Last survivor of the Westerplatte defence, Maj. *Ignacy Skowron*, died at age 97 

Maj. Ignacy Skowron, the last known Polish survivor of the opening battle of World War II, died on Sunday at the age of 97.

Family friend Zofia Nowak said Monday that Skowron died at his grandson's home in Kielce, in southern Poland, after suffering circulatory, liver and pancreas problems.

The last time that he took part in observances of the battle's anniversary at the Westerplatte, a date marked somberly every year on Sept. 1, was in 2009, Nowak said. On his 97th birthday, last month, he was bedridden and weak, she said.

Skowron, at the time a corporal, was one of some 200 Polish troops guarding a military depot at Westerplatte, near the city of Gdansk, when it came under heavy fire from a German warship, the Schlezwig-Holstein.

Cut from any supplies or reinforcements, the Poles held out for seven days in the face of attack by more than 1,500 Nazi German troops from land, sea and air, but were eventually captured as prisoners.

Skowron was released from war prisoner camp in 1940 due to ill health and settled with his family near Kielce. He worked for Polish railways until his 1975 retirement. He then dedicated his life to telling the story of the battle to the younger generations.

His funeral will be held Wednesday in Brzeziny, near Kielce.


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## Wayne Little (Aug 6, 2012)




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## vikingBerserker (Aug 6, 2012)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Aug 6, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Aug 6, 2012)




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## v2 (Sep 28, 2012)

Mjr *Kazimierz Szrajer *

Known to his friends as ‘Paddy’, Kazimierz J. Szrajer, a long-time resident of the Barry’s Bay area and World War II pilot, recently died at 92 years of age and The Valley Gazette would like to honour his passing.
As a young boy in Poland, Szrajer embraced everything about flying and flew toy gliders around in the air.
At the age of 16, however, Szrajer’s parents forced him to stop flying the tiny airplanes, as his brother, who was a professional navigator, was killed in a flying accident.
In September of 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and Szrajer’s life was altered forever.
Along with many other countrymen, he came to England at the beginning of the war to fight for his country.
While waiting to join a flying school, he worked as an instrument mechanic with the 303 Squadron, on such renowned aircrafts as Spitfires and Hurricanes.
According to local resident Zigmund Bloskie of Wilno, Szrajer was a true hero who deserved to have his life story presented.
“I think his story needs to be told,” Bloskie noted.
Not having personally known Szrajer, Bloskie has been collecting information about the local airman for some time.
“It’s an inspiring story and really all that was printed about him was a small obituary a few weeks ago, and I don’t think that’s enough,” Bloskie noted.
Having had a retrospective book written about him, entitled A Question of Honor by authors Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud, Szrajer definitely had a long, decorated and brave life.
The book focuses on Szrajer’s squadron, called Squadron 303, and his life before becoming a bomber pilot.
Szrajer was a Polish pilot who flew and fought in the Battle of Britain and many other operations in Britain in World War II.
Becoming a media sensation after the Battle of Britain, Szrajer and his fellow Polish airmen were denied access to the victory parade, as the new Labour government had to appease Stalin after he had taken over Poland.
Oddly enough, only Winston Churchill and a few other world leaders displayed a serious disagreement at the government’s actions during the parade.
One of the most significant and heroic moments of Szrajer’s life, however, came during a mission that took him behind enemy lines to retrieve top secret parts from a V-2 rocket.
The V-2 rocket was, in fact, the weapon that Hitler was convinced would help him win the war for Nazi Germany.
It is documented that on October 3, 1942, the first V-2 was launched from Peenemünde; a small town off the coast of Baltic Sea.
Breaking the sound barrier, the rocket reached an altitude of 60 miles, and was the first recorded launch of a ballistic missile and the first rocket to reach the fringes of space.
Developed by Germany, the creation program of the rocket was as influential to the German gross national product as the Manhattan atom bomb project was to the United States of America.
Having flown several secret missions in his lifetime, Szrajer was experienced in dropping fellow soldiers and supplies behind enemy lines.
This V-2 rocket mission, however, was given the codename “Third Bridge” and was more daring than anything the pilot had experienced to date.
On the evening of July 25, 1944, Szrajer was the co-pilot of a Dakota transport aircraft that was en route to a small landing strip in occupied Poland that was close to the rocket parts.
With four passengers aboard the airplane, the Dakota landed on the airstrip during its second attempt and two of the soldiers, Jerzy Chmielewski and Jozef Retinger, quickly acquired a bag of parts and were back on the plane within minutes.
The Dakota had taken off from Southern Italy and Szrajer, who was co-piloting, only had five minutes of training in the operation of the aircraft that occurred just before takeoff.
With all of the passengers in tow, Szrajer and his head pilot had the Dakota engines fired up, but the plane sputtered, as it had rained a few days before on the airfield, and was suddenly stuck in the mud.
Having to decrease the load of the plane, Szrajer ordered all soldiers and their baggage off of the aircraft.
Working with the other airmen, Szrajer dug some trenches behind the wheels of the plane and filled them with straw to try and create some traction, but it still would not move.
On the heels of daylight, the members of the Dakota were working against the clock.
Under orders to burn the aircraft if they couldn’t get it back into the air, Szrajer and his crew were delayed an hour
by this mishap, and made one last attempt at freeing the plane by putting boards underneath the wheels.
The Dakota finally jarred itself free, and careened through the muddy terrain and lifted itself off the ground.

Here is a first-hand account in K. Szrajer words:

"...These events took place in July 1944 toward the end of my operational tour on Halifaxes. I was with the 1586 Flight stationed at Brindisi, Italy. I was called by our squadron leader who informed me that I was assigned to the British crew of a Dakota for an assignment to Poland. We were to land there for a pickup. He advised me to be physically and morally prepared for this flight. I felt deeply honoured and for a next few days I was excited, impatiently waiting for my assignment.

Finally, in a morning of July 25th, I was informed that the flight would take place that night. The plane was to land at Brindisi to pick me up. I suddenly realized that I never flew that type of aircraft, and started be a little apprehensive. My commander assured me that I'll do just fine and that the British pilot would brief me about plane's systems and a take-off procedure. That exactly what happened. I took F/Lt Culliford, a New Zealander, about five minutes to introduce me to Dakota. After referring me to instruments, fuel and undercarriage system, he made a fully qualified co-pilot. Our plane had two extra tanks installed in the fuselage, what extended its range significantly and allowed us to stay airborne for at least 13 hours. Our crew consisted of: F/Lt S.C. Culliford (pilot), F/O K. Szrajer (co-pilot and translator), F/O J.P. Williams (navigator) and F/Sgt J. Appleby (wireless operator). It was to be my twentieth flight to the occupied Poland.
By pure luck, this mission was almost scrapped by the last minute, when unexpectedly, a day before the operation, the Germans set up an outpost with two FW190s fighters on the very strip designated for Dakota to land. Fortunately, they left the same day and Resistance was able to prepare everything on time. 
We took off from Brindisi at 7:30 p.m. escorted by a Polish Liberator. It was mostly for our psychical comfort, since both planes were easy target for German fighters. On board we had some equipment and four passengers. Not only the common sense but also strict regulations prohibited us from knowing who they were. After the war I learned from different sources that our passengers were: Kazimierz Bilski, Jan Nowak, Leszek Starzynski and Boguslaw Wolniak. During crossing of the Yugoslavian coast nightfall came. Until that moment I had a radio contact with our escort, which took its own course. Ours led through Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Over Hungary we saw AA in action, but far from us and apparently stimulated by somebody else. Our orientation point for landing was the outlet of the River Dunajec to the River Vistula. We reached it according to plan, right on time. Down there they waited for us, and after signals exchange, the lights appeared on four corners of the landing strip. Pilot made two attempts before putting down the plane. Right after we stopped I opened the door to established contact with the receiving party. I was welcomed by Wlodzimierz Gedymin who commanded on the ground. Our passengers left, the equipment was unloaded and took five new passengers. They were: T. Arciszewski, J. Retinger, J. Chmielewski, T. Chciuk and C. Micinski. Jerzy Chmielewski was in possession of the V-2 parts and written report on them. He was responsible for the watch on Blizna.
After only several minutes on the ground we got ready to take off. It turned out that the field was oozy. Our Dakota was stuck in the mud. I immediately realized my situation: I was on a Polish soil and I could join the Polish Resistance and in few days meet my family and friends. The Polish officer was asking me a lot of questions about certain people, Polish units, etc. while there was no time to waste. We franticly tried to free the aircraft, all in vain. We were running out of time and we discussed burning the plane. Finally, after an hour and five minutes on a ground, we succeeded and took off for home. 

We still had a big problem on our hands. In our desperation to budge the aircraft we severed their hydraulic hoses to eliminate the possibility of the wheels' locked breaks. This prevented us from lifting up the undercarriage. Flying with the wheels down created a drag what threatened with running out of fuel before reaching our base. We filled the hydraulic tank with whatever fluid we could get: water, thermos tea, whatever. By the time we passed the Tatra Mountains we had the wheels up. Then I went to see to our passengers and instruct them about parachute harness in case of need. Back in the cockpit I took over the controls. It was a beautiful, starry and calm night and we all calmed down, calculating that after three hours of flight we'll back home and relatively safe. I reflected on the group of people we left in behind us, who already for five years fought with the hated occupant, and who put a lot of effort into the "Third Bridge". Our successful flight back to Allied territory with the parts of V-2 was their triumph..."


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## Wurger (Sep 28, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Sep 28, 2012)




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## vikingBerserker (Sep 28, 2012)




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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Sep 28, 2012)

R.I.P sir.


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## Wayne Little (Sep 29, 2012)




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## v2 (Oct 22, 2012)

Fl/lt *William Louis Buchanan "Bill/Johnnie" WALKER *(24.08.1913-21.10.2012) passed away aged 99. During the Battle of Britain he flew Hurricanes with 616. Sqn "South Yorkshire".


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## Wayne Little (Oct 22, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Oct 22, 2012)




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## v2 (Oct 24, 2012)

*Wilhelm Brasse*, Polish Auschwitz prisoner and photographer of other inmates, dies at 95. 

The images are haunting: naked and emaciated children at Auschwitz standing shoulder-to-shoulder, adult prisoners in striped garb posing for police-style mug shots. 
One of several photographers to capture such images, Wilhelm Brasse, has died at the age of 95. A Polish photographer who was arrested and sent to Auschwitz early in World War II, he was put to work documenting his fellow prisoners, an emotionally devastating task that tormented him long after his liberation. 
Jaroslaw Mensfelt, a spokesman at the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum, said that Brasse died on Tuesday in Zywiec, a town in southern Poland. 
Brasse, who was born in 1917 and was not Jewish, was sent to Auschwitz at 22 as a political prisoner for trying to sneak out of German-occupied Poland in the spring of 1940. Because he had worked before the war in a photography studio in Katowice, in southern Poland, he was put to work in the camp's photography and identification department.
The job helped to save his life, enabling him to get better treatment and food than many others. Because he worked with the SS, the elite Nazi force, he was also kept cleaner "so as not to offend the SS men," he recalled in an Associated Press interview in 2006. 
After the war, he had nightmares for years of the Nazi victims he was forced to photograph. Among them were emaciated Jewish girls who were about to undergo cruel medical experiments under the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. 
"I didn't return to my profession, because those Jewish kids, and the naked Jewish girls, constantly flashed before my eyes," he said. "Even more so because I knew that later, after taking their pictures, they would just go to the gas." 
In the AP interview, Brasse said believed he took about 40,000 to 50,000 of the identity photographs that the Nazis used to register their prisoners — part of the Nazi obsession with documenting their work. These pictures are among some of the notorious images associated with the camp. 
Brasse was not alone in documenting prisoners. Mensfelt said there were other photographers as well and that an estimated 200,000 such pictures were probably taken. Most were destroyed.Now it's difficult to say which of the surviving photos were Brasses's because they generally did not carry the photographer's name. Some he remembered and was able to identify later. 
At the war's end, with the Soviet army about to liberate Auschwitz, the Germans ordered the photos destroyed. Brasse and others refused the order and managed to save about 40,000 of them. 
Though Brasse early on in his captivity was the only professional photographer in the SS documentation office, eventually some other prisoners took over taking ID photos. Brasse was given new assignments, including taking the pictures of prisoner tattoos and pictures for Mengele.
Mengele ordered pictures of various prisoners he planned to perform his experiments on, including Jewish twins, dwarfs, stunted people and people with noma, a disease common in the malnourished that can result in the loss of flesh. 
"I had to take close-ups. He said sometimes you will be able to see the whole bone of the jaw, and that I have to do close-ups of it. I did the close-ups, in harsh light, and you could see to the bone," Brasse said. "Later, my boss called me in, and Dr. Mengele expressed his happiness with the pictures I'd taken, that I'd taken them just as he had needed them to be done."
Brasse said he never had the right to refuse what Mengele or the other Germans demanded. 
"It was an order, and prisoners didn't have the right to disagree. I couldn't say 'I won't do that,'" he recalled in 2006. "I only listened to what I had to do and because I didn't harm anyone by what I was doing, I tried to address them politely."

source: FOX NEWS


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## Gnomey (Oct 24, 2012)




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## v2 (Oct 28, 2012)

Flight Lieutenant* William Walker* 
Flight Lieutenant William Walker, who has died aged 99, was shot down in his Spitfire during the Battle of Britain and wounded. Late in his life, having become the oldest surviving pilot of the Battle, he wrote poetry in memory of his fellow aircrew. 
During the late morning of August 26 1940, Walker and his squadron colleagues of No 616 (South Yorkshire) Auxiliary Squadron were scrambled from Kenley to intercept a raid of 40 enemy bombers approaching Dover. Too low to attack the raiders, the squadron turned north to gain height but were ambushed by a large formation of Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters. 
Within minutes, three Spitfires had been shot down. As Walker attacked a Bf 109 his Spitfire was hit from behind and he was wounded in the leg. The controls were shot away and Walker was forced to bail out at 20,000ft. He landed in the English Channel very close to a sandbank, which he was able to reach. Shortly afterwards, suffering from hypothermia, he was picked up by a fishing boat. 
A large crowd cheered as he was landed at Ramsgate, but the badly damaged hospital there was unable to deal with his wound. He was taken instead to an RAF hospital where a .303 bullet was removed from his ankle, a souvenir he kept for the rest of his life. 
The son of a brewer, William Louis Buchanan Walker was born in Hampstead on August 24 1913. After leaving Brighton College, where he was a contemporary of the actor Sir Michael Hordern, he joined his father in the brewery trade. 
Walker joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve at Oxford in September 1938 to train as a pilot. Called up on the outbreak of war, he completed his training before joining No 616, based near Beverley in East Yorkshire, where the squadron’s task was to guard the industrial cities of the north. 
The month of August saw an increased tempo of fighting as the Battle of Britain intensified. On the 15th, the Luftwaffe launched a major attack from Norway and Denmark against the north of England. No 616 was scrambled and intercepted a large force of bombers approaching the Yorkshire coast. 
Walker, who had only recently joined, flew on the wing of his section leader as they attacked the force. By the end of the engagement, six enemy bombers had been shot down. Four days later, No 616 moved to Kenley, where Walker was immediately in action. 
He returned to flying after six months’ treatment, joining an aircraft ferry unit before transferring to No 116 Squadron on anti-aircraft co-operation duties. He was released from the RAF in September 1945 and received the Air Efficiency Award. 
Post-war, he returned to the brewing trade and rose to become chairman of Ind Coope, a role previously held by his father. He never lost his liking for a pint. 
In later life, Walker was a strong supporter of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust. Fit and well into old age, he was ever-present at the annual service of remembrance held at the memorial at Capel-le-Ferne overlooking the English Channel in Kent, which always concluded with him stepping forward and reciting, in a strong voice, one of his poems. 
Best known is Our Wall, written to celebrate the stone inscription of the names of 2,937 members of The Few. During the 70th anniversary commemorations in July 2010, the Patron of the Trust, Prince Michael of Kent, unveiled a copy of the poem, carved and sited alongside the wall it describes. To great acclaim, Walker then read the poem, which describes the “many brave unwritten tales/That were simply told in vapour trails”.
His poems were published in 2011 with the proceeds donated to the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust. 
William Walker married Claudine Walker, one of the Mawby triplets, in August 1941. They separated later in life and she died in September 2012. They had seven children, including Tim Walker, Mandrake columnist at the Telegraph. Two children predeceased them. 
Flt Lt William Walker, born August 24 1913, died October 21 2012 

source: The Telegraph


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## Vassili Zaitzev (Oct 28, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Oct 28, 2012)




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## Thorlifter (Nov 2, 2012)

George Smith, one of the Navajo code talkers who helped the U.S. military outfox the Japanese during World War II by sending messages in their obscure language, has died, the president of the Navajo Nation said.

"This news has saddened me," Ben Shelly, the Navajo president, said in a post Wednesday on his Facebook page. "Our Navajo code talkers have been real life heroes to generations of Navajo people."

Smith died Tuesday, Shelly said, and the Navajo Nation's flag is flying at half-staff until Sunday night to commemorate his life.

See CNN's complete coverage of Veterans in Focus

Several hundred Navajo tribe members served as code talkers for the United States during World War II, using a military communications code based on the Navajo language. They sent messages back and forth from the front lines of fighting, relaying crucial information during pivotal battles like Iwo Jima.

Military authorities chose Navajo as a code language because it was almost impossible for a non-Navajo to learn and had no written form. It was the only code the Japanese never managed to crack.

The Navajo code talkers participated in every assault the U.S. Marines carried out in the Pacific between 1942 and 1945.

The code talkers themselves were forbidden from telling anyone about the code -- not their fellow Marines, not their families -- until it was declassified in 1968.

Now in their 80s and 90s, only a handful of code talkers remain.

"They have brought pride to our Navajo people in so many ways," Shelly said. "The nation's prayers and thoughts are with the family at this time as they mourn the passing of a great family man who served his country and protected his people."

Shelly's Facebook post didn't mention Smith's age or the cause and location of his death. A statement about the death on the official Navajo Nation website was not accessible late Thursday.


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## Gnomey (Nov 2, 2012)




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## Wayne Little (Nov 3, 2012)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Nov 3, 2012)




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## bobbysocks (Nov 19, 2012)

I sadly report the passing of James McLane Jr. He served with the 357th Fighter Group based out of Leiston, UK. I had the extreme pleasure to spend time with Jim at the last 357th mini reunion at their museum in Ida, La a year ago. He was a true gentleman and gracious man. attached is a letter from his son Jim McLane III and a link to a story or 2 written by him. He will be missed.


Several folks have asked me about memorial services for my father. 

On Tuesday, Nov. 27 at 7 pm a funeral service and reception will be held at Lakeside Lutheran Church, 1101 South Egret Bay Blvd, League City TX. My dad's ashes will be interred on a later date in the Houston National (Veterans) Cemetery. 

An obituary appeared in the Sunday Nov 18th Houston Chronicle. 

James McLane Obituary: View James McLane's Obituary by Houston Chronicle 

On a related subject, an article based on a story my father told begins on page 20 in the latest issue of Horizons, a technical society newsletter. The newsletter can be downloaded and read here. 

http://www.aiaahouston.org/Horizons/Horizons_2012_09_and_10.pdf

It's a large file so the download may take a minute or so. 

Jim McLane III
Houston TX

Kit Carson's Narrow Escape

http://www.cebudanderson.com/narrowescape.htm


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## vikingBerserker (Nov 19, 2012)

My deepest sympathy to you and your familly.


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## mhan (Nov 20, 2012)

Hoping the following is of interest to you. I am a retired History teacher with an interest in WW2 and militaria. I have just purchased a lot at a Sydney auction house, described as quantity of Spitfire/airforce ephemera, it consists of a 2 ear piece wireless head set with detached wires, I imagine this to be the WW2 spitfire bit, an incomplete set of Rude Star identifier round charts from 1942 USA Navypublication, and a number of items dating from the decade 1960-1970 that would relate to a pilot ie Flight radio operator's manual 1969, the observers basic book of aircraft civil 1970, Sight reduction tables for air navigation vol 3 1967, neatly written on the Flight radio operators manual is C H Parkinson. I asked the auctioneer why he described this as a spitfire lot, he said it had been purchased some time back by a friend of his for her son and he did not want it, so was reselling it, cost me $120. I think what I have is Aust'n WW2 pilot F/O Colin Henry DFC, his spitfire headset and star navigation charts. If this is so he must have flown as a commercial pilot after the war, and I found this forum trying to track down his obituary on the net. what do you think, if you would like to see a picture of the headset etc, please get back to me,
regards Mark in Newcastle


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## Wayne Little (Nov 20, 2012)




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## Thorlifter (Dec 17, 2012)

Democratic Sen. Inouye of Hawaii dies at 88 | The Ticket - Yahoo! News

Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii has died at age 88 after battling a respiratory illness, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Monday. Inouye won the Medal of Honor in World War II—a conflict that cost him his right arm—and later became the first Japanese-American House member and then senator.

His last word was "Aloha," his office said.

"I rise with a real heavy heart. Our friend Dan Inouye just died," Reid said in an emotional tribute. "His commitment to our nation will never be surpassed."

Reid, who several times was at loss for words, said he had spoken to Inouye's wife, Irene. "We will all miss him—and that's a gross understatement."

President Barack Obama said in a statement on Monday that "our country has lost a true American hero."

"It was his incredible bravery during World War II—including one heroic effort that cost him his arm but earned him the Medal of Honor—that made Danny not just a colleague and a mentor, but someone revered by all of us lucky enough to know him," Obama said.

The long-serving senator—he was second in longevity in office only to the late Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia—served as the chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. He never boasted about his military service, but his obituary in Hawaii's Star-Advertiser newspaper included this astonishing passage:

In northern Italy in April 1945 as the war in Europe was coming to an end, Inouye moved his platoon against German troops near San Terenzo. Inouye crawled up a slope and tossed two hand grenades into a German machine-gun nest. He stood up with his tommy gun and raked a second machine-gun nest before being shot in the stomach. But he kept charging until his right arm was hit by an enemy rifle grenade and shattered.

"I looked at it, stunned and disbelieving. It dangled there by a few bloody shreds of tissue, my grenade still clenched in a fist that suddenly didn't belong to me anymore," Inouye wrote in his 1967 autobiography, "Journey to Washington," written with Lawrence Elliott.

Inouye wrote that he pried the grenade out of his right hand and threw it at the German gunman, who was killed by the explosion. He continued firing his gun until he was shot in the right leg and knocked down the hillside. Badly wounded, he ordered his men to keep attacking and they took the ridge from the enemy.

Inouye died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington at 5:01 p.m., his office said. The senator generally stayed out of the limelight, but he was well known in Washington as a staunch defender of lawmakers' securing federal cash for their home states. He also enjoyed some prominence as a member of the committee that investigated the Watergate break-in that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation and chairing the special committee that investigated the Iran-Contra scandal.

"Sen. Daniel Inouye was a man who rarely called attention to himself but who lived a remarkable American life filled with the dignity and grace of a true hero," Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said. "He was a man who had every reason to call attention to himself but who never did."

"He was the kind of man, in short, that America has always been grateful to have, especially in her darkest hours, men who lead by example and who expect nothing in return," McConnell said.


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## vikingBerserker (Dec 18, 2012)




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## v2 (Dec 20, 2012)

*Tadeusz Haska* - If it weren't for Poland, we'd all be speaking Mongolian right now... 

Tadeusz Haska died last week at 93. A long-time chairman of the Polish department at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Dr. Haska joined the Resistance to fight the Germans during World War II. Soon after the war he ran for elected office, but was imprisoned when the communists took over Poland. He escaped to Sweden, then returned on a daring boat raid across the Baltic Sea to spirit his wife out of the country. They made it to America in 1949 and he began his Cold War career educating our service members during the protracted struggle against the Soviets. 
In many ways, Dr. Haska personified the indomitable Polish spirit, something that neither Nazi terror nor communist control could ever break. Indeed, even as we marvel today at the people power of the Arab Spring and the "color revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia a decade ago, our gaze should extend back to an earlier mass movement: Poland's Solidarity. Not only did the rising there free the Poles, it also sparked the collapse of Soviet control in central Europe. 
Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his book Game Plan, a prescient strategic meditation on what was to become the final phase of the Cold War, pointed out Poland's critical role then -- and in the future. As he saw it, for Moscow, Poland was a "linchpin state" whose loss would prove a fatal blow to Russian geostrategic aims in Europe. So it was. By 1999, Poland was a NATO member. Today, it serves as a bulwark of strategic forward defense for the whole alliance -- against a range of threats, perhaps even those posed by a looming new age of missile warfare. 
It is interesting to note that Poland has played a similar role as shield more than once in its earlier history. In the 13th century, even in defeat at the Battle of Liegnitz (1241) against the Mongols, the Poles' and their allies' fierce resistance may have served to deter future invasions by the steppe hordes. Historians suggest that the Mongol commander was distracted by a budding political succession struggle back home. But the fact is that the Mongols never came back; they stayed on to rule in Russia, but left the Poles -- and the rest of the West -- alone.
In the 17th century the major threat to Europe came from the Ottoman Empire, which was already in control of the Balkans and battering at the gates of Vienna (1683). After two months under siege, the city was close to falling, but once again the Poles, under King John Sobieski, rode to the rescue. The Turks were defeated in battle, the siege was lifted, and the Ottoman threat to Europe was over for good. 
In the following decades, though, Poland itself came under siege. Russia pressed from the east, Germany from the west, Austria from the south, and even Sweden encroached from the north. By the centennial of the siege of Vienna, Poland was being partitioned. In 1795, after an insurgency led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko -- a "foreign fighter" who helped the colonies during the American revolution -- was put down, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. Hardly a fitting reward for a shield of the West. 
Poland was restored to Europe's map in 1919 by the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles. The nation was reborn fighting. Russia's new communist rulers, in the process of winning a civil war against tsarist loyalists and defeating an intervention by the Western Allies, began to look to the heart of devastated Europe as a field of easy conquest. The only thing standing between the Soviets and their goal was the newly minted Polish military. 
The Poles were outnumbered and, for reasons that still defy logical explanation, on the receiving end of pro-Russian Western press accounts that left them virtually without external support -- save, that is, for a small French contingent whose members included Charles de Gaulle. The war raged back and forth, with the Soviets finally seeming on the verge of capturing Warsaw. The Poles, refusing to accept defeat, conjured the "miracle on the Vistula" that autumn of 1920, saving their country -- and probably the rest of Europe. 
While Poland was swiftly overrun by German and Soviet forces in 1939, the Poles continued to resist at home and tens of thousands made their way to the West to continue the fight. One of their most notable contributions came in the fall of 1940, during the Battle of Britain, when about 1,500 Polish pilots comprised a very significant percentage of those that Winston Churchill called "the Few" who saved Britain -- and so much more. The Normandy invasion would never have been possible had England fallen. 
So there it is. Whether in ferocious resistance to the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks, the early- and late-Soviet Union -- even the Nazis -- Poland has repeatedly served to shield Europe from aggression, and in its own distinct way. A Slavic nation, but Roman Catholic rather than Orthodox. Sharing an open, hard-to-defend geography with its Prussian neighbor, but liberal and peace-loving rather than militaristic. In short, a most paradoxical nation, cast against type for the role it played. 
Dr. Haska embodied the Polish national character. A thoughtful intellectual, a master of nine languages, and a historian, he had also been a partisan who mounted hit-and-run raids against the Nazis. And he was so proud of his heritage. When I first met him, greeting him with a passable Dzien dobry, his face lit up and he spoke only Polish with me. Most of which I could not understand -- but I got the gist. 
At his wake last Thursday night, most of the whispers I heard were in Polish, too. There was much sorrow in the words, but there was a strong current of pride as well, duly honoring this fallen shield-bearer. 

source: Foreign Policy


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## Gnomey (Dec 20, 2012)




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## Wayne Little (Dec 26, 2012)




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## v2 (Dec 28, 2012)

Wing Commander *William Hoy* 

Wing Commander William Hoy, who has died aged 93, was a successful wartime night fighter pilot, and in 1957 set a new world record time for a flight from Tokyo to London. During the early post-war years, the RAF Flying College flew a variety of aircraft named “Aries” on a series of long-range and record-breaking flights. Hoy joined the college as an instructor in June 1955, coinciding with the arrival of a specially modified Canberra PR 7, “Aries V”. 
In June 1956 Hoy took the aircraft on a series of flights in West Africa, studying the problems of flying at very high altitude near the tropopause (the boundary between the dense atmosphere around Earth, known as the troposphere, and the stratosphere) in equatorial latitudes. He then flew the aircraft direct from Dakar to his base in Lincolnshire, a distance of 2,760 miles. 
A year later he made his record-breaking flight from Tokyo. The aircraft had been flown to Japan on May 23 1957 by another crew from the Flying College in an elapsed time of 19 hours. After just two hours on the ground, Aries V, flown by Hoy and his crew, took off for Fairbanks in Alaska, where they refuelled before heading for the North Pole on a direct flight to London. They landed after a flight of 4,211 miles, the longest ever record attempt by a RAF jet aircraft at that time. The total elapsed time for the 8,000-mile flight from Tokyo was a few minutes short of 18 hours. Hoy was awarded an AFC for his work at the RAF Flying College. 
William Hoy was born in Edinburgh on December 23 1918 and educated at George Watson’s College, where he won a scholarship to the RAF College, Cranwell. He graduated as a pilot in October 1939. 
He flew Anson and Hudson aircraft on shipping sweeps over the North Sea, taking part in the operations over the Norwegian coast after the German invasion in April 1940. He then joined No 420 Flight, flying the antiquated Harrow bomber on operations to drop aerial mines by night. The mines were attached to 2,000ft of piano wire in the hope that enemy bombers would fly into the wire, causing the mines to strike them and explode. There are no recorded successes. 
Converting to the Beaufighter night fighter in late 1941, Hoy joined No 604 Squadron and was soon appointed a flight commander. On the night of July 29 1942 he shot down a Heinkel bomber off Land’s End and, in spring 1943, he accounted for two more off the coast of Yorkshire and damaged a third. On another occasion he led another Beaufighter on a well-planned attack on an enemy reconnaissance aircraft, which was destroyed as a direct result of Hoy’s initiative. In July 1943 he was awarded a DFC . 
After a rest period, Hoy returned to the front line as flight commander of 25 Squadron, flying the Mosquito. On July 9 1944 he shot down a V-1 flying bomb over the Channel. 
After the war Hoy commanded two night fighter squadrons before being appointed wing commander, flying at Church Fenton in Yorkshire – the home of four fighter squadrons. He attended No 1 Course at the new RAF Flying College at Manby, Lincolnshire, before taking up an appointment in the Middle East. 
After his flight in Aries V, Hoy served with Nato and at the Air Ministry. His last appointment before retiring in 1966 was as station commander at RAF Manston in Kent. 
Hoy then worked as the station manager for Invicta Airways, operating from Manston, before joining the building industry, spending some years on the sales staff of Tunnel Cement. He finally retired to Bedfordshire before moving to Australia to live near his daughter. 
William Hoy married, in 1945, Monica Evans. She and a son predeceased him. He is survived by his daughter. 
Wg Cdr William Hoy, born December 23 1918, died November 20 2012.

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Dec 28, 2012)

Flight Lieutenant *Jimmy Corbin* 

Flight Lieutenant Jimmy Corbin, who has died aged 95, had just 29 hours’ flying time in the Spitfire when he joined his fighter squadron during the Battle of Britain. Corbin arrived on No 66 Squadron as it moved south to Surrey in late August 1940, as the Battle was reaching its climax. Because he had so little experience, he was dispatched by his CO to the north of England for a few weeks’ extra training before returning to No 66, which had moved to Gravesend. During the final month of the Battle, Corbin was in action over his native Kent. 
As the Battle of Britain was drawing to a close, Corbin’s CO, Squadron Leader Athol Forbes, decided that 10 of his pilots should record their impressions of the great air battle while memories were fresh. He chose a cross-section of officers and sergeants from different backgrounds and with different experiences – Corbin was one of them. 
In between flying on operations, the 10 scribbled down their thoughts. Corbin contributed the third chapter of their classic book Ten Fighter Boys, which was published by Collins in 1942 – and by which time five had perished. The book was reissued in 2008. In 2007 Corbin decided to complete his story, publishing his own book, Last of the Ten Fighter Boys. 
In the New Year of 1941, Fighter Command went on the offensive, carrying out sweeps over northern France. Corbin’s Spitfire was hit by anti-aircraft fire and damaged over Calais, but he managed to return safely to base. During a strafing attack against an airfield on the Brest Peninsula, Corbin and his leader damaged a number of aircraft on the ground. 
In June 1941 he attacked a Heinkel bomber which was returning from an attack on Liverpool and probably destroyed it; a month later he shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 109 while escorting a force of Blenheim bombers over the Dutch coast. After a year of almost continuous operations, he was rested and became an instructor at a fighter training unit.
William James Corbin was born at Maidstone on August 5 1917 and educated in the town at St Michael’s School. He trained as a teacher, and in April 1939 joined the RAFVR . He was called up on the outbreak of war . 
After his spell as an instructor, Corbin was commissioned and joined a Spitfire squadron sent to North Africa in support of Operation Torch, the Allied landings in Algeria and Morocco in November 1942. He saw a great deal of action with No 72 Squadron as the Allied armies moved eastwards towards Tunis, shooting down a Bf 109 (with another probable) and damaging at least three more fighters. 
He was also engaged on many sweeps shooting up motor transports and aircraft on the ground. During these operations, the Spitfires faced intense enemy ground fire, and Corbin recorded in his diary that he felt “a little shaky at times”. As the Allies closed on Tunis, he attacked a motor torpedo boat – which exploded from the concentrated fire from his cannons; he also damaged two others. A few days later the war in North Africa was over and, after 450 hours’ operational flying, Corbin was rested and returned to Britain to be a gunnery instructor. He was awarded a DFC. 
At the end of the war, Corbin left the RAF and returned to Maidstone, where he took up a teaching post. He joined the RAF Reserve and enjoyed flying Tiger Moths and Chipmunks at weekends until the Force was disbanded in 1955. He received the Air Efficiency Award. 
After 10 years teaching at Collier Road School, Corbin joined the staff of Maidstone Technical School, retiring as a senior master in 1980. He lived most of his life in the Maidstone area, and in 2011 was granted the Freedom of the Borough. 
Corbin and his wife were keen golfers, and he played at Bearsted until late in life. He then made daily visits to the club for his “medicinal whisky” until shortly before his death.
Jimmy Corbin was briefly married during the war. He married, secondly, in 1955, Jeanne, who survives him with their son and two daughters. 
Flt Lt Jimmy Corbin, born August 5 1917, died December 8 2012.

source: The Telegraph


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## vikingBerserker (Dec 28, 2012)




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## Gnomey (Dec 28, 2012)




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## v2 (Feb 11, 2013)

*Lt. Montague (Monty) Yudelman*, a longtime PRB trustee and a SAAF veteran. Passed away at Jan. 22, 2013. He retired as director of Agriculture and Rural Development at the World Bank, but his energy and dedication to development issues never wavered.
Dr. Yudelman was a respected worldwide expert on agriculture development, and he served as a consultant to numerous institutions including the Inter-American Development Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and several foreign governments. He published widely in the field of agricultural development. 
"Monty was deeply committed to issues of population and food/agriculture, and he was a wonderful PRB board member," noted Wendy Baldwin, PRB president and CEO. "He challenged us to do more, was generous with his presence and good spirit, and was always a joy to talk with. We will all miss him."
*Monty was a lieutenant with the South African Air Force during World War II. Great Britain awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1943 "for acts of valor, courage, and devotion to duty while flying in active operations against the enemy." He served in 15 Sqn SAAF and took part in attack against Africa Corps in 1942.*
Among his many contributions and accomplishments was the creation of the Malthus Lecture Series, a partnership between PRB and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). These lectures promote the study of the connections among nutrition, food, agriculture, and population, and invite an outstanding scholar or policymaker to give a presentation each year. He also helped create CGIAR, a global agriculture research partnership.
"Through his leadership as Board Chair and Trustee, his mentoring and support of the PRB staff, and the establishment of the Malthus Lecture Series, Monty will be remembered fondly and his legacy will live on at PRB," said James Scott, COO/CFO of PRB.


_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDF6oyKfGhQ_


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## Gnomey (Feb 12, 2013)




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## michaelmaltby (Mar 5, 2013)

Joseph Stalin, who died 60 years ago today. Still popular after all these years ... in some circles.

MM


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## Wurger (Mar 13, 2013)




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## Bernhart (Mar 20, 2013)

not sure if this fits in here but I work with this girls Mom, 

Officer Jennifer Kovach was pronounced dead in hospital early Thursday morning after a collision with a Guelph Transit bus. (Facebook) Related
Related Stories
Guelph officer dies in line of duty after transit bus collisionConst. Jennifer Kovach is being remembered by friends, family and colleagues as a passionate member of the Guelph Police Service who was fulfilling a childhood dream of becoming an officer.

Kovach was en route to assisting another police officer early Thursday when she lost control of her cruiser, which collided with a Guelph Transit bus. She later died in hospital.

Kovach is the third member in the history of the Guelph Police Service to die in the line of duty.

"Jennifer didn’t come to work, she came to make a difference in the city of Guelph," said Guelph Police Chief Brian Larkin at an afternoon press conference.

Larkin added that Kovach had offers to join other police services, but insisted on staying in her hometown.

Kovach was the daughter of Guelph Ward 4 Coun. Gloria Kovach. During a press conference, Guelph Mayor Karen Farbridge said she knew Kovach personally for many years. 

“I watched Jennifer grow up from a young child to a teenager to a young woman,” said Farbridge. “Its a very sad day and my heart goes out very much to her mother and family.”

Cam Guthrie, another councillor for Guelph Ward 4, said he also knew Kovach since she was a child. “Our whole city is mourning together today for sure,” Guthrie told CBC News.

Kovach graduated in 2007 from the police foundations program at Conestoga College in Kitchener. Professor Carolyn Harrison, one of Kovach’s instructors, said she remembers Kovach as being a very keen and talented student.

“Jen was one of those model students that was just a great credit to her class,” said Harrison. “She was enthusiastic, she had a great sense of humour, she was always smiling.”


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## v2 (Mar 23, 2013)

Squadron Leader* Tom Bennett* :salut:
Squadron Leader Tom Bennett, who has died aged 93, flew as a navigator in one of the specialist crews on No 617 (Dambusters) Squadron . In April 1944 Bennett teamed up with his former pilot, Gerry Fawke, to convert to the Mosquito before joining No 617, where the CO, Leonard Cheshire, was perfecting low-level target marking techniques. The Lancaster-equipped squadron had four Mosquitos for this specialist role. 
Fawke and Bennett flew their first operation on April 18, with the Juvisy marshalling yards the target. They dived to 400ft to drop their markers before the Lancasters attacked, and the success of the operation proved to be the prelude to a concentrated period of similar operations in advance of the D-Day landings . 
Just before the landings No 617 received the huge 12,000lb “Tallboy”, often referred to as the “earthquake bomb”. Its first use, on the night of June 8, was a spectacular success. Trains bringing German reinforcements from the south of France had to pass through the Saumur tunnel near the Loire. The four Mosquitos marked the target for the Lancasters attacking from 10,000ft, and a Tallboy fell 60 yards from the tunnel mouth. The shock waves devastated the tunnel. 
Over the next few weeks, Fawke and Bennett marked the launch emplacements and storage sites for the V-weapons in the Pas de Calais, in addition to the E- and U-boat pens on the French Atlantic coast. 
After 26 operations in the Mosquito, Fawke and Bennett reverted to flying the Lancaster. The battleship Tirpitz had been identified in the far north of Norway — out of range of aircraft based in Scotland. A force of Lancasters deployed to the Russian airfield at Yagodnik, near Murmansk, and on September 15 1944 they attacked; but cloud and a smoke screen generated by the battleship thwarted them. 
On October 7 another No 617 Squadron special operation was mounted, this time against the Kembs Dam on the Rhine near the Swiss border. Fawke and Bennett led a high-level force as the squadron’s CO, Willie Tait, led a low-level attack. Despite heavy opposition, the daring raid was a success. 
A month later Fawke and Bennett again attacked Tirpitz, this time from Scotland (as the ship had moved south, within range). Once again cloud interfered with the attack . It was Bennett’s final sortie with No 617 . 
Thomas Bennett was born on January 27 1919 in Poplar, London, and educated at Raine’s Foundation School . He joined the RAF in early 1940, training as a wireless operator/air gunner before becoming a navigator. In June 1942 he teamed up with Fawke and they joined No 49 Squadron, which was re-equipping with the Lancaster. They attacked targets in the Ruhr, and on one occasion their Lancaster was badly damaged and Bennett was wounded. 
On October 17 1942 Bomber Command launched one of its rare daylight operations, when a force of Lancasters attacked the large Schneider factory at Le Creusot. Fawke and Bennett flew at the head of the formation as the large factory complex was bombed at dusk. 
Bennett attacked Berlin and a radio and radar factory at Friedrickshaven on the shores of Lake Constance, when their aircraft was damaged by flak and they flew on to North Africa on three engines. Shortly afterwards he was awarded a DFM. 
After completing his tour with No 617, Bennett was appointed station navigation officer at Woodhall Spa, the squadron’s home base . 
Bennett remained in the RAF, serving with the Service’s RAF delegation in Greece in 1949 before going to the Middle East with No 38 Squadron, flying Lancasters in the maritime patrol role. After a spell as wing adjutant at the RAF’s Initial Training School, in 1955 he took early retirement. He then worked in administration for the Port of London Authority until 1980. 
Bennett was a staunch supporter of the No 617 Squadron Association and wrote articles for Flypast magazine. His book 617 Squadron: The Dambusters at War was published in 1986. 
Tom Bennett married, in 1940, Lilian Waller; she predeceased him. 
Sqd Ldr Tom Bennett, born January 27 1919, died January 9 2013 

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Mar 23, 2013)

Sir* Alan Smith* 
Sir Alan Smith, who has died aged 95, flew as Douglas Bader’s wingman during Fighter Command’s offensive over northern France in the spring and summer of 1941; he went on to become a fighter “ace”, destroying at least five enemy aircraft. Smith joined No 616 Squadron as a sergeant pilot in early January 1941 as the squadron moved south to Tangmere, near Chichester — it was soon in action over northern France on offensive sweeps. On March 18 Wing Commander Douglas Bader (who had lost both legs in a pre-war flying accident) arrived to take command of the three Spitfire squadrons of Tangmere Wing. He always led 616 in his personal Spitfire marked “DB”. 
Bader selected Smith to be his wingman, and two of the squadrons’ most charismatic pilots, Johnnie Johnson and “Cocky” Dundas, to form his section of four aircraft, which used the call sign “Dogsbody”. The wing commander’s only comment on choosing Smith was: “God help you if you let any Hun get on my tail.” Johnson later described Smith as “leech-like, and a perfect number two who never lost sight of his leader”. 
As operations intensified during the spring, 616 moved to the nearby Westhampnett airfield at Goodwood, and under Bader’s dynamic leadership the Wing’s successes mounted. The ever-faithful wingman Smith stuck to Bader throughout, protecting his rear during a series of hectic battles; for this reason he did not open his own account until July 2, when he shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 109 in the Lille area and also damaged a second. 
In what Johnnie Johnson came to describe as “The High Summer”, the Bader Wing achieved considerable success, often against the Bf 109s of Adolf Galland’s Jagdgeschwader 26. During July, in sweeps over the Pas de Calais, Smith probably destroyed two more Bf 109s and damaged a third. On one occasion his oxygen supply failed and he was forced to descend to low level. Spotting an airfield near St Omer packed with Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, he determined to inflict further damage on the enemy, and flew the length of the parked aircraft, destroying two with his cannons. 
On August 9 Smith was suffering from a head cold and was unable to fly. Bader led the Wing, but from the outset the operation went badly. Bader’s aircraft was attacked and, without Smith to protect his tail, he was shot down — to spend the rest of the war as a PoW. 
Bader had lost one of his false legs when he was shot down, and the Germans offered free passage to an RAF aircraft to drop a replacement near St Omer, where he was being held. The RAF refused, and a few days later mounted a bombing operation during which a new false leg was dropped by parachute. Smith, who had just been commissioned, was one of the pilots that escorted the Blenheim bombers on the mission. 
Smith remained with No 616 for three more months, during which time he damaged a Bf 109. On September 21 he shot down another near Le Touquet. He left the squadron in November, when he was awarded a DFC, the citation concluding: “In combat, he has been of great support to his leader.” 
The youngest son of Captain Alfred Smith, Alan Smith was born at South Shields, Co Durham, on March 14 1917. After his father had been lost at sea, he left school at 14 to help his mother in her ironmongery store. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve, trained as a pilot, and was called up at the outbreak of war . After a brief spell with No 610 Squadron, he joined 616 . 
Following his hectic spell with 616, Smith served as a fighter instructor, and in June 1942 was attached to the USAAF’s 31st Fighter Group to convert the Americans to the Spitfire. In November 1942 he joined No 93 Squadron as it departed for North Africa to take part in Operation Torch, the landings in Morocco and Algeria. Flying from airfields in Algeria, Smith and his colleagues were used initially on ground support operations. As the ground war and advance to Tunisia intensified, the Luftwaffe appeared in force and losses mounted. 
On November 22 Smith shot down a Bf 109 over Tunisia and probably destroyed an Italian Macchi 202 fighter. Four days later he accounted for two Focke Wulf 190s, and by the end of the year he had shared in the destruction of two more FW 190s and damaged a Stuka dive-bomber. At the end of January 1943 he returned to England, and two weeks later was awarded a Bar to his DFC for his “inspired skill and great leadership”. 
He spent the next 18 months as an instructor at various fighter schools before departing for the United States to serve as an instructor at one of the British Flying Training Schools in Florida. He was demobilised in December 1945 as a flight lieutenant. 
After the war Smith worked for his father-in-law at his Kinross woollen mill, Todd and Duncan, the start of a highly successful career in the textile industry. He was managing director of Todd and Duncan for 14 years. 
From 1960 to 1982 (when he retired) he served as chairman and chief executive of Dawson International, a group of companies in the Scottish knitwear industry. 
He was appointed CBE in 1976 and knighted in 1982. He was also appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Kinross in 1967. 
Although some criticised Bader’s “Big Wing” tactics, Smith always remained a great admirer of his former wing commander. In later life he observed: “He was a marvellous leader, a brilliant pilot, a dead shot and everything you relished.” 
In March 1987, to mark his 70th birthday, Smith returned to Westhampnett (by then Goodwood airfield) and took to the air in a Spitfire. 
Sir Alan Smith married first, in 1943, Margaret Stewart Todd. She died in 1971, and he married secondly, in 1977, Alice Elizabeth Moncur, who survives him with three sons and a daughter of his first marriage; another daughter of his first marriage predeceased him. 
Sir Alan Smith, born March 14 1917, died March 1 2013 

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Mar 23, 2013)




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## syscom3 (Mar 25, 2013)

*Abe Baum dies at 91; decorated WW2 US Army officer*

*Under orders from Gen. George S. Patton Jr., Baum led Task Force Baum, an ill-fated mission in March 1945 to liberate a prison camp deep in German territory, where Patton's son-in-law was being held.*

By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times
March 23, 2013, 9:45 p.m.

Abe Baum dies at 91; decorated WWII officer - latimes.com

Dog-tired, Capt. Abe Baum was snoozing on the hood of a military vehicle when he was shaken awake and summoned to a superior's tent. With worry on their faces, his unit's top officers were clustered around Gen. George S. Patton Jr., who had just issued a secret order for what some historians later described as one of the most ill-conceived missions of World War II.

Baum, then a 23-year-old New Yorker, would become known for brilliantly executing his general's flawed orders. German soldiers still study the shock-and-awe tactics of Task Force Baum. But military scholars still criticize Patton for his command to liberate a prison camp deep in German-held territory — a grim spot where one of the captives happened to be his son-in-law.

Baum, who later became a garment manufacturer and salesman, died March 3 at his home in Rancho Bernardo, Calif., said his wife, Eileen Baum. He was 91 and had congestive heart disease.

The raid on the camp at Hammelburg, Germany, came just weeks before the war's end.

Twenty-five of the men under Baum's command were killed and 32 others, including Baum, were wounded. Many of his soldiers were imprisoned, albeit briefly. Patton was derided when word spread that he'd placed 300 men at risk to free Lt. Col. John Knight Waters, his son-in-law — a charge he denied. Baum maintained a soldierly silence for decades.

Born March 29, 1921, Abraham J. Baum dropped out of high school in the Bronx to help support his struggling family. He made patterns for women's blouses, which convinced the Army that he was an engineer, he joked years later. He enlisted shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Baum fought at Normandy and suffered shrapnel wounds in a mine field. By March 1945, he was a battle-toughened officer with the 4th Armored Division but was nonetheless surprised when he was ushered into the meeting with Patton.

"I thought what the hell am I doing here?" he recalled in a recent interview in World War II magazine.

Other officers questioned Patton's plan, telling "Old Blood and Guts" that taking Hammelburg would require at least 3,500 men — not the 300 he was demanding. But Patton had his own ideas. When told that his first choice to lead the mission had severe hemorrhoids, he ordered the man and a physician into a side room to verify the claim. Baum was next in line.

None of the top brass could dissuade Patton, who did not reveal his son-in-law's presence at Hammelburg. The camp was 60 miles away — a dangerous trek at night, with tanks rumbling through medieval streets. Hammelburg served no strategic purpose. Nobody even knew the camp's exact location.

Despite his doubts, Baum followed orders — spectacularly, according to historian John Toland.

"The gallant force had accomplished something quite different and even more important than Patton intended," Toland wrote in 1965. "Every town it had passed through was in a state of confusion and hysteria," forcing the German Army to throw a huge number of troops at a pint-size threat.

Reaching the camp, Baum found 1,500 U.S. prisoners instead of the 300 he had been told to expect.

"I was stunned," he told World War II magazine. "I could've cried."

It proved to be an academic problem as German forces closed in.

Baum, already burned by rocket fire, was shot in the groin. Patton's son-in-law — the presumed reason for the raid — was seriously wounded. The task force's 53 vehicles were destroyed. Within days, Allied forces arrived to liberate Hammelburg for good.

Gen. Omar Bradley, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later called the raid "a wild goose chase that ended in disaster."

Patton denied knowing that Waters, a German prisoner for two years, was at the camp. He said he was concerned that captive officers would be shot as the war ended.

After leaving the Army as a major, Baum worked most of his life in the garment industry. A 1981 book he co-wrote with Richard Baron and Richard Goldhurst raised questions that had dogged him during the raid.

When a Patton aide reluctantly let him in on the general's secret, "a cold fury washed over Abe Baum," the authors wrote in "Raid! The Untold Story of Patton's Secret Mission." "Men were dying … and more would die on the way to Hammelburg — all to bring back one man."

If he felt exploited, it didn't last.

"That was all over and done with as far as my father was concerned," said Baum's son David.

Baum became a lifelong friend of Waters, who went on to become a general. Baum and the German commandant at Hammelburg exchanged holiday cards. A couple of German soldiers invited Baum and his family to Bavaria in 2005, where, with vintage vehicles and old U.S. uniforms, they retraced the route of Task Force Baum.

Passionate about the Israeli war for independence, Baum helped recruit American veterans for the cause. Military leader Moshe Dayan met with him and, in his autobiography, credited Baum with giving him some valuable tactical tips. Baum was offered a top spot in the effort but declined, his son said: The family blouse business needed him.

Baum was awarded numerous military honors, including the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart.

An avid sport fisherman, he moved his family to Florida in 1970. To be closer to his wife's relatives, the family moved to Rancho Palos Verdes in 1976. Baum stayed in the garment business until his retirement in 1991, when the family moved to Rancho Bernardo, north of San Diego.

In addition to his wife, Eileen, and son David, Baum is survived by daughters Susan Locker and Barbara Zoltan and another son, Eric Baum.

He will be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

[email protected]
Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times


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## Vassili Zaitzev (Mar 26, 2013)




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## v2 (Mar 26, 2013)




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## v2 (Mar 31, 2013)

*HOLDEN PETER (PIOTR ZANIEWSKI)* born1917 Odessa, Russia, the month before the start of Revolution. Fought as pilot through WWII, fighting for Poland, France and Britain, from the first day of war on September 1st, 1939, for Polish squadron 121 Krakow, then through Invasion of France, 1940, for famous 1/145 squadron, then in RAF as night fighter defending Exeter and Plymouth in 1941. Also 308 and 315 squadrons on submarine patrols and defending Arctic Convoys to Murmansk 1942-1943. Flew Pz1 1s, Caudrons, Bolton Pauls, Hurricanes, Beaufighters and Mosquitoes all in the fury of war and battle. Awarded Polish Star, Croix de Guerre and many British medals. Gained BSc Chemistry, Nottingham University 1948, and then made a distinguished international business career from United Kingdom to India, Australia and South Africa. He did not return to his motherland Poland for fifty years until after the collapse of Communism. Director of South African Fabrics, director and co-owner of Phoenix Clothing, Instinct Sportswear and Lesotho Clothing. Died March 2013 near Howick at 96 years old, peacefully and in full possession of faculties to last day, surviving his beloved Doe (Betty Irene Elizabeth) Holden by almost exactly seven years. Loved and missed by his sons Paul and Tim, and granddaughters Sarah, Rachel and Celeste and also by Merle, Julia, Enid, Kathy, Dan, Robert and by grandchildren Harry and Everett, and by many true friends. He touched numerous lives and helped many people. Finally he flew into the sunset to join long lost comrades who have waited for him.


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## Vassili Zaitzev (Mar 31, 2013)

that's one hell of a service.


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## Gnomey (Mar 31, 2013)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 7, 2013)




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## Xjrtaz (Apr 25, 2013)

Condolences for the loss of two great WW2 pilots in the last few weeks.
Firstly, Robert `Shorty' Rankin, 61st F.S. 56th F.G renowned for shooting down 5 enemy planes in one mission on 12th May 1944
Secondly, Urban `Ben' Drew, 375th F.S 361st F.G , whose record was first pilot to down two Me. 262's in one mission
RIP guys, clear skies, a strong tailwind and Angels on your 6, you are missed and always remembered

Krys


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## Wayne Little (Apr 25, 2013)




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## vikingBerserker (Apr 25, 2013)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Apr 25, 2013)




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## ToughOmbre (Apr 25, 2013)

Steve


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## Gnomey (Apr 25, 2013)




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## v2 (May 14, 2013)

Former Czechoslovak RAF pilot *Zdenek Škarvada * dies aged 95. 

General Zdenek Skarvada, a former Czechoslovak military pilot of the British RAF during World War Two, died aged 95 Saturday night, Jana Horakova, head of the World War Two Memorial in Hrabyne, north Moravia, told CTK Sunday.
Skarvada often attended commemorative events in the memorial.
"He died at eleven in the evening on Saturday. As recently as May 8, we were in the Hrabyne memorial, " Skarvada's wife Ivana Skarvadova told the server idnes Sunday.
Born in Olesnice, south Moravia, Skarvada was enrolled at the Military Aviation Academy in Prostejov, south Moravia, in 1935 where he became a military pilot two years later.
In 1939, he left for Poland and than through the Soviet Union to Britain. He served with the 310th Squadron RAF at the beginning of the war. In 1942, he was shot down and spent the rest of the war as a POW.
After the war, he was named an air force captain, commander of the 8th air force regiment and commander of the training squadron of the Military Aviation Academy.
After the 1948 Communist coup, he was discharged from the military in 1950 and worked as a miner.
Skarvada is a holder of the For Bravery Medal he received in 1997.
Three years later, he was appointed brigadier general. He also received a number of war medals.
In 2007, he became the honorary citizen of Ostrava.
During his life-time, Skarvada piloted over 50 types of planes. He said his motto was "Never Surrender!"


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## vikingBerserker (May 14, 2013)




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## Njaco (May 14, 2013)




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## Gnomey (May 14, 2013)




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## Wayne Little (May 17, 2013)




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## syscom3 (May 21, 2013)

Gordon Gayle dies at 95; received Navy Cross for attack on Peleliu


By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times

May 19, 2013, 5:56 p.m.

Retired Marine Brig. Gen. Gordon Gayle, who received the Navy Cross for leadership and bravery during the assault on Peleliu, one of the bloodiest and most complex and controversial battles fought by Marines during World War II, has died. He was 95.

Gayle died April 21 at an assisted-living facility in Farnham, Va., after suffering a stroke, according to the U.S. Marine Corps.

As an officer with the 1st Marine Division, Gayle led troops in five key battles in World War II, starting with Guadalcanal in 1942, where Marines, after weeks of fierce jungle fighting, stopped the advance of Japanese troops toward Australia.

By the time Marines were ordered to assault Peleliu in the Palau islands in September 1944, Gayle had been promoted to major and was commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. The Marines faced rugged island terrain, stifling heat and a smart, resilient enemy.

The "Two-Five," as the unit was known, was given the task of seizing a heavily defended area near an airfield, a key objective of the assault.

"Immediately after repulsing a strong Japanese counterattack, Maj. Gayle skillfully seized the critical moment to cross the Peleliu airdrome, personally leading his battalion in the assault over 1,400 yards of open ground in the face of intense hostile mortar, artillery and machine-gun fire," according to the citation for the Navy Cross bestowed on Gayle.

Although wounded, Gayle refused to be evacuated. His bravery "contributed materially to the success with which his battalion seized and held the major portion of the airfield," according to the citation.

Promoted to lieutenant colonel in November 1944, he was an instructor at the command and staff school at Quantico, Va. After World War II, he had several assignments, including as assistant director of the Marine Corps history division.

Assigned to Korea in September 1951, he was executive officer of the 7th Marine Regiment during the height of the fighting. He received a Navy Commendation Ribbon.

After returning from Korea, Gayle had assignments involving recruiting, long-range planning, Marine history, and as deputy assistant chief of staff for Marine forces in Japan. He retired in 1968.

Gayle's account of Peleliu, "Bloody Beaches: The Marines at Peleliu," provides a detailed, dispassionate look at the hardships and horrors of an assault against a well-fortified enemy redoubt. Gayle mentions his own role only in passing.

"1st Division Marines," Gayle wrote, "peering over the gunwales of their landing craft saw an awesome scene of blasting and churning earth along the shore. Smoke, dust and the geysers caused by exploding bombs and large-caliber naval shells gave optimists some hope that the defenders would become casualties from such preparatory fires...."

That optimism, Gayle wrote, was soon shown to be misplaced, and the Marines were forced to fight yard by yard. An attack that was predicted to be complete in days instead took two months.

While praising the Marines, Gayle shows respect for the Japanese tactics and determination. "Rather than depending upon spiritual superiority, they would combine the devilish terrain with the stubborn, disciplined Japanese soldiers to relinquish Peleliu at the highest cost to the invaders."

Although hardly a debunking account, Gayle notes that the assault was hampered by supply problems, disagreements among top officers, "friendly fire" casualties and "confusion and delay."

"Every advance opened the advancing Marines to new fire from heretofore hidden positions on flanks, in rear, in caves above or below nearly won ground," he wrote. After four days, "the 1st Marines was a regiment in name only, having suffered 1,500 casualties."

Eight Marines received the Medal of Honor for their actions on Peleliu, five of them posthumously. Gayle was among 69 Marines who received the Navy Cross, the second-highest award for combat heroism.

The battle at Peleliu remains controversial, with some historians saying it was not worth the sacrifices and that military brass knew at the time that the island was of minimal strategic value and could be bypassed.

In the final portion of "Bloody Beaches," Gayle acknowledges the lingering dispute but does not dwell on it. Taking Peleliu away from the Japanese, he wrote, "was a convenience but not a necessity." He notes that it was a Navy plane working out of Peleliu that spotted survivors of the Indianapolis, which had been sunk by a Japanese submarine after delivering the atomic bomb to Tinian in preparation for the attack on Hiroshima.

Gordon Donald Gayle was born in Tulsa, Okla., on Sept. 13, 1917. His father was in the oil business, and Gayle grew up in Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma.

After briefly attending Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he transferred to the U.S. Naval Academy. He graduated in 1939 and received a commission in the Marine Corps.

In one of his last assignments, Gayle was part of a study group that called for better training and better integration of infantry and air power. Many of that study's recommendations remain integral to Marine doctrine for what is called the air-ground task force approach to warfare that was used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After retiring, Gayle spent three years at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University and taught mathematics at a prep school.

Gayle's wife, Katherine Frank Gayle, died in 2004. He is survived by a daughter, two sons, eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. A third son died in 1971.

[email protected]


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## Vassili Zaitzev (May 21, 2013)




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## Gnomey (May 22, 2013)




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## Wildcat (Jul 31, 2013)

S/L "Tony"Gaze sadly passed away on the 29th. 
Squadron Leader Tony Gaze OAM DFC** (WWII Ace Grand Prix driver)


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## vikingBerserker (Jul 31, 2013)




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## Gnomey (Jul 31, 2013)




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## Wayne Little (Aug 3, 2013)




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## v2 (Sep 1, 2013)

Flight Lieutenant *Tony Snell* 

Flight Lieutenant Tony Snell, who has died aged 91, was shot down in his Spitfire over Sicily and escaped from a German firing squad. Recaptured, he leapt from a train and finally escaped over the Alps into neutral Switzerland. 
On July 10 1943 Snell was patrolling over the beachhead after the Sicily landings when a force of Messerschmitt fighters attacked him. His Spitfire was hit and he had to make a forced landing on enemy territory. He managed to avoid capture and tried to return to the beachhead after dark, managing to convince a group of Italian soldiers that he was a Vichy Frenchman. Later he was challenged by a German patrol that ordered him to put his hands up. Without warning they rolled a hand grenade towards him but he managed to jump clear and run off, followed by more grenades. 
He hid in scrub and realised that he was in a minefield, out of which he picked his way towards a track. There he blundered into a German airfield very near the battle area, and was captured. The Germans decided to execute him as a spy, marched him to an open space and ordered him to kneel down. Realising that he was about to be shot, he leapt up and ran off as the Germans fired. He was badly wounded, his right shoulder being smashed, but he managed to escape. 
He tried to make the Allied lines but, owing to extreme weakness, his attempt failed. Re-captured at dawn he was again threatened with execution but managed to prove his identity. He was taken to hospital and later transferred by ship to Lucca in Tuscany, where he remained for two months being treated for his wounds. 
The Germans decided to transfer him to Germany by train. Although not fully recovered, he made plans to escape en-route. In company with another officer, he jumped from the train as it slowed at a junction and the two headed south. For the next week they had several narrow escapes before joining up with Italian partisans. With their help they reached Modena, where families sheltered them for several months. When they were fit, the two decided that they should head for the Swiss border.
They made a long and risky train journey, accompanied by their Italian friends, to a small village near the frontier where they were introduced to two guides. After a very long and steep climb over the mountains, they crossed the frontier into Switzerland. They were interned until October 1944 when the American advance from the south of France reached the Swiss border. Snell was awarded the DSO, one of very few awarded exclusively for escaping from the enemy. 
Anthony Noel Snell was born in Tunbridge Wells on March 19 1922 and educated at Cheltenham College. He joined the RAF in November 1940 and trained in the United States as a pilot under the US/UK bilateral “Arnold” Scheme. In July 1942 he joined No 242 Squadron flying Spitfires. Three months later he headed for North Africa, where the squadron covered the landings of Operation Torch. Over the next few months the squadron provided support for the First British Army as it headed eastwards to Tunis. Snell flew air interception sorties and convoy patrols. With German air activity reducing, bomber escort and ground attack strafing operations predominated until the final Axis collapse on that front in May 1943. 
The squadron moved to Malta to prepare for the invasion of Sicily. As the Allies launched their amphibious and airborne landings on July 10, Snell took off to provide cover over the beachhead. 
On his return to Britain, Snell spent time in hospital before returning to flying duties. He converted to the Meteor jet fighter and flew with No 504 Squadron (later re-numbered No 245), which moved to Germany just after the war finished. Snell remained with the squadron until August 1946, and was discharged from the RAF shortly after. 
For 20 years afterwards Snell was an actor and songwriter. He toured a one-man show around Africa and, with his wife Jackie, travelled the United States and Mexico in a Volkswagen bus. In New York he recorded an album of his songs, Englishman Abroad, half of which were written by him, with the others by his friend, Donald Cotton, the author of early Doctor Who scripts. 
In 1966 he returned to England, bought a catamaran, sailed it with his wife to Spain, and set up a business giving day charters out of Ibiza. Three years later he moved to the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and established Virgin Voyages with three boats; but this was not a success and he and his wife opened a restaurant, The Last Resort, on Jost van Dyke. After a year the restaurant was burnt down and they returned to Ibiza to sell their catamaran before heading back to BVI to reopen The Last Resort on Bellamy Cay, a tiny island in Trellis Bay, Tortola. While living on a houseboat, they built the restaurant from scratch on the ruins of a derelict building. 
Snell co-owned the restaurant and bar and provided most of the entertainment, playing the guitar, the piano and the chromatic harmonica, singing songs (many of his own composition) and never fully grasping the meaning of political correctness; Jackie was chief cook. 
The restaurant was just one product of a buccaneering business spirit. During their three decades in the Caribbean they also bought a large derelict hotel in New Hampshire that now houses 12 apartments, travelled to Bali to buy furniture for the hotel, bought a cottage in Sussex and an investment property in Brighton. 
Although his family eventually took over The Last Resort, Tony Snell – relentlessly energetic – was still entertaining there until just a few weeks before his death. 
His wife predeceased him in 2001, and he is survived by their son and a daughter. 
Tony Snell, born March 19 1922, died August 4 2013.

source: The Telegraph


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## Wayne Little (Sep 1, 2013)




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## michaelmaltby (Sep 1, 2013)

A life well and fully lived.


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## Alex . (Sep 1, 2013)

RIP sir!


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## Soldier (Sep 2, 2013)

VERN HENRY HANSER (sgt. 209th FA) Aleutian Islands 

Vern Henry Hanser, long time resident of Olathe, Kansas was called to his heavenly home September 28, 2012. A Celebration of Life service will be held on Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 10:00 am at Community Bible Church, 1304 N. Parker, Olathe, Kansas, with burial to follow at the Pleasant Valley Cemetery in Stanley. Visitation will be held from 6:00 to 8:00pm, October 1, 2012, at Penwell-Gabel Funeral Home, Olathe. In lieu of flowers memorial contributions may be made to Community Bible Church TRUST BIG building fund, or Olathe Medical Center Hospice House.

Vern was born May 10, 1921 at Merwin, Missouri to August John and Lizzie Mae (Ellis) Hanser. He served our country in the Army in the Aleutian Islands and Fort Meade, Maryland during WWII. He was married to Geneva Hiatt in 1947 and together they raised 3 children. He was a fireman with the Federal Government serving as Assistant Fire Chief at the Olathe Naval Air Station and as Crew Chief at Richard Gebaur Air Force Base until his retirement in 1986. He owned his own painting business in Olathe for many years finally retiring at the age of 80. He was a member of Masonic Lodge 19 and Abdullah Shrine and a member of the American Legion Post 153 and had attended Community Bible Church since 1997.


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## Wayne Little (Sep 4, 2013)




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## Capt. Vick (Sep 4, 2013)

Hey, I just read that famed aviation author Bill Gunston has passed. RIP


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## v2 (Nov 19, 2013)

I am saddened to announce the sudden passing of *mjr Antoni Tomiczek *age 98 surrounded by his loving friends and family. Antoni passed away on Tuesday, November 19th.
He was the last surviving pilot who flew with supplies for the Warsaw Uprising. He made five flights over occupied Poland during the period August-December 1944. He was awarded Cross of Valour with bar.
Have a Blue Sky, Major...

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## fubar57 (Nov 19, 2013)




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## Wayne Little (Nov 21, 2013)




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## michaelmaltby (Dec 17, 2013)

Kurtz ... he dead:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/02/u...d-in-vietnam-murder-case-dies-at-87.html?_r=1


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## v2 (Jan 5, 2014)

Capt. *William Overstreet Jr.* passed away at a hospital in Roanoke.
He famously flew his plane beneath the Eiffel Tower in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944, lifting the spirits of French troops on the ground.
In 2009, he was presented France's Legion of Honor.
A World War II fighter pilot who gained fame for dramatically flying beneath the Eiffel Tower's arches to take down a German aircraft has died aged 92.
William Overstreet Jr. died on Sunday at a hospital in Roanoke, Virginia, according to his obituary, but there was no indication of the cause of his death.
Overstreet's famously flew his P-51C 'Berlin Express' beneath the Eiffel Tower in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944, which has been credited with lifting the spirits of French Resistance troops on the ground.
Before the ceremony, Overstreet had previously said that, if he lived long enough to receive the Legion of Honor, he would be accepting it in memory of his fallen brothers.
In particular, he wanted to pay tribute to a friend, Eddy Simpson, who died fighting the Nazis on the ground so his comrades, including Overstreet, could escape. 
After the award was pinned to his lapel, Overstreet said: 'If I said, "Thank you," it wouldn’t be enough,' before adding: 'What more than "thank you" do you need?'
For his valiant service, the French ambassador to the United States presented Overstreet with France's Legion of Honor at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford in 2009. 
Overstreet was also awarded hundreds of other medals for his service in the 357th squadron of the U.S. Army Air Forces, his obituary said.
He was born in Clifton Forge, Virginia in 1921 and after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Air Corps as a fighter pilot.
By February 1942, he was a private and sent to California for flight training; here, his instructors prepared him for the unexpected mid-flight by cutting the engine as he landed. During training in 1943, he suffered a near-death crash when his plane, a Bell P-39 Airacobra, began spinning as he practiced maneuvers, and he was unable to control it.
He eventually forced his way out through the doors and found himself standing amid the wreckage.
When he flew in World War II, he suffered another freak accident when his oxygen line cut out as he flew 25,000 feet over France.
He passed out but snapped awake and controlled the plane and dodged trees in front of him to figure out where he was and land safely. Newspapers at the time reported that he could not remember a whole 90 minutes of the flight.
In the spring of 1944, he was following a German aircraft over Paris, with the two planes firing at each other. Overstreet eventually hit the other pilot's engine.
As the German pilot desperately sought to out-maneuver Overstreet, he flew beneath the Eiffel Tower - but the brave American flew directly beneath it and continued to fire.
The German plane crashed and Overstreet was able to escape the city.
The astounding show of skill and bravery lifted the spirits of the French, french dignitary, Bernard Marie, told the Roanoke Times.
He said he only fully understood the importance of Overstreet's feat when he spoke with his father about it.
'My father began shouting out me - "I have to meet this man",' Marie said. 'This guy has done even more than what people are thinking. He lifted the spirit of the French.'
After flying further missions, including a top secret escort mission, his tour of duty ended in October 1944 and he returned to the U.S. He went on to teach at a gunnery school in Pinellas, Florida and when he was released from active duty, he remained on the Reserves.
He went on to work as General Manager of Charleston Aviation in West Virginia before moving to Roanoke in 1950, where he worked as an accountant until he was 65.
Before his death, he also worked with numerous charities and veterans groups, appearing at air shows and gatherings with fellow veterans. He was preceded in death by his wife, Nita.
Anne Mason Keller, Overstreet's niece, said of her uncle: 'He was a fighter, he was always a perfect gentleman. He was concise, focused with a delightful sense of humor and a twinkle in his eyes.
'He was always humble. Whenever the press interviewed him, he said, "I didn't do anything, we were a team".'
His family has asked that those attending his memorial service on Saturday those wear something either or both red and yellow, his squadron's colors.



source: Mail Online

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## Alex . (Jan 6, 2014)

> One of the last surviving Lancaster bomber pilots, who was shot down over Germany and taken prisoner by the Nazis in the Second World War, has died aged 91.
> Dick Starkey was shot down after 22 missions and sent to the infamous Stalag Luft III German prisoner-of-war camp, immortalised by Hollywood in The Great Escape.
> Mr Starkey returned a few years ago to the 1944 crash site of his beloved Lancaster bomber Queenie and was amazed to be introduced to Martin Becker, the Messerschmitt pilot who shot him down.



Dick Starkey, Lancaster bomber pilot captured by Nazis, dies | Mail Online

RIP sir


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## Wayne Little (Jan 8, 2014)




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## vikingBerserker (Jan 8, 2014)




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## Gnomey (Jan 8, 2014)




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## v2 (Jan 17, 2014)

Hiroo Onoda, Solider Who Hid in Jungle for Decades, Dies at 91.


Hiroo Onoda, an Imperial Japanese Army officer who remained at his jungle post on an island in the Philippines for 29 years, refusing to believe that World War II was over, and returned to a hero’s welcome in the all but unrecognizable Japan of 1974, died Thursday at a Tokyo hospital. He was 91.
Caught in a time warp, 2nd Lt. Onoda was one of the war’s last holdouts: a soldier who believed the emperor was a deity and the war a sacred mission; who survived on bananas and coconuts and sometimes killed villagers he assumed were enemies; who finally went home to the lotus land of paper and wood that turned out to be a futuristic world of skyscrapers, television, jet planes, pollution and atomic destruction.
Japanese history and literature are replete with heroes who have remained loyal to a cause, especially if it is lost or hopeless, and Lieutenant Onoda, a small, wiry man of dignified manner and military bearing, seemed to many like a samurai of old, offering his sword as a gesture of surrender to President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines, who returned it to him.
And his homecoming, with roaring crowds, celebratory parades and speeches by public officials, stirred his nation with a pride that many Japanese had found lacking in postwar years of rising prosperity and materialism. His ordeal of deprivation may have seemed a pointless waste to much of the world, but in Japan it was a moving reminder of the redemptive qualities of duty and perseverance.
It happened with a simple command. As related in a memoir after he came home, Lieutenant Onoda’s last order in early 1945 was to stay and fight. Loyal to a military code that taught that death was preferable to surrender, he remained behind on Lubang Island, 93 miles southwest of Manila, when Japanese forces withdrew in the face of an American invasion.
After Japan surrendered in August, thousands of Japanese soldiers were scattered across China, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. Many stragglers were captured or went home, while hundreds went into hiding rather than surrender or commit suicide. Many died of starvation or sickness. A few survivors refused to believe the dropped leaflets and radio announcements saying the war had been lost.
Lieutenant Onoda, an intelligence officer trained in guerrilla tactics, and three enlisted men with him found leaflets proclaiming the war’s end, but believed they were enemy propaganda tricks. They built bamboo huts; ate bananas, coconuts and rice pilfered from a village, and killed cows for meat. Tormented by tropical heat, rats and mosquitoes, they patched their uniforms and kept their rifles in working order.
Considering themselves at war, they evaded American and Filipino search parties and attacked islanders they took to be enemy guerrillas; about 30 inhabitants were killed in skirmishes with the Japanese over the years. One of the enlisted men surrendered to Filipino forces in 1950, and two others were shot dead, one in 1954 and another in 1972, by island police officers searching for the renegades.
The last holdout, Lieutenant Onoda — officially declared dead in 1959 — was found by Norio Suzuki, a student searching for him in 1974. The lieutenant rejected his pleas to go home, insisting he was still awaiting orders. Mr. Suzuki returned with photographs, and the Japanese government sent a delegation, including the lieutenant’s brother and his former commander, to formally relieve him of duty.“I am sorry I have disturbed you for so long a time,” Lieutenant Onoda told his brother, Toshiro.
In Manila, the lieutenant, wearing his tattered uniform, presented his sword to President Marcos, who pardoned him for crimes committed while he thought he was at war.
He was already a national hero when he arrived in Tokyo. He was met by his aging parents and huge flag-waving crowds with an outpouring of emotion. More than patriotism or admiration for his grit, his jungle saga, which had dominated the news in Japan for days, evoked waves of nostalgia and melancholy in a people searching for deeper meaning in their growing postwar affluence.
The 52-year-old lieutenant — a ghost from the past in a new blue suit, close-cropped military haircut and wispy mustache and chin whiskers — spoke earnestly of duty, and seemed to personify a devotion to traditional values that many Japanese thought had been lost.
“I was fortunate that I could devote myself to my duty in my young and vigorous years,” he said. Asked what had been on his mind all those years in the jungle, he said: “Nothing but accomplishing my duty.”
In an editorial, The Mainichi Shimbun, a leading Tokyo newspaper, said: “To this soldier, duty took precedence over personal sentiments. Onoda has shown us that there is much more in life than just material affluence and selfish pursuits. There is the spiritual aspect, something we may have forgotten.”
After his national welcome in Japan, Mr. Onoda was examined by doctors, who found him in amazingly good condition. He was given a military pension and signed a $160,000 contract for a ghostwritten memoir, “No Surrender: My Thirty Year War.” As his story went global in books, articles and documentaries, he tried to lead a normal life.
He went dancing, took driving lessons and traveled up and down the Japanese islands. But he found himself a stranger in a strange land, disillusioned with materialism and overwhelmed by changes. “There are so many tall buildings and automobiles in Tokyo,” he said. “Television might be convenient, but it has no influence on my life here.”
In 1975, he moved to a Japanese colony in São Paulo, Brazil, raised cattle and in 1976 married Machie Onuku, a Japanese tea-ceremony teacher. In 1984, the couple returned to Japan and founded the Onoda Nature School, a survival-skills youth camp. In 1996, he revisited Lubang and gave $10,000 to a school. In recent years, he lived in Japan and Brazil, where he was made an honorary citizen in 2010.
Hiroo Onoda was born on March 19, 1922, in Kainan, Wakayama, in central Japan, one of seven children of Tanejiro and Tamae Onoda. At 17, he went to work for a trading company in Wuhan, China, which Japanese forces occupied in 1938. In 1942, he joined the Japanese Army, was singled out for special training and attended Nakano School, the army’s training center for intelligence officers. He studied guerrilla warfare, philosophy, history, martial arts, propaganda and covert operations.
In late December 1944, he was sent to Lubang, a strategic island 16 miles long and 6 miles wide on the southwestern approach to Manila Bay and the island of Corregidor, with orders to sabotage harbor installations and an airstrip to disrupt a coming American invasion. But superior officers on the island superseded those orders to focus on preparations for a Japanese evacuation.
When American forces landed on Feb. 28, 1945, and the last Japanese fled or were killed, Maj. Yoshimi Taniguchi gave Lieutenant Onoda his final orders, to stand and fight. “It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens we’ll come back for you,” the major promised.
Twenty-nine years later, the retired major, by then a bookseller, returned to Lubang at Tokyo’s request to fulfill his promise. Japan had lost the war, he said, and the lieutenant was relieved of duty. The ragged soldier saluted and wept.


source: The New York Times


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## GrauGeist (Jan 17, 2014)

Lt. Onada was certainly a dedicated soldier!

Japanese WWII soldier who refused to surrender for 29 years dies - World News


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jan 17, 2014)




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## vikingBerserker (Jan 17, 2014)

Another WW2 Vet passed, Russell Johnson more famously known as the Professor from Gilligan's Island. 

"He joined the Army Air Corps during World War II and served as a B-24 bombardier on missions over the Pacific war zone, breaking his ankles in 1945 when his plane was shot down over the Philippine island of Mindanao. He was discharged as a first lieutenant in November 1945, having earned a Purple Heart and other medals."

from Russell Johnson, who played The Professor on 'Gilligan's Island,' dies at age 89 | Fox News


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## GrauGeist (Jan 17, 2014)

Sad to see the Professor pass away! This just leaves Ginger and Maryann


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## Wayne Little (Jan 18, 2014)

times two


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## syscom3 (Jan 18, 2014)

Russell Johnson flew with the 42nd BG, which only had B25's. The wiki story is inaccurate.


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## vikingBerserker (Jan 18, 2014)

That was from Fox, I rarely quote from Wiki.


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## Airframes (Feb 7, 2014)

*F/O Bob Kirkpatrick (RCAF), 21 Sqn. RAF.*

Last surviving aircrew member from the Shell House raid.

I've just received the sad news that my friend Bob Kirkpatrick passed away on Sunday afternoon. He would have been 92 next week.
Bob was an American who, having failed the medical to enlist in the US Forces, crossed the border into Canada and joined the RCAF. He flew Beaufighters, then converted to the Mosquito FBVI, which he flew on operations with 21 Sqn, RAF, from the UK and France.
Bob took part in 'Operation Carthage', the famous low-level raid on Gestapo Headquarters, based in the Shell House in the center of Copenhagen, on March 21st 1945, when he flew one of the FPU (film unit) Mosquito BIV srs.ii , circling the city three times. Hit by flak, with one engine damaged and the hydraulics knocked out, Bob managed to get the Mosquito back across the North Sea, and made an emergency landing, without flaps or brakes, at the USAAF B-24 base base at Rackheath, Norfolk.
At war's end, Bob returned to the 'States, where he had to apply for a certificate showing he was a U.S. citizen, and married his childhood sweetheart Ginny (Virginia), and he continued flying, everything from one of the first crop-spraying operations, to charter and instructional work, amassing a huge total of flying hours.

He was fortunate to be able to travel from his home in Iowa last year, to see, and be a guest at, the air show in Canada where the Mosquito flew, and former crews were center of attention, and the smile on his face, despite the pain he was enduring, showed how happy he was to see the 'Mossie' again.
Still flying until not so many years ago, Bob was a true gentleman, and will be sorely missed.

Blue skies Bob.


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## vikingBerserker (Feb 7, 2014)

and my condolences to you Terry.


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## Njaco (Feb 7, 2014)

So sorry to hear about this, Terry.


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## Gnomey (Feb 7, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Feb 9, 2014)

Sorry to hear this Terry, condolences....


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## v2 (Mar 8, 2014)

*Stefan Baluk *was a Polish SOE agent who escaped from the Nazis through the sewers of Warsaw 

Stefan Baluk, who has died aged 100, was one of the last survivors of the elite SOE agents of Poland’s Home Army, and survived capture by both Nazi and Soviet occupiers. 
On the night of April 9 1944, Baluk was flown from Brindisi, in the liberated heel of Italy, and dropped into Poland. In Warsaw he found bunkers and checkpoints everywhere and, as a spy, he could not make contact with any members of his family. 
He began working with the Armia Krajowa (AK), the Home Army. Moving stealthily around the city he took photographs of German military installations. On August 1, the Home Army gave the signal for the start of the Warsaw uprising. Baluk’s speciality was making forged documents for the resistance fighters. 
Communications were a problem. Fighters in one part of the city lacked the correct radio crystals to maintain contact with their comrades in another. On one occasion, he and his unit volunteered to deliver crystals to a commando group. This involved crossing railway lines which were under water and heavily guarded. It was dark, but a sentry heard the splashing and opened fire. Baluk said afterwards that they were only able to get away because an aircraft came over and the sentry engaged it. 
As the net around them was drawn tighter, the resistance fighters took to the sewers. Baluk travelled the length of the city through the filth. His worst moment, he said, was when his leg became trapped. Switching on his flashlight, something that was only permitted in emergencies, he discovered that the limb was in a pincer-like grip between the ribs of a dead body. Stefan Klemens Baluk was born in Warsaw on January 15 1914. He was studying Law when he was called up and enlisted in the 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade. After Poland was overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg, he escaped through Hungary and joined the Polish armed forces in France under General Sikorski. 
When France fell he was evacuated to England. Having volunteered for the SOE, he was posted to Scotland and trained in sabotage, unarmed combat and guerrilla operations. He was sent on a course in parachuting and in forging German identity documents. 
The Soviet authorities encouraged the Polish underground to stage an insurgency but the Red Army failed to come to their aid. After 63 days of desperate fighting, the Home Army split into small groups and, when their supplies were exhausted, they were forced to surrender. The Germans deported most of the population and destroyed the city.
Baluk was taken prisoner and sent to Oflag 11-D in Gross Born, Pomerania. He escaped in January 1945 and rejoined the Home Army in Poland. Once again, he made false documents but this time for those resisting Poland’s new masters, the Communists. 
In November he was betrayed and arrested by the NKVD for being a member of the Home Army and was sentenced to four years in prison. In 1947 he was, however, released under an amnesty. Thereafter, he was stripped of his rights as a citizen and regularly arrested and interrogated by the secret police. 
He worked as a taxi driver for many years and it was not until 1971 that his friends managed to get him work as a professional photographer. During the Warsaw Uprising, he had taken thousands of photographs which he hid and recovered after the war. 
In 1989, when Poland became a democratic country, his achievements were finally recognised. In 2006, he was promoted to honorary brigadier general. He was also awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest military decoration for gallantry. His memoirs were translated into English in 2009 and appeared as Silent and Unseen: I was a WWII special ops commando. 
Stefan Baluk married, first, “Lala” Krzyczkowska. He married, secondly, Barbara Kostrzewa. His third marriage was to Danuta Orzeszko, who survives him with a son and two daughters, and a daughter of his second marriage. A son of his second marriage predeceased him. 
Stefan Baluk, born January 15 1914, died January 30 2014


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## fubar57 (Mar 8, 2014)




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## vikingBerserker (Mar 8, 2014)




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## Airframes (Mar 8, 2014)

R.I.P. Stefan.


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## Wurger (Mar 15, 2014)




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## Gnomey (Mar 16, 2014)




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## pbehn (Mar 26, 2014)

One of the many who did their bit.

Thank you Mr Holmes.

Air Commodore Jack Holmes - obituary - Telegraph


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## vikingBerserker (Mar 26, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Mar 27, 2014)




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## v2 (Mar 31, 2014)

F/Lt *Roy Conyers Nesbit* a Beuafort last flyer loses his final battle... 

Second World War veteran and acclaimed historian Roy Conyers Nesbit has been praised for his modesty and dedication in a tribute from his brother following his death on February, 2014. Roy, 92, died peacefully on February 2 after a five-month battle with oesophageal cancer. 
Roy became something of a celebrity in Swindon after racking up 25 books as an author of military history in the last 40 years. 
Roy was the second-eldest of four brothers. Michael Nesbit, 90, of Dorking, Essex, was one of Roy’s younger brothers. 
He said: “He individually researched all of his books. He never once trusted or used other people’s work. He personally researched every fact. He was quite modest I suppose. He was one of four brothers, so we always knocked him into shape if he ever got out of line. 
“I always admired the dedication he had for whatever he started doing.” 
Essex-born Roy was a veteran of the Second World War, having joined the RAF at about noon on September 3, 1939, an hour or so after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced on the radio that Britain was at war with Hitler’s Germany. 
Speaking to the Adver following the publication of his 25th book, The Battle for Burma, January 2010, he said: “After war was declared the sirens went off, but we knew it was just a test. 
“I rang up a friend and we met and volunteered for the RAF. 
“At the time I was working for Lloyds Bank and my father was with the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street. 
“I didn’t like my bank studies – I wanted some adventure. I also didn’t like the Germans, so I volunteered!” 
Roy initially trained as a pilot, only to discover that there was a glut of pilots but not of certain other crew positions. That was how, at the age of 19, he found himself in the role of navigator and bomb aimer in Bristol Beaufort aircraft targeting German U-boats in low-level attacks on their heavily-defended pens on the French coast. 
After 50 hazardous missions he became an instructor in navigation and related skills, eventually seeing service in Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – and later throughout the Far East. 
He left the RAF as a 24-year-old Flight Lieutenant in 1946 and studied at the London School Of Economics before working as a director of various manufacturing and retail firms in London until he retired at 63. He then moved to Swindon, where a number of his friends lived. 
Roy’s writing career began in the early 1970s when political strife led to three-day weeks, which in turn left him with time on his hands, although he had previously had an article published in the magazine Aeroplane. He told the Adver: “I was sitting there, wondering what to do. With tongue in cheek, I wrote a personal account of my experiences in the RAF.” 
That book, entitled Woe To The Unwary after the motto of his old squadron, was published in 1981 and opened the floodgates for publishers’ requests for more.

Have a Blue Sky, Sir!

An interview: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80030105


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## Wurger (Mar 31, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 1, 2014)

RIP.


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## GrauGeist (Apr 6, 2014)

Pilamaya Tunkasila







> Edmond Andrew Harjo, a Seminole Nation of Oklahoma tribal member and Congressional Gold Medal recipient, walked on March 31, 2014 in Ada, Oklahoma at the Mercy Hospital of Ada. He was 96 years old.
> 
> When Harjo served in the U.S. Army during World War II he was a private first class and a Seminole Nation Code Talker. During his service with the “A” Battery 195th Field Artillery Battalion he received a Good Conduct Medal, a EAME Service Ribbon and a Silver Star.








Code Talker Edmond Harjo Walks


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## Wurger (Apr 6, 2014)




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## Gnomey (Apr 6, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 7, 2014)




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## vikingBerserker (Apr 7, 2014)




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## v2 (Apr 15, 2014)

*Wing Commander Derek Martin *- Last remaining Sunderland pilot dies aged 93 

The last surviving pilot of Pembroke Dock's famous WW2 Sunderland flying boat has died aged 93.
In 2009 Wing Commander Derek Martin played a key role in the campaign to raise the remains of Sunderland T9044 from the Haven Waterway.
As a 19-year-old wartime pilot, he'd flown the coastal reconnaissance craft as part of the RAF's 210 Squadron.
Despite being badly injured in a 1941 crash he recovered to enjoy a long and successful career with the RAF.
He had received pioneering plastic surgery after the crash, making him a proud member of the 'Guinea Pig Club', made up of injured servicemen treated by renowned plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe.
The techniques he pioneered at the East Grinstead Hospital helped form the basis for modern plastic surgery.
Wing Commander Martin had been part of the RAF's 210 Squadron based in Pembroke Dock, and in retirement he became patron of the Pembroke Dock Sunderland Trust. He backed their efforts to establish a permanent home for the remains of the salvaged Sunderland T9044, which it was rediscovered by divers almost 70 years after it sank in a gale.
He himself had delivered it to Pembrokeshire in 1940, but just two months later it slipped its mooring during a gale, and sunk when a hole was torn in its fuselage. Its rediscovery was particularly important, as it's the only known example of a Mk1 Sunderland flying boat in the world.
Today many of its parts are on display at the Pembroke Dock Flying Boat Centre, officially opened by Wing Commander Martin in 2009.
On his last visit in 2011 he explained to The One Show's Dan Snow, the vital role Pembroke Dock and the Sunderlands had played in the defence of Britain's entire West Coast.

More: BBC - Berkshire - WWII Guinea Pig hero looks back

source: BBCNews


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## Wurger (Apr 15, 2014)




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## pbehn (Apr 15, 2014)

v2 said:


> *Wing Commander Derek Martin *- Last remaining Sunderland pilot dies aged 93
> 
> As a 19-year-old wartime pilot, he'd flown the coastal reconnaissance craft as part of the RAF's 210 Squadron.
> Despite being badly injured in a 1941 crash he recovered to enjoy a long and successful career with the RAF.
> ...



The war wasn't just decided by aces with high totals it also required dedicated young, very young men to fly long boring and dangerous patrol missions. Rest in peace Mr Martin thank you for your dedication.


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## Gnomey (Apr 15, 2014)




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## v2 (Apr 23, 2014)

BoB Veteran Flt Lt *Len Davies* 

A Second World War fighter pilot – who was one of the last of the Few – has died. 
Stockton-born Len Davies was just 19 when he fought in the Battle of Britain and helped to prevent a much-feared German invasion. 
A month after the battle began, Mr Davies was shot down over Kent.
But despite an injury to his leg and a large chunk of his Hurricane cockpit being blown off, rather than bail out he made a forced landing at Eastchurch aerodrome while the runway was being bombed. 
He was not out of action for long and soon headed to Malta where he found conditions even worse than the Battle of Britain. 
The following year, his squadron was posted to an aircraft delivery unit flying aircraft all over North Africa, the Middle East, India and China. 
In 1944, he was moved back to the UK as a transport captain, mainly on Dakotas. 
After the war Mr Davies did an engineering degree at Durham University where in the first week he met his wife to be, Katie. The couple had two children, Philip and Janet. 
Mr Davies later worked as an engineer for ICI and Alcoa in Teesside, Merseyside, Swansea and finally the Aylesbury area. 
The couple settled in Rosedale Abbey and then Whitley Bay, before moving to Cardiff to be near their daughter. 
The youngest of eight children, Mr Davies was brought up in Stanley Street, Norton. 
He did well at school and gained a scholarship to Stockton Grammar School. 
Despite his job being a reserved occupation, he volunteered to join the Auxiliary Air Force squadron based at Thornaby, calculating that when the war came he would have more control over his own destiny as a pilot. 
Battle of Britain airmen were known as "the Few" after Winston Churchill said of their role: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." 
Mr Davies’ friend Brian Outhwaite, who is writing a book about the Few who came from the North-East, said he would be sadly missed. 
He said: “His stories and anecdotes kept me entertained for hours. What a pleasure it was to sit with Len and hear him talk of his life, not just in the Battle of Britain but also of his other adventures during the war." 
Video | Homepage - The Northern Echo
Video | Homepage - The Northern Echo
Video | Homepage - The Northern Echo

Reactions: Like Like:
1 | Like List reactions


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## Wurger (Apr 23, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 25, 2014)




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## pbehn (Apr 25, 2014)

v2 said:


> BoB Veteran Flt Lt *Len Davies*
> 
> A Second World War fighter pilot – who was one of the last of the Few – has died.
> Stockton-born Len Davies was just 19 when he fought in the Battle of Britain and helped to prevent a much-feared German invasion.
> ...



Well I'll be damned, I went to the same school as Mr Davies. Rest in peace Sir.


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## v2 (Apr 26, 2014)

Flying Officer *Leslie Valentine*- Last D-Day light bomber pilot dies. 


Leslie Valentine was born in Dennistoun, Glasgow, on May 14, 1918 to parents Dr Leslie and Katherine Valentine. 
He attended the High School of Glasgow for boys from 1923 to 1936, where his son Dudley was also to enroll in 1946. 
In 1935 he met Vera Ward at Whitecraigs Lawn Tennis and Sports Club, Glasgow, and they married on May 17, 1938. 
The couple had their first child, Una, on December 4. 
That same year,Leslie went to study medicine at the University of Glasgow. 
But by September 1939 he was called up into service in the 2nd Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry and was sent to France. 
Arriving back, a notice to troops had been left asking for volunteers to join the RAF and he signed up. 
In 1941 he was sent to Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada, for his training, returning to Britain, for operations training at RAF Bicester, then RAF Finmere, learning to fly Blenheim and Boston bombers. 
By 1942 he was regularly deployed on missions for 88 Sqdn, 2nd Tactical Air Force, Bomber Command, across France and Germany, carrying out attacks on German supply lines, V1 rocket launching sites, marshalling yards, gun enplacements and submarine pens. 
In one stint he undertook an impressive 60 consecutive combat missions. 
Following D-Day he was made to take time off from combat and instead transported high-ranking officials in Auster planes around Europe for the RAF, based out of Denmark. 
His actions during the war would later be recognised by the French in 1944, when they awarded him one of their highest military honours, the Croix de Guerre (cross of war) with Silver Star, for dropping smoke bombs on Juno Beach during the Battle of Normandy on June 6, 1944, as part of Operation Overlord. He played a vital role in the Allied invasion, by laying smoke over the beaches to shield the forces from enemy fire.
Then aged 24, he flew his Douglas Boston E Easy light bomber 50ft above the Normandy shoreline amid a barrage from Royal Navy gunships and German 88 heavy artillery defences.
Two aircraft were lost on the mission but Leslie returned safely to 88 Squadron's base at RAF Hartford Bridge in Hampshire. 
During the war Mr Valentine carried out many other sorties across France, sabotaging supply lines to disrupt transport of enemy reinforcements.
He returned to the Normandy beaches in France last May as guest of honour at an Armistice Day commemoration.
His son Dudley Valentine said: "He came back very, very proud and poignant and talked about WW2 probably more than he had ever talked about it before."
He added: "It wasn't until the last perhaps 10 years that he ever really spoke about it. He certainly never spoke about it with the family.
"We knew that he had done 60 operations back-to-back, which was very unusual. 
"He still didn't open up totally about it until a couple of years ago. He was a very private man at the best of times during his life."
"He was the kind of man who would do things for other people and who spoke very highly of other people, but stepped out of the limelight himself and into the background," said his son. "The world is a bit of a sadder place without a chap like him around. He was the kind of man you would be proud to have as a father."
After the war he returned to Glasgow to live with his family, including his son Dudley, born in 1942, and continue his university education. 
He switched to physiotherapy and worked as a physiotherapist for 10 years, before taking a job in 1955 with pharmaceutical firm Abbott Laboratories as a salesman and then an area manager. He later took a job with GD Searle, now known as Monsato, also as a manager and stayed there until 1983 when he retired aged 65. 
In 1987 he and his wife moved to their home in Hethe, just outside Bicester, Oxfordshire, where Leslie pursued his interests of golf, reading and antiques collecting. He also finally received his Defence Medal at Downing Street, 16 months ago, from David Cameron for his service in France with the Highland Light Infantry. 
A mix-up, highlighted in a radio interview, meant that he had not been awarded it because he had signed up for the RAF while part of the Army. 
He spent the final four months of his life being cared for in Fewcott House Nursing Home, Fewcott near Bicester
Leslie Valentine died on Monday April 22, following a period of illness. 
He is survived by his son, his daughter and grandchildren David, 40, and Alistair, 21. His wife died in 2012. 
A funeral will be held at Banbury Crematorium on May 7 at 1pm, and all who knew him are welcome. Donations should be sent to the RAF Benevolent Fund.


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## Wayne Little (Apr 26, 2014)




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## vikingBerserker (Apr 26, 2014)




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## pbehn (Apr 28, 2014)

Some men and women are just special


Miloslav Bitton (ne Kratochvil) R.I.P. Sir

Colonel Miloslav Bitton - obituary - Telegraph


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## v2 (May 15, 2014)

Wing Commander *Cliff Alabaster *was an officer who guided missions against V1 bases and battle cruisers but fell prey to friendly fire over Dorset 


Wing Commander Cliff Alabaster, who has died aged 95, was a highly decorated bomber captain who flew more than 100 raids with RAF Bomber Command and the Pathfinder Force before embarking on a distinguished career in civil aviation. 
After completing his training as an air observer, Alabaster joined No 51 Squadron, operating the twin-engined Whitley. He made his first operational raid on August 5 1940 against a flying-boat base on the Baltic and over the next few months attacked targets in Germany and France. On the night of April 3 1941 he took off to bomb the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at Brest. On the outward route over Dorset, his Whitley was hit by machine-gun fire, which inflicted heavy damage, and the crew were forced to bail out. It was later established that the attack came from an RAF Hurricane, which had been hunting for German bombers returning to France from a raid on Swansea. 
After completing 30 operations, Alabaster was awarded the DFC. He had been identified as an outstanding navigator and was sent to Canada to complete a specialist course before returning to Bomber Command. He applied to train as a pilot but his services as a navigator were considered too valuable. 
Soon after the formation of the Pathfinder Force, Alabaster was asked by its leader Group Captain (later Air Vice-Marshal) Don Bennett to be the Force’s navigation officer as an acting wing commander. Six months later, in June 1943, he was appointed a flight commander on No 97 Squadron equipped with the Lancaster. Unusually for a navigator, he was appointed captain of his aircraft. He attacked targets deep in Germany and on the night of August 17/18 his was one of the lead Pathfinder crews on the raid against the secret German V1 and V2 Research Station at Peenemünde. 
During an attack on Cologne his Lancaster was severely damaged by a night-fighter and some of his crew were wounded, but Alabaster was determined to press on to the target. After a successful attack, the aircraft became difficult to control and an engine caught fire. The pilot made a brilliant landing at a coastal airfield. He was awarded the DFC and Alabaster added a Bar to his earlier award for his “masterly captaincy”. 
After completing a further 30 operations, Alabaster was awarded the DSO. The citation noted “his fearlessness and skill have been an important factor in the many successes obtained. He is a most excellent Flight Commander”. Finally, his repeated requests to train as a pilot were granted and he completed his training in May 1944 when, at Bennett’s insistence, he returned to the Pathfinder Force, initially on Lancasters before converting to the Mosquito. 
In November 1944 he assumed command of No 608 Squadron, part of the Light Night Striking Force, and he made attacks against Berlin and other major cities. After completing his 100th operation he was awarded a Bar to his DSO. He was one of only 27 men to be awarded the DSO and Bar and DFC and Bar. He also received the Air Efficiency Award. 
Robert Clifford Alabaster was born on March 11 1918 at Willesden, Middlesex. He won a County Scholarship and was educated at Willesden County School. On leaving school he worked in the legal department of London Transport but with war clouds gathering he enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in May 1939. 
At the war’s end Alabaster was offered a permanent commission with the RAF but he chose to join Don Bennett who had just established British South American Airways (BSAA) operating “Lancastrians” (converted wartime Lancasters). On January 1 1946 Bennett and Alabaster flew the first international service out of “Heath Row” en route to Buenos Aires in the Lancastrian Starlight. 
BSAA merged with BOAC in 1949 and Alabaster began flying Argonauts. During a flight from London to Rio via Lisbon and Dakar, Alabaster’s aircraft was well past the point of no return over the South Atlantic when it suffered a double engine failure. He set course for Fernando de Noronha, part of a remote archipelago 400 miles east of the Brazilian coast where there was an emergency airstrip. It was very close to the side of a mountain and had been rarely used since the war. In Alabaster’s words, “we landed at night amongst the sheep”. All on board survived. For his airmanship he was awarded the King’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. 
He was posted to BOAC’s Comet Development Flight in 1951 and flew many proving flights between London and Beirut. On May 2 1952 he was in command on the world’s first jet passenger service on the Khartoum to Johannesburg leg from London. When the Comets were grounded following disastrous crashes due to metal fatigue he flew Constellations but was happy to return to the Comet fleet, of which he was appointed Flight Manager, when BOAC brought back the redesigned version, the Comet 4, in 1958. 
In February 1959 he took the then Prime Minister, Sir Harold Macmillan on a state visit to Russia for meetings with Nikita Khrushchev.
Later in 1959 he was in command of the first ever jet service between London and New York. Eventually the Comet was withdrawn from service and, appropriately, Alabaster operated the final flight, which touched down at Heathrow in November 1965 ending 13 years of aviation history. He then converted to the Vickers VC10, the aircraft he was still flying in 1973 as a route check captain when he retired from BOAC. 
Alabaster worked for British Caledonian Airways as Flight Safety Advisor before joining Gulf Air in Bahrain flying ex-BOAC VC10s until 1978.
Following his final retirement he became treasurer for the Association of British Airways Pensioners (ABAP) and spent much time defending their cause. He also enjoyed his hobbies of sailing, furniture making, astronomy, playing the piano and gardening. 
Cliff Alabaster is survived by Valerie, his wife of 52 years, and their two sons and two daughters. 
Cliff Alabaster, born March 11 1918, died on February 17 2014.

source: The Telegraph


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## Wurger (May 15, 2014)




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## Gnomey (May 15, 2014)




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## pbehn (May 15, 2014)

100 missions and only shot down by friendly fire, thats a story to tell.

RIP


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## fubar57 (May 15, 2014)




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## vikingBerserker (May 15, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (May 16, 2014)




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## v2 (Jun 5, 2014)

*Chester Nez*, last of original Navajo code talkers of World War II, dies 

For more than two decades, Chester Nez kept silent about his role as one of the original Navajo code talkers responsible for developing an unbreakable code during World War II.
His death Wednesday at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at age 93 was lamented by the Marine Corps as the end of an era -- for both the country and its armed forces.
"We mourn his passing but honor and celebrate the indomitable spirit and dedication of those Marines who became known as the Navajo code talkers," the Marines said in a statement.
Nez was the last remaining of the original 29 Navajos recruited by the Marine Corps to develop the legendary code that was used for vital communications during battle.
He was a teenager when he was recruited in 1942 and assigned with the other code talkers to the Marine Corps' 382nd Platoon at Camp Pendleton.
Together, they created a code, including developing a dictionary.
Military authorities chose Navajo as a code language because its syntax and tonal qualities were almost impossible for a non-Navajo to learn, and it had no written form. The ranks of the Navajo code talkers swelled to more than 300 by the end of the war in 1945.
The code talkers were forbidden from telling anyone about it -- not their fellow Marines, not their families -- until their work was declassified in 1968. The original 29 were presented with the Congressional Gold Medal in 2001 by President George W. Bush.
"In developing our code, we were careful to use everyday Navajo words, so that we could memorize and retain the words easily," Nez told CNN in 2011 while promoting his book "Code Talker."
"I think that made our job easier, and I think it helped us to be successful in the heat of battle."
Still, Nez said he worried every day that an error might cost the life of an American military service member.
Nez was among the code talkers who were shipped out to Guadalcanal in 1942, where the code talkers worked in teams of two, with one relaying and receiving messages while the other cranked the portable radio and listened for errors in transmission.
"That was my first combat experience, and there was a lot of suffering and a lot of the condition was real bad out there," he told CNN's Larry King in 2002.
Nez also fought in Guam and Peleliu.
"When bombs dropped, generally we code talkers couldn't just curl up in a shelter," Nez wrote in his book. "We were almost always needed to transmit information, to ask for supplies and ammunition, and to communicate strategies. And after each transmission, to avoid Japanese fire, we had to move."
The code talkers faced initial resistance from fellow Marines who did not understand who they were and what they were doing.
That changed once they understood the importance of the code, Nez said.
The Navajo code baffled the Japanese, who had successfuly deciphered codes used by the U.S. Army. After the war, the Japanese chief of intelligence, Lt. General Seizo Arisue, admitted they were never able to crack the Navajo code used by the Marines and Navy, according to the Navy.
Nez was discharged in 1945, but later volunteered to fight in the Korean War.
After the code talkers' exploits were declassified by the military, the group gained legendary status with books and, ultimately, a movie that was inspired by their stories.
"The recognition of the code talkers came late, but it has been good for my Navajo people. I hope that this type of recognition continues across cultures," Nez said.
The 2002 film "Windtalkers," starring Adam Beach and Nicolas Cage, followed the fictional account of two Marines assigned to protect two code talkers during the battle of Saipan.
"I could understand when they sent the message and received on the other end," Nez said. "I could understand, and I could sit there and write it down myself. I still remember it."
It was a far cry from his childhood, when he was forced to attend a boarding school and punished by the teachers for speaking Navajo, according to his book.
It's a language, though, that appears lost even to many members of his own family.
"My own children do not speak Navajo, although my daughter-in-law ... speaks it well," he said.
Nez said he decided to tell his story because he wanted to share the contributions and sacrifices of the Navajo during World War II.
"Our Navajo code was one of the most important military secrets of World War II. The fact that the Marines did not tell us Navajo men how to develop that code indicated their trust in us and in our abilities," he said.
"The feeling that I could make it in both the white world and the Navajo world began there, and it has stayed with me all of my life. For that I am grateful."
The Navajo Nation's flags have been ordered lowered in Nez's honor, President Ben Shelly said.

source: CNN


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## Wayne Little (Jun 7, 2014)

RIP Sir!


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## vikingBerserker (Jun 7, 2014)




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## Wurger (Jun 8, 2014)

RIP Sir !


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## Aaron Brooks Wolters (Jun 8, 2014)

Rest In Peace Mr. Nez.


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## v2 (Jun 8, 2014)

Fl/Lt.* Stanisław Socha *VM, CV. 

Borni in Lwow (now Lviv) Poland 27th April 1918. Died 7th May 2014, Canada Age 96. 
Born in Poland, the son of Zofia de domo Ryżko and father, Antoni Socha who was a railway worker. A large family but the only boy with five sisters.
He grew up very close to the airfield of the 6 Air Regiment. Graduated from ‘Jan and Jędrzej Śniadecki’ High School for boys in 1938 and passed the A Exam.
His interest in flying started with flying gliders in Stanisławów. He learned how to fly RWD-8 then Bartel BM-4 training aircraft. 
In 1938 he joined Polish Air Force Cadet Officers School in Dęblin, where he learned fly PWS-10, PWS-26, then fighters PZL P.7.
Socha performed his last training flight on 1st of September 1939. After landing he was informed about the war. He left Poland with group of other cadets and arrived in Romania. In charge of his group was famous Witold Urbanowicz, instructor. From port of Balcik he sailed to Marseille in France.
His group was transferred to Lyon. Then he was posted to Rabat in North Africa where he flew Potez XXVs, Loire et Oliver Leo 206 and Dewoitine D 510. After the French collapse he left for UK via Casablanca and Gibraltar. 
Completed training in 15 EFTS (November 1940), 1 PFTS (Feb – March 1941), 1 AAS in RAF Manby (March Aug 191), then in 1941 (August – Sept) was posted to 61 OTU in Heston. (Operational Training Unit).
In October 1941 Sgt. Socha joined the Polish 306 Squadron, then in November, posted to 303 Squadron, flying the Spitfire. In March 1942, for 3 weeks posted to No. 81 Squadron. Then returned to 303. On the 1st January 1942 Socha was promoted to the rank of P/O. 
On the 12th April 1942 the Squadron took off at 12.40 hrs on Operation Circus 122. South of St Omer he probably shot down Bf109. From the station ORB:
‘The Wing was jumped on out of sun by 5/6 Fw190 which selected this Unit as Top Squadron. P/O. Socha turned and attacked a Me109 which he saw attacking a Spitfire. After the second burst greyish smoke was seen coming from it and it wont spinning down. Claimed as probable.’
He met his future wife, Isabella Leary in Coltishall, Norfolk, marrying on 16th August 1942. Their only son, Paul Stephen was born in 1943.
19th August 1942, during the famous Dieppe raid (‘Jubilee’) he claimed one Fw190 and one Ju88 destroyed. Between the 30th November 1942 – 11th February 1943 he served in Air Fighting Development Unit in Duxford, returning again to 303 squadron. 
On 6 July 1943 near Berck he damaged one Fw 190. The station ORB (Operational Record Book):
‘F/O. S. Socha was leading white section at 18000 ft when he saw 4 Fw. on starboard and slightly above over the sea off Berck on the way out. They turned to attack and he followed the one on the left. He opened fire from 500 yds astern closing to 400 seeing strikes on the fuselage. Receiving warning of 4 e/a which had climbed he broke off at 7/8000 ft. When last seen the e/a was going down out of control. On examination of F/O. Soch’s machine a dent was found on the underside of the nose and a dent and scratches under the air scoop. He saw nothing fly off the machine but it is possible a piece of wreckage glanced off the underside of his kite. 1 Fw. claimed damaged, unless cine gun shows probable.’
Further action on 22nd August 1943 in Sotteville, where he damaged another Fw190. The station ORB:
‘During this sweep Sq/Ldr. Falkowski saw some e/a and his report is as follows: When over Sotteville area he noticed 4/5 Fw190 at 20/21,000 ft. flying south. He attacked one of the last pair from above and astern and opened fire from 400 yds. He gave one short and one long burst after which the e/a started smoking and went vertically down in flames. He also gave one short burst to another Fw, but seeing his No. 2 F/O. Socha attacking he broke away. The COs claim of 1 Fw190 destroyed was confirmed by five other pilots of the Squadron. Cine gun exposed. F/O. Socha who was flying lower than Sq/Ldr. Falkowski went after the second Fw. who was diving and turning like a corkscrew. He gave a few bursts from cannons and MG from 500 to 300 yds. and saw bullet strikes on the port wing. The combat was broken off at 10,000 ft. Claim 1 Fw190 damaged.’
28th January 1944 F/O. Socha was posted for rest from 27th May – 29th August 1944, serving as an instructor in 61 OTU. (Operational Training Unit).
30th August – posted back to 303 squadron. 
On the 1st September 1944 Fl/Lt. Socha took command of B Flight, 303 squadron. He served with them until the 25th May 1945, flying the Mustang IV. 
Between August 1945 and January 1947 served in HQ of RAF Coltishall, Norfolk. He was demobilised in 1948. Decorations: Virtuti Militari, Cross of Valour and other British war medals.
Stanisław Socha emigrated to Canada, where in Alberta he bought a farm, also working in a garage, repairing cars. In 1950 he moved to Toronto. There again he worked as a car mechanic. 
Moved to the USA for 15 years. Before returning to Canada.
His only son, Paul Stephen, died in 2000 (cancer), his wife, Isabella, passed away in 2006. Stanisław Socha died on the 7th May 2014 in Bracebridge Hospital, Canada.


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## Wayne Little (Jun 10, 2014)




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## Thorlifter (Jun 12, 2014)

RIP "Babe" Heffron

To the end, Edward James “Babe” Heffron insisted that he wasn’t a hero, that his service in World War II was simply part of an obligation to serve his country in a time of need.

But when fame followed him in the wake of Stephen Ambrose’s book “Band of Brothers” and its HBO miniseries, Heffron, who died Sunday at the age of 90 after a short battle with colon cancer, used it to praise the sacrifices made by countless men and women during America’s most trying times.

“He felt the heroes were the moms who sent their kids off and the guys who never came back."

- Ed Zavrel, Heffron's son-in-law

“He felt the heroes were the moms who sent their kids off and the guys who never came back,” Ed Zavrel, Heffron’s son-in-law, told FoxNews.com Tuesday night. “Babe didn’t consider himself a hero, just a guy who did his job.”

As a paratrooper in Company E, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, Private Heffron joined Easy Company shortly after the Normandy invasion and participated in some of the war’s fiercest battles, including the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium. He received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

After the war, Heffron returned to south Philadelphia, his hometown, where he found work at a whiskey distillery and later checked cargo on the Delaware River waterfront.

Like many veterans of his era, Heffron never spoke about the war, and if it wasn’t for Ambrose’s book, his family might never have learned about his service.

But after the book -- which documents Easy Company's harrowing engagements and prominently features several soldiers, including Heffron -- was published in 1992, and especially after the miniseries aired in 2001, Heffron became something of an icon for a generation that went to war. He was featured in interviews for the miniseries (in which he was portrayed by Scottish actor Robin Laing) and participated in a 2008 USO tour to the Middle East.

Along with one of his comrades, William "Wild Bill" Guarnere, and journalist Robyn Post, Heffron also wrote a 2007 memoir called "Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends."

Walking around Philadelphia in his airborne jacket and hat, Heffron would often be stopped by people thanking him for his service, Zavrel said. Heffron made regular appearances at local schools, where he would spend hours with children telling stories about the war and general “life lessons,” Zavrel added.

As news of Heffron's passing spread early this week, many paused to offer their condolences.

Actor Tom Hanks, who co-executive produced the miniseries, posted a photo of the 101st Airborne's "Screaming Eagle" patch on his WhoSay account.

"In honor and memory of Babe Heffron and Earl McClung," said Hanks, the latter a sergeant who served alongside Heffron in Easy Company who passed away last month. "Farewell, Brothers. Hanx."

Heffron is survived by his wife, Dolores Heffron, and their daughter, Patricia Zavrel. Funeral arrangements will be private, and some of Heffron’s former comrades were expected to attend.

The family is “holding up as well as can be expected,” an emotional Ed Zavrel said. But in following Heffron’s example, they’re intent on making sure “Babe” is properly honored.

“Babe didn’t want any fanfare,” Zavrel said. “He was never one for tears. He said you got to do what you got to do.”


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## Wayne Little (Jun 12, 2014)




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## vikingBerserker (Jun 12, 2014)




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## FLYBOYJ (Jun 17, 2014)

Mira Slovak passed away yesterday at the age of 84, at his home in Fallbrook California.


Mira Slovak - "The Flying Czech"


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## vikingBerserker (Jun 18, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Jun 20, 2014)




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## Bernhart (Jun 25, 2014)

WINNIPEG – The Department of National Defence has identified the remains of Second World War airman, Flight Sergeant John Joseph Carey.

Flight Sergeant Carey was the front air gunner for the Royal Air Force bomber Halifax BB214. The aircraft was shot down by enemy fighter aircraft over Laacher See, south of Bonn Germany, on August 28th, 1942.


A team of German explosives disposal divers discovered the remains in 2008, while trying to assess the stability of the aircraft, but they could not be analyzed until a genetic donor was found in 2013.

“The identification of the remains of Flight Sergeant Carey demonstrates to his family, and to all of us, that the ultimate sacrifice he made in the name of his country will not be forgotten,” said Minister of National Defence, Rob Nicholson. “ Our Canadian airman will finally be laid to rest with the military honour he so rightfully deserves.”

Flight Sergeant Carey was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on February 4, 1920. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force on May 31, 1940 in Ottawa, Ontario, and was a member of 103 Squadron.

He was 22 years of age at the time of his death.


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## vikingBerserker (Jun 25, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Jun 27, 2014)




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## fubar57 (Jun 27, 2014)




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## v2 (Jul 14, 2014)

Sgt *William G Gausden *MBE BEM, Air Gunner, RAF has joined his Sq 34 Flying Mates in higher service.... 

Bill started his uniformed career in 1940 when he volunteered as an ATC cadet to help man the RAF Air Sea Rescue launches operating from his home town of Dover, Kent. He was involved in the rescue of a number of downed RAF Aircrews during his service. Bill was also a part-time air raid warden and saw firsthand a lot of the devastation caused by German bombing and long-range shelling of the Kent coast throughout the early stages of the war. In August 1943 Bill was called up and he volunteered for RAF Aircrew selection at the tender age of 18 (and 3 days). His application was successful and he underwent aircrew training, qualifying as an Air Gunner in July 1944. In the last year of the war Bill flew 42 operational sorties with 34 SAAF and 70 Sqn RAF flying from Southern Italy over Yugoslavia and Poland in Liberator bombers. Due to his relatively diminutive stature (5’6”) he spent most of the war facing backwards in the tail turret. His flying career included a number of particularly dangerous missions dropping arms to the partisans over the besieged city of Warsaw and he was a proud member of the “Warsaw 44” club (subsequently commemorated by the award of a Polish Home Army Cross by the Polish President in 1994). In May 1945, rather than face demob, Bill volunteered to join the RAF Police and served as a dog handler in Italy until he had completed all the RAFP qualifications required to retain his Sgts Stripes. From 1946 to 1979 Bill served in a number of RAFP roles and amassed various “Qs” including QPD, QPSI, HODT and QPCI, rising to the rank of Warrant Officer. His claims to fame included being a founding member of the RAFP PM4a low-flying complaints unit in the early 60s and providing support for the TSR2 project, WOSy at 26 SUGatow in the late 60s and CI duties as WOCPSyO (NEAF) in Cyprus during the Cyprus war in 1973/4. In all he served for 36 years earning a LSGCM and bar and numerous operational theatre medals and commendations as well as his BEM and MBE. When asked why he chose the RAF Police after his aircrew service he always said: “I chose RAF Police because it appeared to be one of the few trades which had an operational role in peacetime. Also its members tended to perform their duties in relative isolation, making on the spot decisions and being responsible for their own actions. This was similar in some respects to that of members of a bomber-crew of which I was familiar”.
Bill met and married his wife Theresa (Tess) in Malta in 1950 whilst serving with the RAF Police at Takali and they remained happily married until her sudden passing in 2002. Bill died peacefully in a retirement home in Herefordshire at 05:15 on Thursday 5th June 2014 after suffering a stroke earlier in the year. Bill was always a proud member of the RAF first and then took equal pride in both his aircrew and RAF Police careers. He was not a member of the RAF Police Association but was always ready to help his former colleagues or his country whenever asked to do so.


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## fubar57 (Jul 14, 2014)




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## gumbyk (Jul 15, 2014)

NOICE, Ronald Charles (Q.S.M. WWII, RAF 405 Pathfinder Squadron, F.O. 429800). - Passed away peacefully at Atawhai Assisi on 13th July, 2014; aged 90 years. Dearly beloved husband of Pearl for 65 years. Loved and loving father and father-in-law of Jackie and Laurie, Greg and Margaret, Christine and Brian. Much loved Pappy of Stephen, Joanne, Melanie, Carolyn, Kathryn, and their partners. Loved Grand Pappy to all his great-grandchildren.
"Have a great flight on your final journey."
Ron was a Navigator/Bomb Aimer on Pathfinder Lancasters with No. 405 Squadron RCAF (he was a kiwi though). It was Ron who was the first to drop flare markers on the target that would become the very controversial Dresden raid. 

He and his crew were shot down by an upward firing German nightfighter on their 30th op, and all but one became POW's (the other was murdered after landing in his chute by German locals). 

After the war Ron ran the New Zealand Prisoner Of War Association both as Secretary and President for many decades.

He also starred in the Maori Television documentary "Night After Night", and for some years was a committee member of the Cambridge Returned and Services Association.


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## vikingBerserker (Jul 15, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 16, 2014)




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## Gnomey (Jul 19, 2014)




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## v2 (Jul 30, 2014)

*Theodore VanKirk*, last survivor of Enola Gay crew, dies 

Theodore VanKirk, also known as "Dutch," died Monday, July 28, 2014 of natural causes at the retirement home where he lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia, his son Tom VanKirk said. He was 93.
VanKirk was the navigator of the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress aircraft that dropped "Little Boy" - the world's first atomic bomb - over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. The bomb killed 140,000 in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki three days later. VanKirk was 24 years old at the time. Tom VanKirk said he and his siblings are very fortunate to have had such a wonderful father who remained active until the end of his life.
"I know he was recognized as a war hero, but we just knew him as a great father," he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday.
In a 2005 interview with the AP, VanKirk said his World War II experience showed that wars and atomic bombs don't settle anything, and he'd like to see the weapons abolished.
A funeral service was scheduled for VanKirk on Aug. 5 in his hometown of Northumberland, Pennsylvania. He will be buried in Northumberland next to his wife, who died in 1975. 

source: Theodore VanKirk, last survivor of Enola Gay crew, dies - CBS News


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## fubar57 (Jul 30, 2014)




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## vikingBerserker (Jul 30, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Jul 31, 2014)




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## Gnomey (Aug 1, 2014)




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## michaelmaltby (Aug 6, 2014)

Man who saved JFK has passed:

BBC News - The Solomon Islanders who saved JFK


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## Wildcat (Aug 7, 2014)




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## Wurger (Aug 7, 2014)




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## fubar57 (Aug 7, 2014)




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## Gnomey (Aug 7, 2014)




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## pbehn (Aug 12, 2014)

Amazing love story of a brave and lucky man.
Second World War camp survivor and wife both die on 76th wedding anniversary - Telegraph


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## Wayne Little (Aug 12, 2014)

Aw man...that brings a tear to the eye.....


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## Glider (Aug 12, 2014)

That is a bit special


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## pbehn (Aug 12, 2014)

Glider said:


> That is a bit special



After 76 years together what other way to go than both together. It touched a nerve with me I must say.


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## v2 (Sep 13, 2014)

Lt-Cdr *John Hone *

Lt-Cdr John Hone was an officer who flew biplanes in North Africa and helped to hunt the Bismarck.

Lt-Cdr John Hone, who has died aged 92, was at the sinking of the Bismarck and flew biplanes in support of the Eighth Army in North Africa.
In May 1941 Hone was sent to America, where he was to attend flying school, in the battleship Rodney. His ship was carrying 512 passengers, many in place of the normal crew, and when she was diverted to hunt down Bismarck, Hone was quickly trained as part of the crew of a turret of 16-inch guns; he helped to handle the silk-encased cordite charges, each weighing nearly 200lb, from the magazine to the breech. Hone saw nothing of the battle itself, but took some satisfaction when on May 27 1941 Bismarck was sunk. 
After training at the wartime school for observers (as air navigators are called in the Navy) in Trinidad, Hone joined 821 Naval Air Squadron, flying Fairey Albacore biplanes from primitive advanced airstrips in the Western Desert in support of the Eighth Army. The work consisted of locating, and illuminating by flares, front-line targets, and night dive-bombing in cooperation with the bombers of the RAF and Allied forces. They also undertook minelaying and spotting for night coastal bombardments by the Navy. Assessing these operations by 821 (and 826) NAS, the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, reckoned they were “one of the decisive factors in holding Rommel’s assaults”. 
On October 23 1942, Hone flew two sorties on the opening night of the Second Battle of El Alamein, the battle which marked the turning point of the campaign in the Western Desert. When that seemed won, in December 1942 Hone, with the six remaining Albacores of 821 Squadron, was deployed to Hal Far, Malta, from where they attacked enemy warships and convoys in an attempt to throttle supplies to Axis forces in North Africa. 
In April the next year Hone returned to Britain, and was sent to the trials unit which flew the first Fairey Firefly fighter-bombers from the experimental carrier Pretoria Castle. 
After the Navy received the twin-engined de Havilland Mosquito in 1944, he was observer on the first deck-landings; and when 811 NAS was equipped with the aircraft in September 1945, he was appointed senior observer of the squadron. He flew in the Korean War from the carriers Ocean and Glory, then attended the Navy’s Observer Training School as an instructor. 
John Reginald Hone was born at Kingsbridge, Devon, on November 11 1921 and educated at Peter Symonds School in Winchester, where his father was a teacher. After leaving school he volunteered for the Royal Navy as aircrew. 
In 1954, after his first wife, Jean Ann Bale, died from electrocution while they were on honeymoon, Hone married Joy Simpson . In 1958 Hone left the Navy and joined the Simpson family firm in the management of the Flamingo Club and Ballroom, outside Redruth. 
In the 25 years that Hone was licensee of the 2,000-capacity Flamingo, the club hosted various top bands, and, in the winters, wrestling matches. As well as giving many local acts their first gig, John and Joy Hone booked big names such as Pink Floyd, Queen and Tom Jones. Being so far from London, the Hones always feared a no-show and insisted that all bookings should be contracted. 
Once, when the Pretty Things failed to show on the grounds of “illness”, Joy Hone tracked them down in London to discover that their “illness” was self-inflicted and made them agree to perform at the Flamingo at a reduced fee. 
Johnny Hone’s focus was always his local patrons and the quality of the beer he served. He was a founding member of the Campaign for Real Ale.
He was a lay assistant at Truro cathedral and a member of the Prayer Book Society. 
His wife survives him with their daughter and a son. 
Lt-Cdr John Hone, born November 11 1921, died July 8 2014 

source: The Telegraph


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## vikingBerserker (Sep 13, 2014)




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## v2 (Oct 2, 2014)

Wing Commander *Bob Bray * 

Wing Commander Bob Bray was a bomber pilot who lit up targets in the Ruhr and during the lead-up to D-Day.

Wing Commander Bob Bray, who has died aged 93, flew 94 bombing operations over occupied Europe and won two DFCs.
By the summer of 1943, Bray had already completed more than 30 missions when he joined No 105 Squadron as the unit became part of Bomber Command’s Pathfinder Force. Equipped with the new Oboe radar , the squadron’s Mosquitos illuminated and marked targets with flares and target indicators for the main bomber force. Bray was in constant action from August 1943 during the Battle of the Ruhr, when industrial targets were attacked.
On the night of March 26 1944 he was flying one of six Mosquitos which dropped target indicators on the Krupps works in Essen to provide an aiming point for a force of 705 bombers. Despite complete cloud cover, Bray dropped his markers using Oboe, and proof of their accuracy came in the form of a large red glow through the cloud followed by large explosions; the glow could be seen from as far away as the Dutch coast.
On the night of May 4/5 Bray dropped a 4,000lb bomb on the IG Farbenindustrie AG chemical works at Leverkusen. Over the target, flak smashed into the starboard engine and his Mosquito lost height rapidly. Bray wrestled with the controls and managed to reach Kent flying at very low level. With one engine on fire and the other malfunctioning, he managed to land on the crash strip at Manston, near Ramsgate. 
In the lead-up to the Allied landings in Normandy, Bray marked railways, marshalling yards, night fighter airfields and oil installations, mostly in France. On D-Day, he took off before dawn and dropped his markers on the huge gun battery at Longines near Cherbourg, which posed a great threat to the invading naval forces. The main force of bombers destroyed it. After attacking airfields and the docks at Le Havre, he marked the V-1 site at Reneserve on June 16. It was his final sortie with No 105 after 15 months of continuous operations. A few days later he was awarded a Bar to the DFC he had earned earlier in the war. 
Robert Walter Bray was born on May 5 1921 in Sheffield and educated at King Edward VII Grammar School in the city. He joined the RAF in June 1940 and trained as a pilot. 
In June 1941 he joined No 75 (NZ) Squadron to fly the Wellington, and over the next six months bombed many targets in Germany . In September he attacked La Spezia in Italy . On December 23 he took part in a raid on Düsseldorf, his 32nd and final operation with No 75 Squadron. He was later awarded his first DFC . 
During a rest period as an instructor, Bray flew a Wellington in the first “1,000 Bomber” raid, on Cologne. Two nights later he flew on the second raid, in which Essen was the target. 
After he had completed his tour with the Pathfinder Force in June 1944, Bray was rested until April 1945 when, at the age of 23, he was promoted to wing commander and given command of No 571 Squadron. Piloting the high-flying Mosquito, he attacked Berlin eight times in two weeks. On his eighth operation his aircraft was hit by flak but he managed to get back to base. On April 26 he bombed a seaplane base in Schleswig-Holstein. It was his 94th and final operation. 
Bray was hoping to remain in the RAF after the war, but the death of his father prompted him to return home where, for the next 40 years, he ran the family business in Sheffield, the men’s outfitters Bray Brothers. 
A modest, self-effacing man, he greatly enjoyed golf, skiing and travelling around Europe.
Bob Bray married, in 1945, Winifred Frith, who died in 1980. His long-standing companion, Alicea Bentall, survives him.
Wing Commander Bob Bray, born May 5 1921, died August 15 2014.

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Oct 2, 2014)

*Jimmy Dodds *

Jimmy Dodds was a Hurricane fighter pilot who cut a swathe through enemy aircraft during the campaign in North Africa.

Jimmy Dodds, who has died aged 92, was the RAF’s most successful Hurricane fighter pilot during the North African desert campaign and went on to have a distinguished flying career in East Africa. 
In the summer of 1941 Dodds joined No 274 Squadron, as a teenage sergeant pilot, to fly Hurricanes. On November 18 that year a major Allied offensive against Rommel and his Panzers was launched with extensive air support. Dodds was in the thick of “Operation Crusader” from the outset, and over the next few months flew 143 operational sorties over the desert. 
His first success came on December 1, when he shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 109. Over the next six months he was credited with shooting down 14 enemy aircraft, with a further six “probables”. Most of his victims were German and Italian fighters; these had a superior performance to the Hurricane, and to offset this Dodds, when encountering hostile formations, would climb as high as possible before picking out a target well below him, then diving on it. 
On one occasion he was escorting a reconnaissance aircraft when his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he was forced to land in the desert. 
He had his final success on June 17 1942, when he shot down two Italian fighters during the same engagement. His squadron then carried out a number of low-level bombing operations, Dodds completing seven sorties . He left the squadron in July, and a few months later was awarded a DFM. 
James Dodds was born in Glasgow on July 22 1921 and educated at Hyndland Secondary School, where he developed a lifelong love of literature. He joined the RAF (where he was known as “Hamish”) in May 1940 and trained as a fighter pilot. 
Shortly after leaving No 274 Squadron in 1942 he was commissioned and remained in Egypt flying communications and training aircraft. On his return to Britain in April 1945 he joined No 56 Squadron, flying the Tempest and then the Meteor jet fighter. He left the RAF in early 1947 as a flight lieutenant but continued to fly with the RAF Reserve from Perth. 
In the aftermath of war Dodds worked for several years for the King Aircraft Corporation of Glasgow, makers of aircraft components and fittings. He then went to Nairobi, where he joined Campling Vanderwal as a charter pilot. Operating 16 aircraft, this was the largest air charter company in East Africa carrying mail and making Red Cross flights between cities throughout the region. 
During the Kenyan Emergency, Dodds was seconded, in 1953, to the Kenya Police Reserve Air Wing. Flying a single-engine Piper Pacer, he worked closely in support of Army operations, particularly those of the Devonshire Regiment in the Aberdare Forest. Known to the ground forces by his call sign “Eagle Green”, he dropped supplies to isolated patrols and transported reinforcements to remote airstrips. To provide additional flexibility in the area, the Devons levelled out an airstrip at Kihuri which they named “Dodds Field”. 
Sometimes it was Dodds who provided the only radio link between ground patrols, meaning that he would have to coordinate an operation himself. His command of one such operation, involving the Devons and the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, was described in the regimental history as “masterly”, and in May 1954 he was appointed MBE for his “outstanding services during the Emergency”. His farewell visit to the Devons involved his landing, to the consternation of motorists, on the main Nairobi-Naivasha road — “because it was the nearest suitable strip to the Officers’ Mess”. 
In 1955 Dodds left Kenya for New Zealand, where he joined Fieldair in Gisborne spraying a top dressing on numerous sheep stations in the area. He met his future wife, Robin, in New Zealand, and in 1956 she accompanied him back to Nairobi, where he rejoined Campling Vanderwal. 
On June 30 1960 the former Belgian Congo became independent, and 10 days later Congolese soldiers mutinied against their European officers. There was widespread panic among the 97,000 whites, and Dodds immediately volunteered to join an airlift to evacuate those in the east of the country. On July 10 he flew a single-engine Comanche aircraft to the town of Bunia in the Congo, starting a shuttle between Bunia and Kasase in western Uganda, flying out to safety nuns, missionaries and civilians. Over the next four days he flew for six or seven hours a day, making nine round trips during which his small aircraft was often overloaded and the target of rifle fire. 
He then made four more evacuation flights from other Congo towns, making his last on July 16, when he picked up refugees from Paulis (now Isiro) and took them to Entebbe, in Uganda. 
In November 1960 Dodds left for Mwanza in Tanzania, establishing his own air charter business flying a Cessna 206. His wife did the bookings and paperwork while he traversed East Africa on both business and tourist charter flights. These included frequent visits to game parks, providing him with opportunities to indulge his keen interest in both wildlife and photography. 
Dodds returned to his native Scotland in 1970, building a marina on the banks of the Caledonian Canal in Inverness. He also designed the superstructure of a cabin cruiser based on a 23ft fibreglass hull; she was hired out on the canal for some years, and chandlery, moorings, and small boat hire and sales gradually augmented the business. 
Finally settled in East Berwickshire Jimmy Dodds passed his time gardening, reading and listening to classical music . 
He is survived by his wife, whom he married in 1956, and by their two sons and one daughter.

Jimmy Dodds, born July 22 1921, died July 17 2014.

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Oct 2, 2014)

F/Sgt Wlodzimierz "Don" Chojnacki 

Don was a member of 303 Squdron, which was one of 16 Polish Fighter Squadrons in the RAF during the Second World War. It was the highest scoring Polish-manned RAF Squadron during the Battle of Britain. Of interest, according to the RAF Museum, the Poles were keen to fight but the RAF would not at first let them fly operationally. This was because few of the exiles spoke English and there was concern about their morale. What the British did not yet realise was that many of the Poles were excellent pilots. Having come through the Polish and French Campaigns, they had more combat experience than most of their British comrades and they employed superior tactics.
The photo of Don in his "Hendon Lamb" Spitfire W3506, a Mark Vb marked RF-U, was possibly taken at Northolt or Kirton in Lindsey in 1942. No. 303 Squadron records indicate that the “Hendon Lamb” Spitfire was W3506, a Spitfire Mk. Vb marked RF-U. This would date the photo to a period between 3 Oct 1941 (W3506 assigned to No. 303 Sqn) and 12 Apr 1942, when the same aircraft was lost. Damaged by a Fw 190 during a Circus 122 mission over France, it ditched five miles South-East off Dover; the pilot, P/O Wojda, was rescued by an RAF launch.
(Note the two emblems on his Spitfire. The right one is the circular "Kosciuszko" emblem of 303 Squadron, commemorating a Polish general who fought in the American Revolutionary War (note that the emblem features the stars and stripes of the American flag). The second one, "Hendon Lamb" is a presentation name of this particular Spitfire, adorned by the coat of arms of Hendon - a Lamb carrying a St George's Flag, which is seen on St Mary's Church in the town. The elaborate presentation logo is an interesting example of local patriotism. Hendon had become a municipal borough with its own mayor and the right to to have its own coat of arms only eight years previously, in 1932, when Don was going through his initial flying training.
Chojnacki career as a pilot begun in 1932 in Poznan, where he got his license. He quickly distinguished himself as a skilfull aviator. By the time the war broke out, he already was a qualified fighter instructor in the Polish Air Force.
Like many of his peers, after the demise of his home country Chojnacki escaped to Britain. There, for the 15 months’ in 1941 and 1942, he served with Nos. 303 and 129 Squadrons in which he flew Spitfires Mk. Vb and Vc.
After the Dieppe Raid where he flew on Operation Jubilee, he was awarded the Polish Cross of Valour which was presented to him by the Polish President at a special parade, about two weeks after the operation.
During his Flying Career, Wlodek flew nearly 4000 hours on 28 different types of aircraft.

Wlodzimierz "Don" Chojnacki died October 1 2014 in Melbourne.


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## Gnomey (Oct 3, 2014)




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## fubar57 (Oct 3, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Oct 6, 2014)




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## v2 (Nov 21, 2014)

*Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska*: Pilot daughter of Marshal Pilsudski who served the Air Transport Auxiliary during WW2 

Pilsudska-Jaraczewska was among the female pilots who worked the Air Transport Auxiliary, transporting warplanes around the country, alongside such British women as Freydis Sharland and Maureen Dunlop.
Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska, who has died at the age of 94, was a Second World War pilot and a daughter of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the father of Polish independence. 
She was the younger of two daughters of the celebrated military leader who helped Poland regain its independence at the end of the First World War after being wiped off the map for 123 years.
He commanded Polish troops in the 1920 victory against Bolshevik forces known as “The Miracle on the Vistula” that turned the tide in Poland’s favour during the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1919-1920. He went on to guide the country until his death in 1935.
Four years later his daughters fled the Nazi invasion and settled in Britain. Pilsudska-Jaraczewska was among the female pilots who worked the Air Transport Auxiliary, transporting warplanes around the country, alongside such British women as Freydis Sharland and Maureen Dunlop.
In 1944 she married a Polish Navy officer, Andrzej Jaraczewski, and later earned a degree in architecture, working for the Polish immigrant community in her free time. The sisters returned to Warsaw after the fall of communism in 1989. Her sister, Wanda, died in 2001. 
Jadwiga was born in 1920, the second out-of-wedlock daughter of Pilsudski and his companion Aleksandra Szczerbinska. At the time he was unable to marry Szczerbinska because his first wife refused a divorce. They married after Pilsudski’s first wife died in 1921. From their earliest years Pilsudski’s daughters joined him in public appearances. They lived for a time in Belweder, a Warsaw palace that is now a presidential residence. 

Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska, pilot: born 28 February 1920; died 16 November 2014.

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## vikingBerserker (Nov 21, 2014)




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## Wayne Little (Nov 27, 2014)




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## fubar57 (Nov 27, 2014)




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## v2 (Feb 20, 2015)

Flight Lieutenant Jim Inward 

Former aircraft fitter who flew on 47 bombing operations and risked his life to save that of his rear gunner.


Flight Lieutenant Jim Inward, who has died aged 94, was an RAF aircraft fitter who travelled to Finland to service Gladiator fighters and was caught up in the fighting of the “Winter War” between Finland and Russia. He later flew 47 operations in Bomber Command and was awarded a DFC. 
Inward had just completed his training as an aircraft apprentice when the Second World War broke out. After a brief spell servicing Hurricane fighters, he volunteered for a special task, which took him first to neutral Sweden. To avoid a diplomatic incident, he and his few RAF colleagues were “asked to resign” from the RAF and become civilians. 
He joined a small party at the Gloster Aviation Company to become familiar with the Gladiator before flying to Sweden in February 1940 to assemble a number of the biplane fighters, which had arrived in crates. 
The aircraft were then flown to Finland for the defence of the south of the country. Inward followed and joined a squadron on the eastern front east of Viipuri on the Karelian Isthmus. 
Within a week Soviet forces had advanced into the area, creating an urgent need to evacuate the small British party to prevent them falling into Russian hands. Inward travelled by horse-drawn sleigh to Helsinki, where he and some of his colleagues took a civilian flight to Sweden . In Stockholm, two men claiming to be British agents approached him and two of his colleagues. Sweden had recently acquired two large cranes to help load iron ore on to ships for export to Germany. Inward and his team were invited to blow up the cranes with explosives provided by the agents. 
During a dummy run to the docks they were arrested by the Swedes and sent to an internment camp, which they shared with captured German soldiers, Russian spies and other foreign nationals. After a few months they were freed as part of an exchange deal involving a number of German prisoners. Inward arrived back in Britain in late 1940. 
James Inward was born on April 4 1920 at Romford, Essex. On leaving school in 1936 he joined the RAF Apprentice School at Halton and trained as an aircraft fitter. In 1939 he joined No 56 Squadron at North Weald as a leading aircraftman. 
After his return from Sweden he served on two squadrons servicing bombers. With the introduction of the four-engine heavy bombers, there was a need for a specialist flight engineer to be added to the crew, and Inward was among the first volunteers . After a brief period of training, he joined No 35 Squadron, equipped with the Halifax, and flew his first bombing operation over Germany in February 1942. The target was Warnemünde on the Baltic. Searchlights and flak protected the port, and Inward’s reaction was: “This is dangerous stuff.” His second operation was the first of the “Thousand Bomber” raids, when the target was Cologne. After 15 operations, part of his squadron augmented No 76 Squadron, also flying the Halifax. Based in Palestine, he flew 10 more operations, against targets in North Africa and in support of the Eighth Army after the Battle of El Alamein. After a period as an instructor at a bomber-training unit, Inward returned to operations with No 576 Squadron. On the first of these he took part in an attack on Stuttgart on February 20 1944. While the aircraft was over the target at 22,000ft, the rear gunner’s oxygen tube became disconnected and he started to lose consciousness. 
Immediate rescue was essential, and without hesitation Inward left his position to go to the aid of his comrade. He had to disconnect his intercommunication lead, making it impossible for him to react to any emergency orders or reach his parachute. 
To rectify the problem in the air gunner’s turret, he had to remove his gloves and, despite the intense cold and his own emergency oxygen supply becoming exhausted, he persevered until the gunner’s supply was reconnected. 
Inward then struggled along the fuselage to regain his position and reach an oxygen supply, but his fingers were badly frostbitten, a fact he withheld from his captain. Unable to write in his log, he made mental computations and manipulated the fuel supply until the aircraft had returned safely to base. 
He went on to complete another 21 operations, including attacks against V-1 flying bomb sites, French railway targets and industrial cities in Germany. At the end of his tour he was awarded a DFC .
On leaving the RAF, Inward joined Unilever before transferring to the group’s Birds Eye factory at Great Yarmouth and then to a management post on Humberside. 

Jim Inward’s wife, Pat, predeceased him by a few weeks, and he is survived by a son and three daughters. 

Flt Lt Jim Inward, born April 4 1920, died January 31 2015 

Source: The Telegraph

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## fubar57 (Feb 20, 2015)




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## Wurger (Feb 20, 2015)




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## Wayne Little (Feb 24, 2015)




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## pbehn (Mar 2, 2015)

Not exactly an obituary but I thought interesting


Last surviving Dambusters pilot sells gallantry medals for upkeep of Bomber Command Memorial - Telegraph

Among them will be the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery, which brought a tragic twist of fate for Sq Ldr Munro.

When his mother opened the door to an official delivering an unopened telegram with news of his award, she feared the worst and collapsed with an aneurism and died within a week.


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## Airframes (Mar 3, 2015)

A superb sacrifice by a man who has already done more than enough. 
It's ing that such a memorial should be privately funded, and that Sqn Ldr Munro should have to help in the first place - it should be the responsibility of the Government of this nation, in abstentia of their forebears who sent young men to fight their war, to fund the maintenance of the Monument. The same bunch of clowns would happily spend £50,000 on a month-long advertising campaign to keep them in the privileged positions to which they have grown accustomed.
But well done Les Munro, and thank you for your extremely generous sacrifice.


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## pbehn (Mar 3, 2015)

Airframes said:


> A superb sacrifice by a man who has already done more than enough.
> It's ing that such a memorial should be privately funded, and that Sqn Ldr Munro should have to help in the first place - it should be the responsibility of the Government of this nation, in abstentia of their forebears who sent young men to fight their war, to fund the maintenance of the Monument. The same bunch of clowns would happily spend £50,000 on a month-long advertising campaign to keep them in the privileged positions to which they have grown accustomed.
> But well done Les Munro, and thank you for your extremely generous sacrifice.



Even more shaming is that much of the cost of upkeep of the memorial is removing graffiti. From a few things Sqr Ldr Munroe has said he felt he was lucky, maybe donating his medals was a way for him to give something back remembering his mates who weren't so lucky. I imagine that since his mother died as an indirect result of one of those medals they would have bitter/sweet memories for him. Regardless of the whys and wherefores, thank you Mr Munroe, enjoy a long happy retirement.


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## v2 (Mar 16, 2015)

Commander *Peter "Roddy" Elias *- decorated Swordfish navigator who wrote an eyewitness account of the attack on Bismarck. 


Commander Peter "Roddy" Elias, who has died aged 93, played a key role in the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck and twice found his enemy despite bad weather and low cloud in the Atlantic. 
On Monday May 26 1941 Elias flew two sorties totalling nine hours in Swordfish 2H of 810 Naval Air Squadron from the carrier Ark Royal. At 11.15am on the first sortie he found Bismarck and on the second he witnessed the attack by Swordfish torpedo-bombers on the German behemoth. 
In a letter, written hours after the battle and published here for the first time, he described the events, starting the previous day, when he had been ashore in Gibraltar: “I was rudely wakened at 3am and given a message to rendezvous with the Ark 100 miles out in the Atlantic. 
“By five o’clock we refuelled the aircraft and took off with the dawn breaking behind us. Sixty minutes flying and the fleet appeared ahead and so began the Bismarck hunt for me. 
“All that day and through the night we steamed at top speed into the steadily thickening weather. At dawn on the second day the wind had got up to 40 to 50 knots, cloud at 300ft and visibility anything below six miles. After an hour and some minutes flying, having long given up hope of seeing anything, a long grey shape appeared ahead.” 
Elias plotted his position and began to close in on the German battleship. “I do not think I have ever been quite so excited,” he wrote. “We stayed and shadowed [observed] and don’t think we were seen by Bismarck.” 
Back in the ship Elias found everything being made ready for an attack. Aircraft were being ranged on the slippery deck, which, he recalled, was “moving like a pendulum” in a fore and aft motion. At six in the evening he flew off to continue shadowing. By that time the first “stringbag” (Swordfish torpedo bomber) had returned, beaten by the weather. 
At this stage Elias’s aircraft flew close to Bismarck in a rain squall, receiving flak. Every now and again Elias and his crew (a pilot and an air gunner) received a broadside, but by watching the flash they only had to turn away to be missed. 
Two hours later he witnessed the successful attack: “Aircraft in line astern diving through clouds and rain and turning in through a rainstorm to drop their 'fish’. Just as they turned in they received the full blast of the port armament – tracers, orange bursts, flaming onions, lighting up the sky. By some miracle only two people were injured and no planes lost.” 
Then he saw what he described as “the most cold-blooded bit of courage”. One aircraft, separated from the main assault, had found Bismarck and made a lone attack, receiving concentrated fire. “Just after turning away,” Elias wrote, “I saw a great column of water tower above the ship and momentarily hide it as the wind blew the spray across. Shortly afterwards the Bismarck turned two circles and headed into wind, the heavy seas breaking right over her forecastle.” 
After another four hours of coding and sending messages, Elias was recalled. As he was turning back he received an instruction to flash to the destroyers their relative position to the Bismarck. That took 30 minutes by the time he had found the ships, and then he set off again. 
Worryingly, Elias only had 30 minutes of petrol left and a 50 knot wind to beat against. Adding to his difficulties it was rapidly getting dark. When he and his crew spotted Ark Royal two miles away he “danced about in the back of the machine with relief and joy”. They had just five minutes of petrol on landing. 
There was no time for sleep, however, because they had only four hours to get the planes ready for a dawn attack.
“Before we found the target,” Elias recalled, “we heard the news that our battleships had engaged. Smoke was pouring out of Bismarck fore and aft as we watched salvo after salvo pitch into her. We were signalled not to attack and saw the Dorsetshire (flying four ensigns) steam in and fire her torpedoes. As the spray cleared away from Bismarck she heeled over and was gone in 10 seconds.” 
For gallantry, daring and skill in the operations and especially his expert navigation, Elias was awarded a DSC, and his torpedo-air-gunner, Leading Airman “Harry” Huxley, the DSM. 
Peter Rodney Elias was born at Woking on February 27 1921 and educated at the Tiffin School. His father had been a pilot in the RFC, and Elias volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm as soon as his nose, broken in a boxing match, had healed. 
He trained as an observer (or air navigator). After Ark Royal, he flew from converted merchant ships. Once, when there was insufficient wind, he crashed into the sea and was almost run over. He spent two hours clinging to the tailplane of his Swordfish before being rescued by the destroyer Wizard.
Post-war he remained in the Navy, qualified as a pilot and flew a range of aircraft: he was promoted commander aged 34, but hated desk jobs. On retirement in 1971 he became bursar of Stonar School in Wiltshire, then town clerk of Frome in Somerset. Elias loved to design gadgets, and filled his garage with old tools collected from around the world. 
Peter Elias married Rosalie “Lee” Hextall in 1948; she survives him with their two sons and a daughter. 
Commander Peter Elias, born February 27 1921, died January 24 2015 

source: The Telegraph

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## Wayne Little (Mar 18, 2015)




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## fubar57 (Mar 18, 2015)




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## v2 (Apr 9, 2015)

Luftwaffe Ace and Knight’s Cross Holder *Walter Schuck* passed away. 

Former Oberleutnant of the Luftwaffe, later Hauptmann a.D., and Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves Holder Walter Schuck has died at 94 years of age on 28 March 2015. Walter Schuck was born on 30 July 1920 in Frankenholz. He was a German World War II fighter ace who served in the Luftwaffe from 1937 until the end of World War II. He claimed 206 enemy aircraft shot down in over 500 combat missions, eight of which while flying the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter.
He earned the Knight’s Cross on 8 April 1944 as Oberfeldwebel and pilot in the 7./ Jagdgeschwader 5 and the Oak Leaves (616.) on 30 September 1944 as Leutnant and pilot in the 9./ Jagdgeschwader 5.
On 10 April 1945 he claimed four B-17 Flying Fortresses shot down. One of the bombers was “Henn’s Revenge” of the 303rd Bombardment Group, and another was “Moonlight Mission” of the 457th Bombardment Group. Shortly afterwards, his Me 262 was hit by a P-51 Mustang of the fighter escort, piloted by Lt. Joseph Anthony Peterburs of the 55th Fighter Squadron, 20th Fighter Group, causing Schuck to bail out. Schuck sprained both ankles upon landing and the war ended before he recovered. 
In 2005 Schuck met Peterburs in person during a visit to the US. They both became close friends. 
Arbeitsgruppe Vermisstenforschung states: ”Walter Schuck visited lots of our presentations in the past and also supported our work. He always wanted us to search for his missing comrades and bring them back home to their families. We will always keep his memory alive.”
Walter Schuck wrote a book on his military career, called “Abschuss!: Von der Me 109 zur Me 262“. Walter Schuck may you find eternal rest. Horrido, for your last flight.

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## Gnomey (Apr 9, 2015)




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## pbehn (Apr 9, 2015)

Richie Benaud the voice of cricket has passed on.

84 years Richie? Good effort that, I thought! (You guys from Oz can put in the accent, I loved his commentary).

Richie Benaud dies - aged 84 - Telegraph


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## v2 (Aug 21, 2015)

Frederick Rounsville "Fritz" Payne, Jr. 

Frederick Rounsville "Fritz" Payne, Jr. (July 31, 1911 – August 6, 2015) was a World War II fighter ace who left his mark on aviation and wartime history by shooting down six Japanese warplanes during the Battle of Guadalcanal. What Payne did between September and October 1942 was take to the skies in an F4F Wildcat and shoot down four Japanese bombers and two fighter planes during a crucial, months-long battle for control of the Pacific that Allied forces had launched with no clear indication they could win, Toronto Sun reported. But it was in two weeks at Guadalcanal that he built his lifelong reputation. The title fighter ace is reserved for those who have shot down at least five enemy aircraft in battle. Technically Payne was awarded 5 1/2 kills because he had help from another pilot in downing one plane. In addition to Guadalcanal, Payne saw combat at Kwajalein, Hollandia (now Jayapura, Indonesia) and Guam. Frederick Rounsville "Fritz" Payne, Jr. was a brigadier general in the United States Marine Corps. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1934. Ordered to flight training at Pensacola, Payne was commissioned a second lieutenant in July 1936 and designated a Naval Aviator in September. The next month he reported to Quantico, Virginia to begin squadron flying assignments. Initially assigned to VMF-2 in October 1940, he was transferred to VMF-221 in July 1941, and embarked for Midway on 8 December following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Major Payne entered combat at Guadalcanal in September 1942 on detached duty with VMF-223. His first victory was a half-share in a Japanese twin-engine bomber on 14 September followed by a solo victory two weeks later. When his own squadron, VMF-212, arrived in October, Payne quickly added for more victories: two bombers and a pair of Zekes between 18 and 23 October to become a Wildcat ace. He left Guadalcanal on 27 October and subsequently served as commander of VMF-212 from November 1942 to February 1943 and later commanded Marine Air Group 23.
He was made a lieutenant colonel in 1943, and later served in Korea. He retired from active duty with the rank of brigadier general on 1 August 1958.
Payne was awarded the Navy Cross for service with VMF-212 on Guadalcanal between September and October 1942, shooting down six Japanese airplanes. He was also honored with the Congressional Gold Medal in May 2015. Payne died in 2015 at Rancho Mirage, California; at the time of his death he was the oldest living former fighter ace.

Source: Toronto Sun


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## fubar57 (Aug 21, 2015)




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## Gnomey (Aug 22, 2015)




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## Wayne Little (Aug 30, 2015)




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## vikingBerserker (Aug 30, 2015)

Paul Royle, Who Fled Nazis in a ‘Great Escape,’ Dies at 101 [apologies if already posted - I could not find it]

from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/world/paul-royle-who-fled-nazis-in-a-great-escape-dies-at-101.html

Paul Royle, whose escape from a German prisoner of war camp in 1944 with 75 other Allied soldiers inspired the 1963 Steve McQueen movie “The Great Escape,” died on Aug. 23 in Perth, Australia. He was 101.

His son Gordon wrote in an email message that Mr. Royle died from complications after surgery for a fractured hip. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that his death left only one remaining survivor of the escape: Dick Churchill, who is in his 90s and lives in England.

Mr. Royle, a Royal Air Force flight lieutenant originally from Australia, was one of 200 prisoners who dug several tunnels using improvised tools at the Stalag Luft III camp in Sagan, then a part of Germany and now in Poland. His job was to dispose of the excavated dirt.

“Long, thin tubes made of material, like long underpants, were put under our ordinary trousers,” Mr. Royle told The Sunday Mercury, a British tabloid, in 2008. “The bottom was tied together with a bit of string, we shoveled this stuff into the long underpants, then you would nonchalantly wander around getting rid of the dirt.”

He was one of 76 prisoners who made it through a tunnel on a freezing night in March. He and a comrade wandered in the German countryside for about a day before they were recaptured. Only three of the escapees reached freedom — 50 were executed, including the man who was with Mr. Royle.

He later told Air Force, the official newspaper of the Royal Australian Air Force, that he never understood how the German soldiers had decided whom to execute.

“Rationality didn’t come into it,” Mr. Royle said. “I haven’t a clue as to why I wasn’t chosen.” He was liberated and made his way to England in 1945.

In 1950, Paul Brickhill, another Australian P.O.W. involved in the escape, published a book about the experience called “The Great Escape.” The book was made into a 1963 film starring James Garner, Richard Attenborough and Charles Bronson, in addition to Mr. McQueen.

The movie took liberties with historical events by featuring Mr. McQueen leaping over a barbed wire fence on a motorcycle.

Mr. Royle told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2014 that he did not care for the film.

“The movie I disliked intensely because there were no motorbikes,” Mr. Royle said. “And the Americans weren’t there.” (The American officers at the camp were transferred before the tunnel was completed.)

Gordon Paul Royle was born in Perth on Jan. 17, 1914, but went by Paul since his youth. He was recruited for the R.A.F. in the late 1930s. His plane was shot down when he flew his first mission in 1940, and he was soon taken prisoner.

After the war, he settled in England, where he married Georgina Rufford Forster-Knight, in 1946. They soon moved to Australia and had three children, Paul and Francis Royle and Margaret Verling, and then divorced in 1961. He married Pamela Yvonne Fortune, later that year. They had two children, Gordon and Lucy Royle. He is survived by his wife and children; a sister, Shirley Rogers; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Royle spent much of his career working on major civil engineering projects around the world. He retired at 66 and returned to Perth, where he had lived since.

Before the war, Mr. Royle studied a trade that would prove useful during his imprisonment — mine surveying. He returned to mining after he was liberated and continued working in it until he switched to engineering in the mid-1950s.


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## fubar57 (Aug 30, 2015)




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## Gnomey (Aug 30, 2015)




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## v2 (Sep 24, 2015)

Group Captain *Allan Wright* 


Group Captain Allan Wright, who has died aged 95, was a veteran of the Battle of France in 1940 and one of the last three surviving Battle of Britain ace fighter pilots. 
As the opening phase of the Battle of Britain commenced in July 1940, Wright and his colleagues of No 92 Squadron were resting in South Wales following their fierce activity covering the withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches of northern France. Nevertheless, Wright shared in the destruction of a German bomber over Gloucestershire and on August 29 achieved a rare success for a Spitfire pilot when he engaged a Heinkel III bomber over Bristol at night and shot it down. 
On September 9 No 92 was sent to Biggin Hill, at the height of the battle, to intercept the large formations of enemy bombers attacking London. Within two days Wright achieved success when he destroyed another Heinkel bomber and probably one of the escorting Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters. In the space of the next 20 days, as the battle reached its climax, he was credited with knocking out four more enemy aircraft, sharing in the destruction of a fifth, probably destroying a further two and damaging four. 
On September 30 he engaged some Bf 109 fighters near Brighton and shot one down. His Spitfire was damaged and he had to make a forced landing. He was slightly wounded in this engagement and this signalled the end of his involvement in the battle. A month later he was awarded the DFC for “displaying great determination and skill”. 
The son of Air Commodore A C Wright, a Royal Flying Corps pilot and regular RAF officer, Allan Richard Wright was born at Teignmouth, Devon, on February 12 1920 and educated at St Edmund’s College. He was awarded a cadetship to the RAF College, Cranwell, where he gained a commendation before graduating as a pilot in October 1939. 
Wright joined No 92 Squadron as it was re-equipping with the Spitfire. Flying from Northolt, the squadron was soon in action over Dunkirk. Wright flew his first patrol on May 23, when he destroyed a Messerschmitt Bf 110, possibly brought down another and damaged a third. His successes were tempered by the loss of his closest friend from his time at Cranwell. Many years later he commented: “We were just 22 years old and I was overwhelmed by shock and disbelief. The whole episode seemed a dream.” The squadron’s commanding officer, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, was also shot down on this day. Later, as “Big X”, Bushell masterminded the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, but he was murdered by the Gestapo after being recaptured. 
Wright flew six more patrols over the Dunkirk area, being engaged and firing his guns every time, and was credited with shooting down an enemy fighter and possibly destroying a bomber. 
After recovering from wounds sustained in the closing phase of the Battle of Britain, Wright returned to No 92 and, in December, shot down a Bf 109. 
He saw considerable action over northern France during the spring and summer of 1941. Fighter Command had gone on the offensive, seeking combat, and Wright gained further success. Flying the Spitfire Mk V on sweeps and bomber escort operations, he was frequently engaged by Bf 109s and he destroyed one, shared in the destruction of another and probably took care of two more. 
On one occasion his Spitfire was badly damaged but he managed to cross the Channel back to England to make an emergency landing. He was rested in July after a year of constant combat and was awarded a Bar to his DFC. 
Wright then trained fighter pilots before becoming the chief instructor at the newly formed Pilot Gunnery Instructor’s School. He later undertook a tour of the United States to discuss gunnery and fighter tactics. On his return he trained as a night fighter pilot before becoming the flight commander on No 29 Squadron flying the Beaufighter. On April 3 1943 he shot down a Junkers 88 bomber and damaged a second, his final success of the war. 
As a 23-year-old wing commander, he took command of the Air Fighting Development Unit, his service recognised by the award of the AFC. In early 1945 he left for Egypt to command the fighter wing of a bombing and gunnery school. 
He remained in the RAF and held a number of fighter-related appointments including four years at the Air Ministry responsible for air defence planning. After converting to jet fighters he became wing commander, flying at Waterbeach near Cambridge with Hunter and Javelin squadrons under his command. 
After two years in the Far East and a further two at HQ, Fighter Command, he was appointed to command the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Station (BMEWS) – the famous “Giant Golf Balls” – situated on the Yorkshire Moors at Fylingdales, near Whitby. This was the final site of three – the others operated by the USAF at Thule in Greenland and Clear in Alaska – to provide early warning of a ballistic missile attack. Fylingdales became fully operational during Wright’s period of command. He retired from the RAF in February 1967. 
He moved to North Devon where he spent the next 10 years developing a smallholding and renovating a cottage. He was an excellent and meticulous carpenter and woodworker. 
He married his wife Barbara in June 1942 and she and their two sons and two daughters survive him.
Group Captain Allan Wright, born February 12 1920, died September 16 2015 

source: The Telegraph


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## Capt. Vick (Sep 24, 2015)

Blue skys....RIP


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## Vassili Zaitzev (Oct 1, 2015)

Sidney Phillips Jr., featured in HBO's _The Pacific_ passed on Saturday, September 26. 

Beloved Alabama WWII veteran Sid Phillips dead at 91 | AL.com


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## fubar57 (Oct 1, 2015)




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## vikingBerserker (Oct 1, 2015)

I loved that character.

RIP


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## Wayne Little (Oct 5, 2015)




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## v2 (Oct 19, 2015)

Dear Friends, 

It is with the most heavy heart that I have to tell you that Squadron 31's beloved "Little Gunner from Malta" has joined his Band of Air Gunner Brothers.
*Sgt Michael Basil Cauchi*, 795258 RAF VR, proud member of Sq 31 SAAF, Top Gunner in Lt Reg Franklin's crew, Warsaw Veteran, and gentleman supreme, died last night, in hospital, near his home in Nuneaton, UK.
Michael, the last of your crew to go, may you sing from the turret forever more and as you make your way from the dark skies to the blue skies, think of us, when you enjoy the peanut butter and marmite sandwiches that are waiting for you at the end of the mission.
Our beloved friend, your passion and pride for your Squadron and the enthusiasm you instilled in us, will stay with us, till we meet again. Last year, he visited Warsaw on the occasion of 70 anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising and he had an occasion to meet his friends from 31 Sqn SAAF. 
The Little Gunner from Malta, We Salute You...





_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIz8zYjmRLw_

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## fubar57 (Oct 19, 2015)




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## Wayne Little (Oct 19, 2015)




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## Airframes (Oct 20, 2015)

R.I.P.


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## Gnomey (Oct 21, 2015)




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## vikingBerserker (Oct 21, 2015)




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## michaelmaltby (Oct 28, 2015)

Ken Taylor, Canadian ambassador to Iran at the time of the US Embassy capture, who sheltered then smuggled American diplomats out of the country has passed. He earned the Congressional Medal for his cheeky plot.

Ken Taylor funeral honours famed diplomat in Toronto - Canada - CBC News

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)

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## Gnomey (Oct 28, 2015)




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## GrauGeist (Nov 19, 2015)

*John Delmar Anderson*, BM2C, USN - USS Arizona

Mr. Anderson passed away Tuesday, 16 November at the age of 98. He was one of 7 remaining survivors of the Arizona's sinking during the 7 December 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces.



> ...on Dec. 7, he went below deck to have breakfast when he heard a "kaplunk," looked out a porthole and saw planes bombing nearby Ford Island, he told Forum columnist Bob Lind.
> 
> He then headed for his post, all the while looking for Jake. He made it to his gun turret, but before he could load it, a bomb hit the turret's top, bounced off and penetrated the deck. The resulting explosion killed many of the crew.
> 
> Shortly after, the forward ammunition magazine with 1.5 million pounds of gunpowder blew up, virtually splitting the Arizona, and leaving dead and dying men everywhere...



Former Dilworth resident, oldest survivor of sinking of USS Arizona, dies


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## Gnomey (Nov 19, 2015)




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## vikingBerserker (Nov 20, 2015)

to them both.


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## v2 (Nov 25, 2015)

Squadron Leader *Stan Dixon* 

Pilot who flew hazardous low-altitude parachute supply drops during the Malayan Emergency. 

Squadron Leader Stan Dixon, who has died aged 95, flew his first operation in the Second World War while still a teenager; he was later awarded the DFC for supply dropping operations during the Malayan campaign in 1959. 
Trained as an air observer, Dixon joined No 254 Squadron at the time of the Phoney War. With tension mounting, the squadron’s Blenheims flew to Lossiemouth in north Scotland. On April 9 1940 the Germans invaded Norway and dozens of aircraft landed troops on a number of airfields. The following day, Dixon and his pilot, Sergeant Charlie Rose, mounted a lone attack against parked aircraft on Stavanger airfield. 
Diving down to attack, Rose strafed the airfield despite heavy anti-aircraft fire and destroyed at least two aircraft. The crew then turned their attention to the nearby anchorage and attacked a number of flying boats, sinking one and damaging others. On the return flight to Scotland they encountered a German bomber and attacked it with the forward guns and then with the air gunner’s turret guns. It disappeared with smoke trailing from an engine. The Blenheim had been damaged, however, and Rose slightly wounded. The undercarriage collapsed on landing and the ground crew found 30 bullet holes in the aircraft. Rose received the DFM. 
Following the German invasion of the Low Countries, Dixon flew patrols over the North Sea and witnessed the bombing of Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe. After almost a year of flying operations, the squadron moved to Northern Ireland where he flew anti-submarine patrols and convoy escorts. Stanley Reginald Dixon was born in Durban, South Africa, on July 31 1920. His parents returned to England when he was 15 and he completed his education at Girton School, Cambridge. When he was 18 he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve to train as an observer and was mobilised on the outbreak of war. 
After completing his tour with No 254 Squadron he joined No 608 Squadron operating the Hudson on shipping strikes over the North Sea. After completing his second tour he was mentioned in despatches and spent the following year as a navigation instructor at a Coastal Command operational training unit. 
Dixon had always wished to be a pilot and in July 1943 he left for Canada. It was unusual for a flight lieutenant with two tours of operations behind him to join a large intake of pilot recruits, and he was soon appointed the senior student. He was awarded his wings at the end of 1944. By the time he had completed his training to be a transport pilot, the war was over and he left the RAF for a brief period.
After re-joining in 1947 he flew Dakotas in Egypt and in 1950 returned to England to fly the Valetta transport aircraft on routes to Europe. On his promotion to squadron leader he joined a Transport Command Examining Unit, testing squadron pilots and checking on standardised procedures. Dixon established a similar unit for the Pakistan Air Force at Lahore. In January 1955 he was awarded the AFC. 
In May 1957 Dixon left for Kuala Lumpur in Malaya to organise air supply during the Malayan Emergency. He also flew many sorties in Dakotas and Valettas to parachute supplies to Army units in the jungle. Some of the dropping zones were in hazardous terrain and the weather was a constant threat to the low-flying, lumbering aircraft. For his services during the Emergency he was awarded the DFC for “gallant and distinguished service”. 
Dixon returned to England in 1960 and spent the rest of his time in the RAF on various staff appointments retiring in 1975. He received the Air Efficiency Award. 
He and his family moved to Norfolk where he spent eight years as the owner of a care home for the elderly before spending fifteen years as the welfare officer of the Royal Air Force Association Branch at Wymondham in Norfolk, where he was also a long-standing member of the local branch of the Royal British Legion. 
He was a keen member of the Blenheim Society and a founding member of the Barnham Broom Golf Club, where he achieved a hole in one three times. 
Dixon travelled widely, including a visit to the grave of his brother who had died on the notorious “Death Railway” in Burma while he was a prisoner of the Japanese. 
He made his last flight in June 2014, when he took the controls of a light aircraft during Operation Propeller, an annual event when younger pilots take a veteran to a reunion of Second World War aircrew. 
Stan Dixon married Joyce Bonser in 1942; she died in 1999. Their son survives him. 
Squadron Leader Stan Dixon, born July 31 1920, died August 7 2015 

source: "The Telegraph"


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## Wayne Little (Nov 25, 2015)




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## fubar57 (Nov 25, 2015)




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## Gnomey (Nov 25, 2015)




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## imalko (Dec 27, 2015)

Nikolay Belayev (Николай Беляев) last living participant of the storming of the Reichstag during battle of Berlin died at the age of 93.


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## fubar57 (Dec 27, 2015)




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## Wayne Little (Jan 1, 2016)




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## v2 (Jan 8, 2016)

Group Captain *Ray Price* Coastal Command navigator who led 36 Mosquitos on a perilous operation up a Norwegian fjord. 


Group Captain Ray Price, who has died aged 93, was an RAF navigator who flew many low-level anti-shipping strikes; with his New Zealand pilot, Wing Commander Bill Sise, he formed one of Coastal Command’s most formidable partnerships. 
In April 1944 Price and the highly decorated Sise teamed up and joined No 235 Squadron at Portreath in Cornwall, initially flying the Beaufighter then the Mosquito. They led many strikes against shipping in the Bay of Biscay and in the entrances to French ports. They led a devastating attack from mast-height against minesweepers in the Gironde estuary, during which the canopy of their Mosquito was shattered by anti-aircraft fire. After a difficult return flight, they landed safely in Cornwall. 
On June 6, as the Allied forces landed in Normandy, Price and his pilot flew on patrols off Brest during an operation to prevent German Navy surface forces harassing the huge Allied armada approaching Normandy. 
Once German forces had been swept from France, the squadron moved to Banff in northern Scotland to begin concentrated attacks against the convoys using the Norwegian fjords for shelter. Sise had been appointed to command No 248 Squadron. As the most experienced pilot in the Banff Wing, he led many attacks often involving three squadrons. This placed great responsibility on Price whose navigation across the North Sea had to be perfect. On one occasion they led 87 Beaufighters and Mosquitos on a strike to Alesund, a complex operation requiring pinpoint navigation to succeed. 
Leading an attack against a convoy in Florø harbour, an engine of their Mosquito was set on fire by flak but they pressed home their attack before returning 400 miles across the North Sea. Soon after this operation, Price was awarded the DFC and Sise received a Bar to an earlier DFC. 
Throughout the winter of 1944-45, the two men continued to lead attacks against shipping sheltering in the lee of high mountains. These had to be made in a steep dive down the sides of precipitous cliffs in the face of intense opposition. They led 36 Mosquitos into Nordgulen Fjord to attack a convoy when almost all the ships were hit by rockets and cannon fire leaving two ships burning furiously. The anti-aircraft fire from heavily armed minesweeper escorts was intense and losses on these sorties were high. 
The Banff Wing took a considerable toll of shipping destined for Germany in what has since been described as “The Forgotten Offensive.” At the end of February, Price and his pilot were finally rested. The citation for the Bar to his DFC mentioned Price’s faultless navigation in difficult circumstances and described him as “a courageous member of crew”. Sise was awarded a Bar to an earlier DSO. 
Raymond George Price was born on January 9 1922 in Gloucester and was educated at the local Central School and Technical College. He joined the RAF as a boy entrant in February 1939 and trained as a ground wireless operator. In 1941 he volunteered for aircrew duties and trained as an observer. 
He joined No 254 Squadron flying the Blenheim on convoy patrols from airfields in Northern Ireland. After re-equipping with the Beaufighter late in 1942, the squadron joined the North Coates Strike Wing. It specialised in low-level torpedo attacks along the Dutch coast and Frisian Islands against convoys carrying raw materials from Scandinavia to Rotterdam. 
After an intense period of training, the wing conducted its first major operation on April 18 1943 when its three squadrons attacked a convoy off the island of Texel. Flying at 50 ft into intense anti-aircraft fire, Price and his pilot lined up on the major ship the Norwegian Höegh Carrier. They released their torpedo at close range and theirs was one of three that struck the ship, which eventually sank. 
Throughout the summer of 1943, Price carried out many other successful strikes off the Dutch coast, but losses were high. In the autumn, he was rested and became a navigation instructor until he returned to operations after teaming up with Sise. 
Price remained in the RAF after the war becoming a specialist navigator. He was the chief instructor at a training school for navigators before serving in Aden. In February 1956 he was given command of No 35 Squadron, a Canberra jet bomber squadron, making him one of the very first navigators to command such a unit. As a wing commander he was in charge of administration on the Coastal Command base at St Mawgan before filling a number of specialist navigation appointments. He served at HQ Flying Training Command and in January 1969 took command of RAF Stradishall in Suffolk, home of one of the RAF’s two air navigation schools.
His final appointment was at Biggin Hill where he was responsible for selecting future officers and aircrew for the RAF. He retired in April 1973.
For many years he was the assistant secretary to the Diocesan Board of Finance at Gloucester Cathedral until he retired in 1987. 
A keen fisherman and ardent rugby fan, he and his wife moved to Marlow. Throughout his life he maintained a close friendship with Bill Sise and visited him in New Zealand. 
Ray Price married Joan Edgington in January 1947. She died in 2006 and their daughter survives him.

Group Captain Ray Price, born January 9 1922, died October 10 2015 

source: The Telegraph

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## fubar57 (Jan 8, 2016)




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## Gnomey (Jan 8, 2016)




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## pbehn (Jan 8, 2016)

*Once German forces had been swept from France, the squadron moved to Banff in northern Scotland to begin concentrated attacks against the convoys using the Norwegian fjords for shelter. Sise had been appointed to command No 248 Squadron. As the most experienced pilot in the Banff Wing, he led many attacks often involving three squadrons. This placed great responsibility on Price whose navigation across the North Sea had to be perfect. On one occasion they led 87 Beaufighters and Mosquitos on a strike to Alesund, a complex operation requiring pinpoint navigation to succeed. *


In many ways it was a forgotten war 87 Beaus and Mosquitos on low level attack must have been a sight to see.

Rest in peace Group Captain Price.


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## Wayne Little (Jan 10, 2016)




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## vikingBerserker (Jan 11, 2016)




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## v2 (Feb 11, 2016)

Blue Skies Forever for F/O *David Pattison Lambert* - 148 SOE RAF and 3 times Warsaw Veteran

F/O David Lambert RAF passed away on 3 February 2016. David was an air gunner / dispatcher in 148 Sq Special Operations Executive ( SOE) - Special Duties.
David and his crew flew 3 flights in aid of the Poles to Warsaw on 14/16/18 August 1944 - he was then a very young man: "Flight Sgt. David Pattison LAMBERT DOB 27-6-1924 and service number 1823096 RAF VR . Soon after their successful... flights to Warsaw they were commissioned on 4/11/1944 and David carried the service number of 189247 and then the rank of Flying Officer. They flew Hadley Page Halifaxes and were based at Brindisi. The Halifax Aircraft with code letters G/G/B were flown to Warsaw on above respective dates.
Those of us who were in Warsaw in 2014 at the 70th Commemoration will remember David as a great gentleman. He was accompanied by his son Stephen Lambert and 2 members of his crew were also in attendance at Warsaw: Flt Sgt Larry Toft (the pilot) and Fl Sgt Jim Leith (air gunner).
Sadly W/O Larry Toft passed away on 1 Sept 2015.

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## Wurger (Feb 11, 2016)




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## fubar57 (Feb 11, 2016)




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## Wildcat (Feb 11, 2016)




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## Airframes (Feb 11, 2016)

R.I.P. Blue skies and tail winds, to peace in the clouds.


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## Gnomey (Feb 12, 2016)




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## pbehn (Feb 21, 2016)

Just announced on BBC radio that Eric "winkle" Brown has died.

Thankyou for your service Sir.


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## fubar57 (Feb 21, 2016)




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## rochie (Feb 21, 2016)

So sad to here this, RIP Winkle !


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## Capt. Vick (Feb 21, 2016)

Oh no! So sad.

No words...


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Feb 21, 2016)

Blue skies and tail winds.


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## v2 (Feb 23, 2016)

Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown - obituary


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## Wayne Little (Feb 23, 2016)




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## Micdrow (Feb 23, 2016)




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## herman1rg (Mar 24, 2016)

Last of Our Few: In memory of Squadron Leader Tony Pickering


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## Airframes (Mar 24, 2016)

R.I.P. Tony.


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## Gnomey (Mar 25, 2016)




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## v2 (Mar 27, 2016)

In Memory of Squadron Leader Tony Pickering who passed away few days ago... 

Last of Our Few: In memory of Squadron Leader Tony Pickering


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## Gnomey (Mar 27, 2016)




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## fubar57 (Mar 30, 2016)




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## v2 (Apr 11, 2016)

Wing Commander *Len Ratcliff* 

Wing Commander Len Ratcliff , who has died aged 96, flew agents into occupied Europe and was one of the RAF’s most decorated special duties pilots.
Ratcliff was an experienced bomber pilot and instructor when he joined No 161 Squadron at the secret RAF airfield at Tempsford in June 1943. Initially he flew the four-engine Halifax, dropping supplies and agents into France, Denmark and Norway at night. On one occasion he was crossing the French coast when one of the aircraft’s engines failed but he decided to press on. He found the dropping zone near Mâcon, north of Lyon, and dropped two agents and two packages from a height of 600 ft. With daylight approaching, he headed for Algeria where the dead engine was replaced before he returned to his base. Later in the year, Ratcliff flew to a field east of Bordeaux and dropped Yvonne Cormeau, codename “Annette”, one of SOE’s most successful wireless operators, whose exploits were immortalised in the 2001 film Charlotte Grey. In December 1943 Ratcliff was awarded a Bar to an earlier DFC for his “unfailing devotion to duty” and a month later took command of the squadron’s new Hudson Flight. He flew his first sortie almost immediately and landed in a field near Angers with an SOE officer who was to bring back Henri Dericourt – suspected of being a double agent – for interrogation. Dericourt became suspicious and persuaded the SOE officer that he had to secure a new landing ground and Ratcliff returned with eight agents but not with Dericourt. A Lysander picked up the agent a week later. When landing fields were unavailable, agents were parachuted from the Hudson. In February Ratcliff dropped the SOE agent Wing Commander FFE Yeo-Thomas (known to the Gestapo as “The White Rabbit”) who was later captured but survived and was subsequently awarded the George Cross. In April Ratcliff took command of the Lysander flight. The single-engine, black painted aircraft was capable of very short take offs and landings making it ideal for the hazardous operations. Flying alone, the pilot had to carry out precise navigation in order to find the small fields lit only by a handful of torches held by the reception party.
On the night of April 28/29 he took three agents to a remote area near Chartres and on May 9 he flew one of three Lysanders to a field near Touraine taking in two agents and returning with three. The three aircraft flew independently to a landmark on the River Cher, arriving within three minutes of each other. Ratcliff headed for the rough airstrip, identified the coded flashing signal and landed. He was airborne again within five minutes allowing the second aircraft to land. After almost six hours he arrived back in England. A month later Ratcliff had completed 40 special duties flights and was rested when he was awarded the DSO. The sensitive nature of his work prevented a detailed citation being published. Leonard Fitch Ratcliff was born at Maldon, Essex, on July 27 1919. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in June 1939 and trained as a pilot. In July 1941 he was posted to fly the Hampden. New pilots flew their first sorties in the twin-engine bomber as the navigator so Ratcliff attended a brief navigation course, which was to stand him in good stead later when he flew his clandestine operations over France alone. He joined No 49 Squadron at Scampton, near Lincoln, in July 1941. Over the next six months he flew 30 operations, the majority to industrial targets in the Ruhr and to Hamburg. He also flew operations to drop mines in the entrances to occupied ports and river estuaries in Germany, the Netherlands and France. On the night of December 28 night fighters intercepted his aircraft as he headed for the synthetic rubber plant at Huls. He skilfully evaded the attackers and went on to the target. A few weeks later he was attacking the German capital ships at Brest when he was again intercepted but his evasive action allowed his gunners to frustrate the attacks of the two enemy fighters. At the end of his tour he was awarded the DFC for “setting a very valuable example”. After leaving No 49 Squadron Ratcliff spent a year as a bombing instructor when his service was recognised with the award of the AFC. Ratcliff’s long tour with No 161 Squadron came to an end in October 1944 when he was posted to the Air Ministry’s Directorate of Intelligence where he dealt with the clandestine activities carried out in occupied Europe. In February 1945, he returned to Tempsford as a wing commander in charge of operations but, following the loss of No 161’s commanding officer on operations, he assumed command of the squadron until the end of the war when there was no further requirement for such a unit. He left the RAF in December 1945. The French Government awarded him the Croix de Guerre (with Palm) and later he was invested as a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. He also added the Air Efficiency Award to his British decorations. After the war Ratcliff settled in Essex. He was a successful grain merchant, gradually expanding his business before becoming a director of Spillers.
He was appointed High Sheriff of Essex in 1988 and he made a major contribution to the life of Halstead. In 1948 he was a founder member of the Halstead Rotary Club, which he supported all his life. In 1985 he became chairman of the League of Friends of Halstead Hospital. In recognition of his long service and fund-raising activities, a rehabilitation centre at the hospital was named the Leonard Ratcliff Building in 2015. A modest, unassuming man, Ratcliff maintained close contact with his fellow RAF special duties colleagues. In 2010 he was invited by the French authorities to help dedicate the Musee de la Resistance et de la Deportation in the town of Bourges close to where he had once landed agents. In May 2015 Len Ratcliff was a special guest at a Tempsford commemoration where he spoke of his wartime experiences.
He married Betty Stewart in 1939. She predeceased him. He is survived by his second wife, Dorothy, and three sons and a daughter from his first marriage.

*Wing Commander Len Ratcliff, born July 27 1919, died April 1 2016
*
source: The Telegraph


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## Wayne Little (Apr 11, 2016)




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## Airframes (Apr 12, 2016)

R.I.P W/Cdr Ratcliffe.

Read about some of his exploits in the book "We Landed by Moonlight" - well worth a read.


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## v2 (Apr 18, 2016)

Few days ago we say goodbye to Maj. John "Googoo" Hewitson, last SAAF WW2 fighter pilot ace to pass away. (aged 98 -4 days)
In 1940 John saw service in East Africa flying Gladiator- and Hurricane aircraft. He was in the very first aerial battle of No.1 squadron where he shared a victory.
In 1942 he went to war with 5 squadron to North Africa and survived the terrible Gazala air battles where most of his close pilot friends were killed....
John was then commissioned as OC of 4 squadron, but was shortly thereafter shot down and became a POW in Germany.
He spent 3 years as a POW and actively participated in the "Great Escape" effort, but was not selected to be an escapee.

Condolences to his family and especially to his wife Marjorie and his children Robin and Nicky.

More about John: John Googoo Hewitson


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## Wurger (Apr 18, 2016)




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## fubar57 (Apr 18, 2016)




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## Airframes (Apr 18, 2016)

R.I.P. Maj. Hewitson.


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## Gnomey (Apr 18, 2016)




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## v2 (Apr 29, 2016)

*F/Lt Murray Anderson- pilot *

Murray Anderson, who has died aged 96, had an unusually varied flying career in the RAF, which resulted in the award of two DFCs for gallantry; his post-war civil flying brought even greater variety and adventure. A regular Army officer, Anderson was seconded to the RAF to train as a pilot. Frustrated with being on a UK-based Army co-operation squadron, he volunteered for the lonely and dangerous world of flying unarmed Spitfires on long-range photographic reconnaissance sorties. He flew his first operation over Europe on May 28 1941, photographing four enemy airfields. He then moved to Cornwall where he flew numerous sorties monitoring the movements of Germany’s capital ships based in Brest.
In November 1941 he made one of his longest sorties when he flew to Chemnitz. Navigating with his magnetic compass, a stopwatch, annotated map and, as he described it, “your nous”, he photographed key targets. After five hours in the cramped and intensely cold cockpit, he landed. Following a brief detachment to Gibraltar to photograph the Spanish and Algerian coasts, Anderson was returning to Britain when he ran out of fuel 90 miles from the south coast. He managed to stretch the aircraft’s glide and land in a field. On another occasion the engine of his Spitfire failed and he ditched in the sea.
Over Hamburg he was hit by anti-aircraft fire at 28,000 ft but he continued to photograph his target before managing to bring his damaged Spitfire back to an airfield in England. On another occasion he was chased by enemy fighters but evaded them and brought back his photographs. In September 1942 he was awarded the DFC for “his excellent work, courage and devotion to duty”. 
In November 1942 he joined a new unit to support Operation Torch. Flying from Maison Blanche in Algeria, he took photographs of Tunis, Bizerta and targets in Tunisia. During this period with No 4 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit he was sometimes given tasks by the USAAF. After three months of intense flying he was awarded a second DFC and the US Air Medal.
Murray Crichton Bell Anderson was born into a military family in Norwood on December 7 1919. He spent his early childhood in India and was educated at Cheltenham College. His brother Lindsay became a distinguished film director. Murray gained entrance to the Royal Military Academy Woolwich and was commissioned into the Royal Tank Regiment. 
After returning from North Africa he was an instructor for a short time before going on to another photographic reconnaissance squadron. He took photographs of fields in France to be used by the special duties squadrons dropping SOE agents. He met a friend flying on one of these “moonlight” squadrons who persuaded him to volunteer. On October 27 1943 he flew his 131st reconnaissance sortie and then joined No 161 Squadron to fly Lysanders into torch-lit fields, dropping agents and returning with others. 
His long-range navigation skills were a great help to him, but now he had to perfect them at night and at low level. He flew his first special duties sortie in February 1944, and in the build-up to the D-Day landings he was one of the busiest pilots on the squadron. 
Once he picked up a pilot who had force-landed near Caen. Later he landed near Angers to bring back four agents: one had a 55 ft map showing the details of all the enemy defences on the Cotentin Peninsula and also a great deal of information on the secret weapon sites.
Anderson had an irrepressible nature, great energy and courage and enjoyed life but he had a disdain for desk-bound higher authorities who rarely flew on operations. He was once told to fly a very long-range sortie to the region of Lyon, which would have resulted in his being over enemy territory in daylight. He had a one-sided “discussion” with his station commander, who decided they should part company. Anderson was posted to a fighter-bomber squadron. Within weeks he was flying Mustangs of No 65 Squadron from a basic airstrip in Normandy, and dive-bombing bridges. Over the next three months his squadron followed the advancing Allied armies and Anderson flew 70 close support operations. He was finally rested and returned to a ground appointment. Inevitably, this did not suit him, and within weeks he was flying RAF Dakotas in India. Anderson left the RAF after the war as a flight lieutenant, and returned to India to begin a long civilian flying career which took in the period of Indian Partition and taking supplies into remote areas of Assam and Burma. In 1952 he began a five-year period carrying pilgrims to and from Mecca for the annual pilgrimage. 
He later operated out of Aden before flying a United Nations Dakota from Rawalpindi. This was followed by three years in the Persian Gulf, but his great passion was India and he returned to fly for Air Nepal. He left India in 1967 and for the next 12 years flew the Hawker Siddeley HS 748 from Lympne airport near Hythe in Kent, where he bought the house in which he lived until his death. He flew with Dan Air until 1979 when he reached the obligatory retirement age of 60, at which point he joined Skyways Air Freight, operating from Lydd airport. The company went into liquidation within a year and Anderson’s 40-year career was over after 22,000 flying hours.
In retirement Anderson made beautiful life-size replica church brasses using linoleum, intricately decorated. Many are displayed on the walls of stately homes and castles in Kent, including Lympne Castle. He wrote a fascinating and amusing autobiography, Saint Praftu (2009). 
He married Mary Tappo in 1959. In 2004 he married Jean MacEwan who survives him with a son and daughter from his first marriage.

*Murray Anderson, born December 7 1919, died March 22 2016
*
source: The Telegraph


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## Wurger (Apr 29, 2016)




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## fubar57 (Apr 29, 2016)




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## Airframes (Apr 29, 2016)

R.I.P. Murray Anderson.


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## Wayne Little (Apr 30, 2016)




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## v2 (May 6, 2016)

Wing Commander *Arthur Gill* 

Wing Commander Arthur Gill, who has died aged 100, was one of the few survivors from his squadron after the Japanese overran the Dutch East Indies; he went on to become the RAF’s leading dive-bomber pilot during the campaign in Burma. 
Gill was the senior surviving officer of No 84 Squadron to reach India after the squadron had been annihilated in Sumatra and Java in March 1942. Higher authority had decided to disband the squadron but through his tenacious efforts it was rebuilt and equipped with the American-built Vengeance dive-bomber. After many months of re-organisation and training, Gill was able to demonstrate his squadron’s capabilities to Admiral Lord Mountbatten and Major General Orde Wingate. They were impressed and Wingate sought the squadron’s support for his forthcoming Chindits expedition. The squadron flew its first operation on February 16 1944, when Gill led 14 of his aircraft to attack Japanese positions in the Arakan. Attacking in a near vertical dive, the Vengeance crews placed their two 500 lb bombs with great accuracy, sometimes just 100 yards ahead of Allied troops. Gill’s squadron was so effective that it was in constant demand by Army commanders. He led attacks in support of the British 14th Army and Wingate’s Chindits before becoming heavily involved in the battles around Kohima and Imphal. In a desperate attempt to relieve the men, and contending with the monsoon weather, Gill led attacks within yards of the beleaguered troops. He received the following signal from the garrison: “Your bombing a bull’s eye, bloody good show.”
Over the coming months Gill was in constant action, often leading formations of 24 aircraft. Sometimes his crews flew two or three sorties each day and the often maligned Vengeance aircraft became a key element of the RAF’s attack force. In addition to supporting the ground forces, Gill led attacks against bridges over the Irrawaddy, rail yards and enemy stores areas. 
He regularly received signals of congratulations from Army commanders in the field. On July 16 the squadron flew its last sortie with the Vengeance, when Gill led 12 aircraft in an attack against an ammunition dump at Le-u. It was his 108th sortie in Burma, almost all as the leader of large formations. 
“Thank you for your work in 221 Group,” the Air Officer Commanding signalled Gill. “In five months you have carried out 1,800 sorties dropping over 900 tons of bombs. Good luck.” The leader of the Chindits, General Lentaigne, thanked him for his “first class co-operation and support”. Gill was awarded the DFC but was bitterly disappointed that the rewards to his squadron, particularly the ground crew, were so paltry.
Arthur Murland Gill was born at Finchley on February 24 1916 and educated at the Royal Commercial Traveller’s School, Pinner. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1937 and trained to be a pilot. Called up on the outbreak of war, he completed his training before heading for South Africa as an instructor. In September 1941 he joined No 84 Squadron at Habbaniya near Baghdad, flying the Blenheim bomber. Within a month, the squadron moved to the Western Desert. Gill attacked motor transport columns, supply depots and troop concentrations and had completed more than 20 operations when the squadron left for the Far East. Following the Japanese attacks against Malaya and Singapore, reinforcements were rushed to the area. No 84 started to arrive in January and by the time Gill and his section of Blenheims reached the area, Singapore was about to fall and he headed for Palembang in Sumatra. Landing after a night bombing sortie, Gill’s aircraft hit a large crater on the runway and was wrecked. The situation in Sumatra soon became “chaotic” and the RAF forces were ordered to evacuate and head for Java. Having lost his aircraft, Gill co-ordinated the destruction of weapons and surplus equipment before organising the withdrawal of the ground party. He was the last to board the final ferry to Java. Finally, on February 17, it was decided to evacuate all non-essential personnel and the surplus aircrew. They embarked on the old steamship Yoma and sailed for India. Of the 605 officers and airmen who had left Egypt a few weeks earlier, only 132 returned to India. 
After his tour in command of No 84 Squadron, Gill worked on the air plans staff at HQ 221 Group, where he was mentioned in despatches. He also received the Air Efficiency Award. He returned to Britain in June 1945. 
After the war he flew with the Overseas Ferry Unit and commanded a number of Maintenance Units, testing aircraft before they wsere returned to squadrons. He flew a variety of aircraft from the four-engine Shackleton to the supersonic Hunter fighter. He served on the air staff in Egypt and Cyprus and for his work at HQ Signals Command he was appointed OBE. He spent three years in Oslo as the British Air Attaché before his final tour on the personnel staff at Air Support Command, retiring in 1971.

Gill was greatly admired by his staff. Members of the current 84 Squadron flew from Cyprus to join him in celebrating his 100th birthday. He died a few hours after they left the party. 
He married Doris Hammond in 1948, six years after their first meeting in India. She and their son and two daughters survive him.

*Wing Commander Arthur Gill, born February 24 1916, died March 4 2016
*
source: The Telegraph


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## Wayne Little (May 6, 2016)




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## Gnomey (May 6, 2016)




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## Wildcat (May 6, 2016)

Sad to see a Vengeance man go..


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## v2 (May 10, 2016)

*Harry Ferrier*, last Midway Survivor of VT-8. 

Harry Ferrier enlisted in the Navy on January 28, 1941, three days after his sixteenth birthday. After boot camp and aviation radio school, he joined Torpedo Squadron 8 (VT-8) stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet.
In 1941, VT-8 was flying the outdated TBD Devastator, but in early 1942, the squadron was selected to receive the first of the new TBF Avengers. Since the USS Hornet was immediately needed in the Pacific, a small detachment of VT-8 was chosen to stay behind and train on the new planes. Harry Ferrier, his pilot Albert “Bert” Earnest and gunner Jay Manning were selected to be part of this detachment. 
After about three months of training on the Avenger, Ferrier and the detachment of six Avengers were sent to Pearl Harbor to join the rest of VT-8. Arriving on May 28, 1942, the detachment had missed the USS Hornet which had sailed for Midway a day earlier. The group then volunteered to fly directly to Midway Island to re-enforce the Marine Garrison there. 
On June 4, 1942, Harry Ferrier and his crew received word of Japanese aircraft heading towards Midway and sightings of an enemy fleet 150 miles out to sea. All six Avengers took off immediately. Five minutes later, Jay manning reported seeing Japanese planes starting their attack on Midway Island. 
About an hour later, Bert Earnest saw Japanese ships on the horizon. As the Avengers prepared to attack, they were jumped by Japanese Zeros. Harry Ferrier heard Jay Manning fire a few rounds from his turret, but then go silent. He looked up after feelings Manning’s blood drip on him and saw Manning’s lifeless body and the turret full of holes. 
Flying at 200 feet, the Avengers pressed home their attacks on the Japanese fleet, but under a swarm of Zeros they were being shot down one by one. Canon shells from the Zeros shot away the elevator, compass and hydraulics on Ferrier’s plane. Pilot Bert Earnest struggled with the controls, but managed to release his torpedo at a Japanese cruiser. Soon after, Harry Ferrier was hit by shrapnel and knocked unconscious. 
After fending off Zeros and flying on dead reckoning, Bert Earnest managed to locate Midway Island. Harry Ferrier regained consciousness and Earnest asked him to confirm that the torpedo was successfully launched. Ferrier couldn’t tell because the window to the bomb bay was covered in blood. 
Ferrier’s Avenger approached Midway and prepared for landing. With only one wheel down, it was waived off twice. On the third approach Earnest touched down. The plane ground looped and came to a gentle stop. 
Harry Ferrier and Bert Earnest were alive. They were the only plane of VT-8 to return to base. Five out of six of VT-8’s Midway based Avengers were lost and all 15 of their carrier based Devastators were shot down during the battle. Their Avenger had nearly 70 holes in it. 
For his actions that day, Harry Ferrier was awarded the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross. His pilot, Bert Earnest was awarded the Navy Cross and the Purple Heart. 
Harry Ferrier continued to fly with VT-8 after the Battle of Midway, participating in the Battle of Guadalcanal. After WWII, he stayed in the Navy and served in Korea and Vietnam.


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## Wayne Little (May 10, 2016)




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## Gnomey (May 10, 2016)




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## fubar57 (May 10, 2016)




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## v2 (May 16, 2016)

*Stephen Wheatcroft*, aviation expert. 

Stephen Wheatcroft, who has died aged 94, became a leading authority in the field of civil aviation, after his career had been decided by a hint from a university teacher. Wheatcroft was about to leave the London School of Economics to join the Navy, when his supervisor, the free-market economist FA Hayek, suggested that he should return for graduate research after the war, and that the economics of civil aviation might be a fruitful subject. This was most prescient advice at a time when aviation was barely a glimmer of the multi-billion world-wide industry it would become. Not that Wheatcroft sympathised with his mentor politically: he always thought himself a man of the Left, first harder and then softer, and lived to be dismayed by the sight of Jeremy Corbyn leading the Labour Party he had so long supported. 
Stephen Frederick Wheatcroft was born in north London on September 11 1921 (which meant that his 80th birthday saw one awful consequence of aviation, in New York), the son of a carpenter. He had one brother, who was killed serving with the RAF.
In the days when poor scholarship boys were still unusual, Wheatcroft went from Latymer School in Edmonton to the LSE, where he took a First in Economics, rowed on the Cam when the LSE was evacuated to Cambridge, and was president of the Union. From 1970 to 2003 he was a Governor of the LSE, and then its first Emeritus Governor. At the LSE he met Joy Reed. They married in 1943 and had two sons and a daughter. 
By the time Wheatcroft married he was in uniform, commissioned in the RNVR, and trained in Canada as a Fleet Air Arm pilot. He served in Indomitable with the Far East Fleet based in Trincomalee, and took part in the bombing of Japanese oil fields in Sumatra, an operation he spoke of somewhat derisively, when he talked about the war at all. On demobilisation he briefly returned to the LSE, but his plans changed when he was recruited by British European Airways, whose Commercial Planning manager he was from 1946 to 1953. He then spent two years as a Simon Research Fellow at Manchester University, working on what would be published in 1956 as The Economics of European Air Transport. From 1956 to 1972 he was an independent consultant, working for airlines in Canada, India and the West Indies among other countries, but he was still retained as an advisor by BEA, and from 1967 to 1969 he served as Assessor or technical adviser to the official committee of inquiry into the civil air transport industry under the chairmanship of Sir Ronald Edwards. This may have been his most influential work: although the Edwards Report did not recommend the immediate amalgamation of BEA and the British Overseas Airways Corporation, that was in practice its outcome, and Wheatcroft, like Edwards, became a member of the board of the new-born British Airways in 1972. He was appointed OBE in 1974. Although he remained a board member, and chairman of British Airways Helicopters, until 1982, he enjoyed executive corporate life less and less, and did not work happily with Lord King, the formidable and sometimes overbearing self-made industrialist whom Mrs Thatcher’s government made chairman of BA. 
Wheatcroft left for private practice again and for his own consultancy, Aviation and Tourism International, which he and his colleague Geoffrey Lipman ran from 1983 to 2000. His first wife died in 1974 and Wheatcroft married Alison Dessau, an American living in London.
He skied until his seventies, and in later years they were able to spend much time at their house near Villeneuve-sur-Lot as well as in Hampshire, and to enjoy travel, bridge, the opera. She and their two sons survive him, together with his elder children.

*Stephen Wheatcroft, born September 11 1921, died April 26 2016.*

Source: The Telegraph.


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## Gnomey (May 16, 2016)




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## Wayne Little (May 21, 2016)




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## v2 (Jun 22, 2016)

*Bob Cowper*- ONE of Australia’s most highly decorated World War II veteran. 


Former squadron leader and fighter pilot Bob Cowper, who survived dozens of wartime missions and the crashing of his Mosquito aircraft on two occasions, would have turned 94 this Friday. 
Leader of the famous 456 RAAF Night Fighters, Mr Cowper’s many medals included a Distinguished Flying Cross (with bar) for gallantry, the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) and the French Legion of Honour, for his heroics during the D-Day invasion at Normandy in June 1944. “I remember on the first night of D-Day (June 6) the squadron shot down four aircraft near Normandy,’’ he recalled in 2014 when living at Netley. “Altogether, I think we shot down about 35 aircraft over the beach and our squadron was proud to have been part of the entire operation that created history and helped end the war in Europe.” 
Mr Cowper joined the RAAF on his 18th birthday in June 1940.

more: No Cookies | The Advertiser


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## Wurger (Jun 22, 2016)




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## Wayne Little (Jun 22, 2016)




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## Gnomey (Jun 22, 2016)




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## fubar57 (Jun 23, 2016)




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## v2 (Jun 23, 2016)

Sgt. David Thatcher 

Retired Staff Sgt. David Thatcher, one of the last two remaining members of the legendary Doolittle Raiders, passed away Monday morning (Jun. 22, 2016) in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. He was 94.“It’s very sad,” said Fort Walton Beach resident Wes Fields, who has worked closely with the remaining Raiders over the years. “It’s one more link to that living history that we’ve lost.”Thatcher’s passing leaves 100-year-old retired Lt. Col. Richard “Dick” Cole as the sole surviving member of the group of 80 volunteers who participated in the dangerous World War II mission under the command of then-Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle.The raid was dramatized in the popular 1944 film “Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.” Thatcher, who was portrayed by actor Robert Walker, was one of the main characters in the movie.The men trained for the daring daylight bombing raid over Tokyo, Japan, at what was then known as Eglin Field, and the surviving members of the 16 original crews have visited Northwest Florida frequently in recent years for reunions and other events.Thatcher, who served as the engineer/gunner with Crew 7, was awarded the Silver Star for his heroics during the April 18, 1942, raid. His aircraft, one of 16 B-25B bombers that took part in the raid, crashed over China following the attack. Thatcher is credited with saving most of his seriously injured crew members.Fields remembers Thatcher as a quiet, modest man who was easy-going and friendly.“He was a gunner and I was a gunner, so we just hit it off,” he said.Fort Walton Beach businessman Lynn Dominique first met Thatcher when he served as an escort during a 2008 Raider Reunion organized by the Fort Walton Beach Chamber of Commerce.“About a year later, I saw him at another Raider event,” Dominique recalled. “I went up to introduce myself to him, and he said, ‘I remember you — I met you in Fort Walton, didn’t I?’ ” Dominique said. “I thought that was pretty impressive. Here’s a guy that probably shakes a thousand hands a year.”Thatcher visited Northwest Florida for the last time in 2013, when he took part in a special Raider reunion. Magnolia Grill owner Tom Rice, who has entertained the Doolittle Raiders and their entourage many times over the years, said the community should be grateful for its connection to the Raiders.“Like our own Doolittle Raider, Ed Horton, these men lived a humble life after World War II, and Staff Sergeant Dave Thatcher was no exception,” Rice said. “He symbolized a generation of truly humble warriors. We miss Ed Horton and our friend Dave Thatcher and now look to Colonel Dick Cole to carry the flag alone in their honor.” Thatcher, who was awarded the Silver Star for his heroics during the daring daylight attack on Tokyo, Japan, in April 1942, died this morning in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. He was 94.Thatcher served as the engineer/gunner with Crew 7, which crashed over China following the bombing raid. He is credited with saving his fellow crew members after the crash.Ret. Lt. Col. Richard “Dick” Cole is now the sole surviving member of the Raiders.


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## Wayne Little (Jun 23, 2016)




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## fubar57 (Jun 23, 2016)




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## vikingBerserker (Jun 24, 2016)




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## buffnut453 (Jun 24, 2016)

Had the privilege to meet David Thatcher and Dick Cole on a couple of occasions - real gents the pair of them.


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## v2 (Jul 8, 2016)

Squadron Leader *Keith Lawrence *

Squadron Leader Keith Lawrence, who has died aged 96, was one of only two surviving New Zealand-born Battle of Britain fighter pilots; he later flew in the fierce air battles of the Battle of Malta.
Lawrence was flying a Spitfire of No 234 Squadron when he damaged a German bomber on July 8 1940, the squadron’s first success. He went on to damage three more enemy aircraft including a Messerschmitt Bf 110, which ditched in the English Channel. On September 7 the Luftwaffe made its first heavy daylight raid on London. Lawrence was scrambled and, after attacking a bomber, he chased a Messerschmitt Bf 109 to the coast and shot it down south of Folkestone. When his squadron moved to Cornwall for a rest, he transferred to No 603 Squadron and during the fierce fighting on September 15, Battle of Britain Day, he shot down another Bf 109 and saw his gunfire hit two others. 
In October Lawrence joined a new unit at Gravesend in Kent. On November 23 he damaged a Bf 110 fighter during a weather reconnaissance flight but four days later was attacked by a Bf 109. One wing of his Spitfire was blown off and Lawrence found himself falling with a useless right arm. He managed to deploy his parachute and landed in the sea. He was picked up by a minesweeper and taken to Ramsgate, where he was admitted to hospital with a broken leg and dislocated arm. 
The eldest son of a New Zealand Regiment sergeant severely wounded at Passchendaele, Keith Ashley Lawrence was born at Waitara, New Zealand, on November 25 1919 and attended Southland Boys’ High School at Invercargill. He joined the Civil Reserve of Pilots in February 1938 before being accepted by the RAF. He left for the UK in January 1939 and was commissioned in November 1939, when he joined No 234 in Yorkshire. After almost a year recovering from his injuries, Lawrence returned to his old unit, but in February 1942 he left for Malta where he joined No 185 Squadron as a flight commander to fly Hurricanes. 
Over the next four months Lawrence flew intensively, leading many patrols during the period when Malta was coming under very heavy attack. Operating from Hal Far airfield he engaged large enemy bomber formations, gaining his first success on March 23 when he shared in the destruction of a Junkers Ju 88 bomber. The German crew took to their dinghy after crashing into the sea. 
Scrambled on a daily basis to meet the German bomber formations, often involving more than 40 aircraft, Lawrence and his pilots also flew patrols to protect the vital re-supply convoys, which came under constant fire as they approached the island. Lawrence damaged a number of enemy aircraft and on May 9 he shot down a Junkers 87 Stuka dive-bomber over Valetta. The following day he accounted for another Stuka as it dive-bombed shipping in Grand Harbour. After re-equipping with Spitfires, Lawrence took command of No 185 Squadron, at which point he decided to dispense with his trademark moustache. He continued to lead formations during the fierce fighting until he was rested, returning to Britain in August. For his service in Malta, Lawrence was awarded the DFC. The citation recorded his “great courage and outstanding keenness especially when the odds were great”. 
He became an instructor, training fighter pilots before serving as a liaison officer with the USAAF fighter units based in East Anglia. In October 1943 he was posted to the Central Gunnery School to train as a gunnery instructor, before returning to fighter training units to pass on his expertise. Lawrence was keen “to do his bit” and he volunteered for a third tour of operations. He joined No 124 Squadron in early February 1945, flying Spitfires on dive-bombing attacks against V-2 rocket launching sites in Holland and on interdiction and bomber escort missions. By the end of the war he had flown a further 50 sorties.
In August the squadron converted to the Gloster Meteor and Lawrence flew 56 sorties in the RAF’s first jet fighter before leaving for New Zealand in March 1946. He served with the RNZAF as an air traffic controller and returned to the UK in 1954 to run various commercial enterprises. He retired at 65 and settled in Devon, where he flew with the Devon and Somerset Gliding Club for 18 years. In 2002, as part of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations, the Battle of Britain Fighter Association nominated him for a flight in a Spitfire, which he was delighted to accept 57 years after his first flight in the fighter. 
In 2010, the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, Lawrence was invited to represent “the Few” in a short sequence for the BBC filmed at the Battle of Britain Memorial at Capel-le-Ferne on the Kent coast. 
Lawrence was a lifelong Christian Scientist, and was both clerk and treasurer of the Exeter church for many years after his retirement.

Keith Lawrence married Kay Harte in July 1945; she survives him with their three sons and two daughters.

*Squadron Leader Keith Lawrence, born November 25 1919, died June 2 2016*

source: The Telegraph


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## fubar57 (Jul 8, 2016)




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## vikingBerserker (Jul 8, 2016)




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## Airframes (Jul 8, 2016)

R.I.P Sqn Ldr Lawrence.


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## Wildcat (Jul 12, 2016)

S/Ldr Bob Cowper, Night fighter ace 


> Squadron Leader Bob Cowper, who has died aged 93, is thought to have been the last surviving Australian fighter “ace” of the Second World War; flying night fighters, he was credited with destroying at least six enemy aircraft.
> 
> During the air operations to support the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, Cowper and his colleagues of No 456 Squadron RAAF, mounted standing patrols over the beachhead and in a few days accounted for 35 enemy aircraft. On the night of June 9/10 Cowper and his navigator, Flying Officer William Watson, were on patrol near Cherbourg when they attacked a Heinkel 177 bomber and damaged it so severely it was forced to crash land. Later in the sortie, they intercepted a Dornier Do 217 bomber and destroyed it near Beaumont.
> 
> ...



Squadron Leader Bob Cowper, Australian fighter ‘ace’ – obituary


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## Thorlifter (Jul 12, 2016)




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## fubar57 (Jul 12, 2016)




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## Gnomey (Jul 12, 2016)




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## v2 (Jul 27, 2016)

Squadron Leader *Percy Beake*- fighter pilot 

Squadron Leader Percy Beake, who has died aged 99, flew Spitfires in the latter stages of the Battle of Britain and commanded a Typhoon squadron in support of the D-Day landings and the campaign in Normandy.
Beake was an experienced fighter pilot when he was given command in May 1944 of No 164 Squadron, flying the rocket-firing Typhoon. Operating from airfields on the south coast, Beake and his pilots attacked targets on the Normandy coast in preparation for the Allied invasion. On D-Day the squadron was particularly busy. On its third sweep of the day over the beachhead, Beake shot down a Focke Wulf 190 eight miles east of Caen, the squadron’s first air-to-air success.
On July 17 the squadron moved to a makeshift airstrip at Sommervieu, near Bayeaux, from where it flew “cab rank” sorties directed by a ground controller to attack enemy armour and troop concentrations. Supporting the Canadian Army, the Typhoons inflicted severe damage on the retreating German forces but losses among the squadrons were high.
Beake led his squadron during the intensive fighting of the summer months, including the fierce battles around Falaise and during the rapid Allied advance into Belgium that followed. In September he was rested and was awarded the DFC. The citation described him as a “first class leader whose great skill, thoroughness and untiring efforts contributed materially to the successes gained”. A few weeks earlier he had been mentioned in despatches. 
Percival Harold Beake, always known as Percy, was born on March 17 1917 in Montreal, Canada, to English parents who returned to Britain eight years later. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School. He joined the RAFVR in April 1939 and commenced training as a pilot, being mobilised in August.
After completing his training on Spitfires, in September 1940 he joined No 64 Squadron at Leconfield in Yorkshire before the squadron moved to Biggin Hill and then to an airfield in Norfolk. He flew patrols in the final stages of the Battle of Britain.
In June 1941 he asked to join a squadron at Biggin Hill in order to see more action. Flying Spitfires with No 92 Squadron, he participated in many sweeps and escort missions over northern France. Returning from one of these sorties he crash-landed in a field in Kent having run out of fuel.
In July Messerschmitt Bf 109s attacked him over the French coast and damaged the radiator of his Spitfire. Shortly afterwards the aircraft’s engine seized and he was forced to bale out. Trapped in the cockpit, he inverted the aircraft and fell clear to land in the sea 18 miles south of Dover. He clambered aboard his dinghy but searching Spitfires failed to find him in the misty conditions. Some time later, by then suffering from hypothermia, he was picked up by an air-sea rescue launch.He was given a week’s leave.
On September 24, Bf 109s engaged his formation over France and in the ensuing fight he managed to damage one. He finally came off operations in April 1942 to be an instructor at a fighter school.
He returned to the frontline in December when he was made the flight commander of a new squadron, No 193, which was forming with the Typhoon. The Brazilian branch of the Fellowship of the Bellows, an international group formed during the conflict to collect funds for the purchase of aircraft for the RAF, paid for some of the squadron’s aircraft.
Over the following months he attacked shipping, flew standing patrols over the south coast and, later in the year, dive-bombed the V-1 sites under construction in the Pas de Calais. On February 8 1944, during a sweep over Brittany, he engaged a Focke Wulf 190 and shot it down. In May 1944 he was promoted to squadron leader to take command of No 164 Squadron.
After his time with the squadron, Beake joined the staff of the Fighter Leader’s School as an instructor and he was released from the RAF in January 1946. He resumed his career in the animal feed manufacturing business with Robinson’s, which later became part of BOCM – British Oil & Cake Mills – and later Unilever. He became the manager of the feed mills at Selby and later in Exeter.
In 2015, 71 years after his service during the liberation of France, the French government appointed him to the Legion d’honneur.
Percy Beake’s wife Evelyn (née Viner), to whom he had been married for 75 years, predeceased him by five weeks. Their two daughters survive him.

*Squadron Leader Percy Beake, born March 17 1917, died June 25 2016
*
source: The Telegraph

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## Old Wizard (Jul 30, 2016)




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## v2 (Aug 3, 2016)

Wing Commander Howard Murley 

Wing Commander Howard Murley, who has died aged 92, flew four-engine bombers with Bomber Command before spending a number of years as a test pilot.

When Murley joined No 218 Squadron in May 1944 as the pilot of a four-engine Stirling bomber, he was barely 20 years old, the second youngest member of his seven-man crew. His early sorties were to northern France during Bomber Command’s campaign to destroy vital targets, particularly rail marshalling yards and infrastructure, in the lead-up to D-Day. On one such sortie, as he was heading south over London, one engine of his bomber failed. The Stirling was at maximum weight and unable to maintain height. By the time Murley reached the Wash to jettison his bombs, the aircraft had lost more 10,000 ft in height. The squadron soon re-equipped with the Lancaster and bombing over Germany was resumed in August. Flying over Homberg on Bomber Command’s first major daylight raid for three years, Murley’s aircraft was badly damaged by flak and its hydraulics and undercarriage were damaged, but he managed to return to his base in Suffolk and land safely After 39 operations over Germany he was rested and awarded the DFC.
Howard Thomas Murley was born at Enfield on September 9 1923 and educated at Stationers’ Company’s School, a grammar school in North London, where he excelled at athletics and football. He went to Durham University, where he joined the University Air Squadron. He left early to join the RAF and trained as a pilot in Canada.
After his tour with No 218 Squadron Murley had a spell as a bombing instructor before transferring to the air transport force and flying Dakotas on routes to Italy and the Middle East. He later joined the Transport Command Development Unit and during this period flew sorties on the Berlin Airlift, operating from an airfield in West Germany. He was also seconded to the USAF as an RAF representative, during which time he flew as co-pilot on a C-54 Skymaster as one of the team transporting the much-publicised millionth sack of coal into Berlin. One of his duties on the Development Unit was to fly the RAF’s new transport aircraft, the Vickers Valetta. He took one across the North Atlantic to the United States for trials. The outbound route for the relatively short-range aircraft included one leg where there was no alternative airfield in the event of an emergency. Before leaving the unit he was awarded the AFC.
In July 1949 Murley was selected as one of the first two RAF exchange students to train as test pilots at the United States Navy Test Pilot Training School in Patuxent River, Maryland, where he met and married his wife. A year later he returned to Britain to take up a post as a test pilot at Farnborough, flying a wide range of different aircraft types.
In 1953 he became the flight commander of the Aerodynamics Flight, at a time when the first of the V-bombers were being tested. One was the Avro Vulcan, and to provide aerodynamic data for its revolutionary delta-wing configuration a small number of third-scale single-engine research aircraft, the Avro 707, were built to provide aircraft handling data. During the 1953 Farnborough Air Show, he flew one of four of these aircraft in formation with the first two prototypes of the Vulcan, providing a stunning spectacle.
His flying duties also included photographing live trials of the Martin Baker ejector seat, and he flew some of the initial test flights investigating the spinning characteristics of the early high-performance jet fighters. He was then awarded a bar to his AFC.
While flying a Sabre fighter he suffered a pneumothorax as a result of being subjected to high g-forces while breathing 100 per cent oxygen at low level. Although unknown at the time, this is now a recognised risk. He was grounded and spent the next few years at a desk before spending two years as the personal staff officer to the secretary of state for air, George Ward.Returning to flying in July 1960, Murley converted to the Canberra bomber, serving on No 12 Squadron before taking command of No IX Squadron.
After three years in Malta as a staff officer, he returned to the test-flying arena when he was appointed as the Officer Commanding the Experimental Flying Wing at Farnborough. Again he flew a wide variety of aircraft, but he enjoyed none more than a replica SE 5A bi-plane of First World War vintage, which he demonstrated at several air shows.
After two non-flying appointments, the last on the British defence staff in Washington, Murley took early retirement in 1975. He and his wife decided to remain in America and they settled in Mississippi, his wife’s home state. For a number of years he flew aerial photographic surveys and was an instructor at a local flying club. In 1990 he moved back to live in Farnham and aged 69 he retired from flying.
His many years’ service to the local Rotary club was recognised with the award of the Paul Harris Fellowship. He was also a founding member of the Wey Valley Probus Club and helped with local church duties.
Despite the high-risk flying experiences he had had as a test pilot, his Second World War memories remained uppermost in his mind. He thought daily of his fallen colleagues. He was extremely moved when he first saw the RAF Bomber Command Memorial at Green Park. A modest, reserved man, he did not wish to be present at its unveiling.
*Wing Commander Howard Murley, born September 9 1923, died May 31 2016.
*
source: The Telegraph


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## Airframes (Aug 3, 2016)

R.I.P W/Cdr. Murley.


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## fubar57 (Aug 3, 2016)




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## Gnomey (Aug 3, 2016)




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## v2 (Sep 5, 2016)

*Stanisław Rockminster* (formerly Stanisław Rochmiński), pilot of the 307 Polish Night Fighter Squadron. 

A heroic polish pilot who survived 55 daring missions in WW2 has died just days after celebrating his 100th birthday. Polish-born Stanley 'Rocky' Rockminster had been presented with a special Royal British Legion plaque for reaching the milestone at his care home in Mumbles, Swansea.
In an extraordinary story the brave pilot escaped the Nazis after a tense night time flight at the start of the war, only to fall into the hands of the Russians. He survived over two years of hard labour on a Siberian railway line before he reached the UK in 1942 and quickly enlisted in the RAF. Rocky's duty was to escort the Allies' Bomber Command and would fly his Mosquito at the front to take care of any Luftwaffe in their path, according to a report from the South Wales Evening Post in 2015
The veteran had said: 'If anyone tells you they are not frightened of death, then they are a liar'.
At the end of the war Rocky had stints as an RAF instructor in Cyprus and Malta, before raising a family in Swansea, South Wales with wife Marjorie.
He had four children, 11 grandchildren and 21 great-children at the time of his death. Daughter Barbara Rockminster said: 'He was the most wonderful father you could wish for.'

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## fubar57 (Sep 5, 2016)




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## Gnomey (Sep 5, 2016)




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## Old Wizard (Sep 5, 2016)




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## Thorlifter (Sep 6, 2016)

I post this here because of his WWII service. I had no idea he was the youngest DI in the Marine Corps. Can you imagine getting your butt chewed out by a 17 year old?

RIP Mr. O'Brian

Hugh O’Brian, Star of TV’s ‘The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,’ Dies at 91


 





Hugh O’Brian, who starred in the long-running series “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,” died Monday. He was 91.

The actor died peacefully in his Beverly Hills home, according to a statement from Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership.

ABC Western “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,” in which the exceedingly handsome, muscular O’Brian starred as the title character, ran for 221 episodes from 1955-61. At the time he was one of television’s great male sex symbols.

In 1957 he was nominated for an Emmy for best continuing performance by an actor in a dramatic series for his work on “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.”

So popular and so much a part of popular culture was O’Brian that he showed up as Earp, uncredited, in the 1959 Bob Hope Western comedy “Alias Jesse James,” as well as in the 1960 TV movie “The Secret World of Eddie Hodges”; when the actor guested on “Make Room for Daddy” in 1956, the episode was entitled “Wyatt Earp Visits the Williamses.”

The actor had appeared in many feature Westerns by the time ABC cast him in its series as Wyatt Earp, a lawman who was one of the legends of the Old West.

Later he appeared in features including the 1963 comedy “Come Fly With Me”; in 1965, he starred in the feature “Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians” along with Shirley Eaton and Fabian and had an uncredited role in Otto Preminger’s World War II drama “In Harm’s Way,” starring John Wayne, Patricia Neal and Kirk Douglas.

In 1972-73 he starred with Doug McClure, Anthony Franciosa and Burgess Meredith in the NBC series “Search.”

O’Brian had a small role in John Wayne’s last film, Don Siegel’s “The Shootist” (1976), as the last character ever killed by Wayne on screen — O’Brian, a good friend of Wayne’s, considered a great honor.

The actor reprised the role of Wyatt Earp for two episodes of the CBS series “Guns of Paradise” in 1989, and in the TV movies “The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw” (1991), starring Kenny Rogers, and CBS’ “Wyatt Earp: Return to Tombstone” (1994).

O’Brian did plenty of work outside the Western genre, appearing in the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Danny De Vito comedy “Twins” (1988) as one of several men who donated DNA that produced the “twins” and guesting on “Charlie’s Angels,” “Fantasy Island,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “L.A. Law.” He appeared in an Animal Planet adaptation of Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” in 2000.

Hugh Charles Krampe was born in Rochester, New York. Hugh lettered in a variety of sports.

He spent a semester at the University of Cincinnati but during World War II he dropped out to enlist in the Marine Corps — where his father had been an officer. At 17 he became the youngest Marine drill instructor, according to the TCM website.

After the war, O’Brian moved to Los Angeles to study at UCLA. He had started doing stage work, and was discovered by Ida Lupino, who signed him to appear as the second male lead in the polio drama “Never Fear,” which she had co-scripted and was directing; for O’Brian that film led to a contract with Universal Pictures.

He had a brief, uncredited role in the classic noir film “D.O.A.,” starring Edmond O’Brien, but he was soon — almost inevitably — doing Westerns, appearing in the Gene Autry vehicle “Beyond the Purple Hills” (1950); “Vengeance Valley,” starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Walker; Budd Boetticher’s “The Cimarron Kid” (1952), starring Audie Murphy; Raoul Walsh’s “The Lawless Breed” (1953), starring Rock Hudson and Julie Adams; Boetticher’s “Seminole,” also starring Hudson; Boetticher’s “The Man From the Alamo,” starring Glenn Ford; “Back to God’s Country,” also starring Hudson; Raoul Walsh’s “Saskatchewan” (1954), starring Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters; “Drums Across the River,” starring Audie Murphy; Edward Dmytryk’s excellent “Broken Lance,” starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner and Richard Widmark; and “White Feather,” starring Robert Wagner and Debra Paget.

Occasionally he worked outside the Western genre, as in WWII actioner “Fighting Coast Guard” (1951); “On the Loose” (1951), in which he had a supporting role as a doctor; “Son of Ali Baba,” starring Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie; the Douglas Sirk-directed musical “Meet Me at the Fair” (1953); the bizarre comedy “Fireman Save My Child” (1954), originally intended for Abbott and Costello; and the Ethel Merman musical “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” which also starred Donald O’Connor and Marilyn Monroe.

O’Brian dedicated a great deal of his life to a charitable effort he created himself in 1958, the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Foundation, a nonprofit youth leadership development program for high schoolers. The organization sponsors 10,000 high school sophomores annually through leadership programs in all 50 states and 20 countries.

The concept for the program was inspired by the nine days O’Brian spent visiting with humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa in 1958.

At the Golden Globes in 1954, O’Brian won for most promising newcomer – male (tied with Steve Forrest and Richard Egan).

O’Brian won a Golden Boot Award in 1991 (the awards, sponsored and presented by the Motion Picture & Television Fund, are bestowed upon those who have made significant contributions to the genre of Western television and movies).

He is survived by his wife, the former Virginia Barber, whom he married in 2006 at the age of 81.


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## Old Wizard (Sep 6, 2016)

RIP.


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## v2 (Sep 30, 2016)

Wing Commander *Lenny Lambert *

Wing Commander Lenny Lambert, who has died aged 96, escaped from the beaches of Dunkirk as a private soldier and returned to France four years later to lead a squadron in support of the Allied armies as they advanced towards Germany.
By the Normandy invasion in June 1944, Lambert was an experienced fighter-reconnaissance pilot and was second-in-command of a Mustang squadron, No 168 Squadron. Based at an airfield in Hampshire, he flew low-level reconnaissance sorties and carried out a patrol over the beachhead on D-Day. At the end of June his squadron moved to Normandy to operate from a temporary airstrip.
Over the next few weeks, Lambert and his pilots flew in support of the 2nd Army seeking out and attacking German transport columns with reinforcements moving into the invasion area. In October, the squadron replaced its Mustangs with Typhoons and Lambert was appointed as the CO. The squadron’s role was low-level attack with cannons. Lambert and his pilots flew ahead of other Typhoons armed with rockets and attacked the anti-aircraft batteries to suppress their fire. On November 29, he led eight of his Typhoons to suppress the guns protecting the lock gates on the Dortmund-Ems canal. His formation flew just ahead of a Canadian squadron who were able to bomb the target accurately. On January 1 1945, when the Luftwaffe launched a mass attack against Allied airfields in the Netherlands, Lambert was airborne on a mission to strafe enemy positions around St Vith. On the return flight his aircraft was badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire. The formation soon ran into a flight of enemy fighters and one closed in on Lambert who was having great difficulty controlling his aircraft. Fortunately, his wingman recognised Lambert’s problem, closed in on the enemy fighter and shot it down.
Lambert led his pilots on attack missions almost every day. On January 23 during an armed-reconnaissance sortie near Munster, he and two of his pilots spotted a German bomber and a fighter preparing to land at Rheine airfield. They attacked them and the fighter pulled into cloud. Lambert fired on the bomber, which crashed as it tried to land and was destroyed.
An important task for Lambert’s squadron was to try and find the mobile launching sites for the V-2 rockets being launched against London and the port of Antwerp. The sites were well camouflaged but Lambert found a V-2 being fuelled. His Typhoons attacked and the fuel installation and the rocket blew up. On another occasion he was circling at 10,000 feet looking for a site when he spotted a “mushroom” developing on the ground marking the launch of a V-2. The rocket rose and passed between him and his wingman, giving him the closest view of the rocket of any other man on the Allied side. His formation then dived and blew up the fuel tanks and destroyed the site. Newspaper reporters were at Eindhoven when he landed and their headlines claimed “Squadron Commander claims V-2 is pretty!” At the end of February, Lambert was rested and awarded the DFC. The citation commented on his keenness and courage of the highest order and concluded, “He is an outstanding operational pilot”.

Leonard Horace Lambert was born in Yardley, Birmingham, on October 21 1919. He joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a private soldier in April 1939. 
During the withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force to Dunkirk, Lambert and his colleagues became isolated and had to make their own way to the coast in an abandoned truck. The small party arrived near Dunkirk after the main evacuation had finished and spent five sleepless nights on the beach. They commandeered a small boat and were eventually picked up by a naval vessel. Lambert had been wounded and he was to spend three months recovering from his ordeal. He volunteered for service in the RAF and trained as a pilot in Canada before being posted to an army-cooperation squadron. Flying the US-built Tomahawk, he attacked shipping and coastal targets and photographed areas in northern France in preparation for the eventual amphibious landing in Normandy. To maintain security and mislead the Germans, photographic sorties along the whole of the north coast of France were flown at frequent intervals to monitor enemy defences, survey the beaches and monitor the building of the V-1 launch sites. 
When Lambert returned to England in March 1945, he was an instructor at a fighter pilot training unit before spending a year on the air staff in West Africa. He returned to fly fighters in September 1946 when he joined the Central Fighter Establishment to help develop tactics. In January 1949 Lambert left for the RAF base at Gutersloh in West Germany where he took command of No 16 Squadron, which had just re-equipped with the Vampire jet fighter bomber. To support the Berlin Airlift, the squadron moved to Celle near the border with East Germany to mount patrols and be a rapid reaction fighter force in the event of any “incidents”. When Lambert left the squadron in January 1951 he was awarded the AFC. A tour on the operations staff at Allied Air Forces Central Europe, based near Paris, Lambert commanded the fighter wing at the former Battle of Britain airfield at North Weald in Essex. During an exchange appointment with the USAF in California he met Marilyn Monroe and Howard Hughes, the latter offering him a job in his aircraft plant. For his last appointment in the RAF he worked in the operational requirements division at the Air Ministry. He retired in February 1961 and initially worked for Computing Devices of Canada before starting his own company. Later he became the managing director of Natural Power Systems, specialising in solar and wind energy and continuing to work into his eighties. Lambert did not forget his experiences in France and in recent years made numerous visits to Normandy, the Pas de Calais region and to Dunkirk. He became involved in the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships and in 1975 he discovered the sailing clipper Falcon II moored on the riverbank at Thames Ditton in a sorry state. It had made five trips to Dunkirk. Once he had restored it he gave it the name Alabama. It is thought to be the oldest surviving Dunkirk veteran. After the war he became friendly with the German fighter “ace”, Adolph Galland. They reminded each other that they had met twice before – over Antwerp in late 1944. Lambert enjoyed sailing and good wine, and he and his second wife gave many house parties at their villa in Italy. In October 2015 Lambert joined six other veterans at a ceremony in Gloucester where he was presented with the Legion d’honneur for his services during the liberation of France.

Lenny Lambert married Diana Boff in 1947. The marriage was later dissolved and he married, secondly, the Hollywood and Broadway actress Virginia Campbell who died earlier this year aged 102. His two sons and two daughters from his first marriage survive him.

*Wing Commander Lenny Lambert, born October 21 1919, died September 6 2016

*

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## fubar57 (Sep 30, 2016)




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## Gnomey (Sep 30, 2016)




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## Old Wizard (Sep 30, 2016)




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## Wayne Little (Oct 8, 2016)




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## v2 (Oct 16, 2016)

Wing Commander *Colin Colquhoun*, courageous Spitfire pilot 

Wing Commander Colin Colquhoun, who has died aged 93, flew Spitfires during the Italian campaign and his leadership and courage earned him the DFC; he later excelled as a formation and aerobatic pilot.
In June 1944 Colquhoun joined No 111 Squadron, based at an airfield near Rome. The British Eighth Army was advancing north and the squadron’s Spitfires attacked motor transports and the enemy’s lines of communication in support of the ground forces.
In July the squadron left for Corsica and on August 16, the day after Allied troops landed in the south of France for Operation Dragoon, Colquhoun and his colleagues flew into Ramatuelle airfield near St Tropez.
From various bases in the area, Colquhoun flew ground-attack sorties ahead of the advancing troops. By the end of September the campaign was over and the squadron returned to Italy. Bomb racks were fitted to the Spitfires and Colquhoun led attacks against road and rail targets. During the spring offensive of 1945, ground-attack sorties increased as the land forces mounted a major offensive over the River Po.
At the end of the campaign, Colquhoun was awarded the DFC for “the outstanding part he played in operations over north Italy”. The citation mentioned “his daring leadership” and concluded: “The excellent results achieved have been due largely to his fine fighting spirit, cool courage and devotion to duty.”
Colin Ian Colquhoun was born at Felling-on-Tyne on August 25 1923 and educated at Berwick Grammar School. He enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve in February 1942 and trained as a pilot in South Africa under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
At the end of the war, Colquhoun spent six months at the RAF headquarters in Greece before returning to Britain to fly on various fighter squadrons. In September 1946 he joined No 247 Squadron, just as it was becoming the RAF’s first squadron to be equipped with the single-engine Vampire jet fighter.
A month later a second squadron, No 54, received the Vampire and Colquhoun moved across the airfield at Odiham to join as the flight commander. The CO decided to form an aerobatic team of three aircraft and Colquhoun became the deputy leader.
In July 1947 the team made its first public appearance at the Blackpool Air Show as the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team. This was followed by other displays, and after performing at the International Air Show in Brussels it received a signal from the secretary general of the Belgian Aero Club saying he was “greatly impressed by the brilliant British display”. Later that year a fourth member joined the team.
In the spring of 1948 the USAF invited the RAF to send a squadron of jet fighters to take part in a series of airshows. No 54 Squadron was selected and on July 12 six Vampires took off for Canada, making stops in Stornoway, Iceland and Greenland en route, to become the first jet aircraft to cross the Atlantic. This was a major achievement for a short-range single-engine aircraft. Colquhoun flew two of the legs before the formation arrived in Labrador.
The squadron gave a number of displays at airshows in Canada, including brilliant solo displays by Colquhoun, before flying to the United States where they were feted by their USAF hosts and the press. More formation displays and Colquhoun’s solo sequence at East Coast venues followed. The visit culminated in a performance at the opening ceremony of Idlewild Airport (now JFK).
On August 12, the six Vampires left Labrador for the return crossing of the Atlantic, with Colquhoun flying one of the jets. For his work helping to establish the RAF’s first jet aerobatic team and for his many solo displays he was awarded the AFC.
After his involvement in the North American tour he specialised as a fighter weapons instructor, serving at the RAF’s Central Gunnery School and at the School of Air Land Warfare. He spent two years at the Air HQ in Malta as a weapons specialist and then returned to be an instructor at the Fighter Leader’s School. He was appointed MBE in 1954.
In May 1955 he transferred to the Engineer (Photographic) Branch, specialising in supporting RAF photographic reconnaissance squadrons in Germany, Britain and in Singapore. He returned to Germany in 1968 as the senior photographic officer at the RAF’s headquarters at Rheindahlen.
Before retiring from the RAF in 1978 he served in the MoD on the engineer photographic policy staff, and later at Headquarters Strike Command. After his retirement he was lay administrator at Wells Cathedral for six years before working at Hindhayes School at Street in Somerset. He played golf but was a very private man.
Colin Colquhoun married Joyce Hunter in August 1951 and she died in 1986. Their daughter survives him.

*Wg Cdr Colin Colquhoun, born August 25 1923, died September 12 2016

source: The Telegraph*


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## Old Wizard (Oct 16, 2016)




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## Gnomey (Oct 16, 2016)




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## fubar57 (Oct 16, 2016)




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## michaelmaltby (Oct 25, 2016)

Alistair Urquhart ... The Forgotten Highlander

Man whose incredible story of surviving as Japanese prisoner of war became bestseller, dies at 97

Very revealing story


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## Shinpachi (Oct 25, 2016)

I wonder if he read "The Ahlone Concentration Camp" written by Yuji Aida.
His comrades took revenge before assailants' apologies.


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## Gnomey (Oct 25, 2016)




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## Capt. Vick (Oct 25, 2016)

Hey I heard Bob Hoover died... What a man, what a life!


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## bobm4360 (Oct 26, 2016)




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## fubar57 (Oct 26, 2016)




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## v2 (Oct 26, 2016)

Lieutenant General *Wilhelm Mohr *

Lieutenant General Wilhelm Mohr, who has died aged 100, escaped from his native Norway following the German occupation to fly fighters with the RAF, rising to become the chief of the Royal Norwegian Air Force (RNoAF) and to hold senior Nato appointments.
When the Germans invaded Norway on April 9 1940, Mohr was the deputy commander of a reconnaissance squadron based near Trondheim. It was soon apparent that the airfield would become untenable. Skis were fitted to the aircraft and Mohr and his men headed to an army unit further south, where he took command of the squadron.
Mohr and his pilots flew reconnaissance sorties to identify German advances, but by the end of the month it was clear that south Norway would have to be surrendered. He headed for the west coast and his aircraft was attacked and damaged en route, but he reached the HQ for the remnants of the Norwegian Army Air Arm on a frozen lake. He met the commanding general of the Norwegian forces, who gave him permission to escape to Britain.
Mohr left the small port of Molde on May 2 with other Air Arm personnel, but their fishing boat was attacked and sunk. Undaunted, they commandeered another and headed for the Shetlands.
Wilhelm Mohr was born on June 27 1916 in Fana on the west coast of Norway, near the city of Bergen. In 1936 he joined the Norwegian Army Air Arm, training as a pilot. A year later he started his officer studies at the Norwegian army’s Military Academy. He was selected to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but with war threatening he returned to flying duties.
Mohr soon demonstrated his courage and tenacity. In late 1938 an emergency call came through that a pregnant woman needed to be evacuated from a remote farm. Owing to the bad weather, overland travel was impossible, but Mohr flew his biplane to the area and with the woman sitting on his lap, he took off and she was safely taken to a hospital. 
After reaching Britain, Mohr soon left for Canada. Following the escape to Britain of the Norwegian royal family and government, it was decided to set up a training base for Norwegian military personnel and a site near Toronto was chosen. Mohr was one of the first flying instructors and played a key role in establishing what became known as “Little Norway”.
He returned to Britain in May 1941 and joined No 615 Squadron to gain combat experience on the Hurricane. He was soon made a flight commander and took part in attacks over northern France. He provided fighter escort to a force of heavy bombers on a daylight attack against German capital ships in Brest.
In January 1942 Mohr became a founder member of No 332 Squadron, the second Norwegian fighter squadron equipped with the Spitfire. After a brief spell as the deputy commander, he assumed command in April. Operating from RAF North Weald, just north of London, Mohr led his squadron in attacks over France. During one operation he was in combat with a Focke Wulf 190 when he was wounded in the face, but he continued to fly on operations.
On August 19, the two Norwegian Spitfire squadrons provided fighter support for the ill-fated raid on Dieppe. Mohr was involved in dogfights with Luftwaffe fighters and was wounded in the leg, but continued his patrol for a further 30 minutes; his squadron accounted for seven of the enemy. On landing he refused treatment until he had organised a further operation by his squadron. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the DFC for his actions over Dieppe.
In September, King Haakon VII of Norway and his family visited North Weald and Mohr, his foot in plaster, was presented with the Norwegian War Cross with Swords. A few weeks later he married his fiancée Jonna, who had served as a courier with the Norwegian Resistance but had been forced to flee to Sweden in late 1941. She worked there for a year as a secretary for the Norwegian Defence Attaché before leaving for Britain.
Mohr continued to fly on operations before being rested in April 1943. Six months later he joined No 132 (Norwegian) Wing. On the morning of D-Day he flew a patrol over the beachhead in his Spitfire. Within weeks Mohr and his wing moved to a makeshift airstrip in Normandy to provide close support for the Allied ground forces. Over the next few months the Norwegians moved eastwards to Belgium and the Netherlands, attacking lines of communication, trains and enemy formations. Two weeks after the German surrender he landed back in Norway.
For three years he was the aide-de-camp to King Haakon, and he played an important role in establishing the RNoAF. After a series of appointments in Norway he spent three years in Washington as his country’s representative on Nato’s Military Committee. In 1960 he was appointed chief of staff of the RNoAF and three years later became its commander-in-chief, a post he held for six years.
In 1969 he was appointed deputy commander-in-chief of Nato’s Allied Forces Northern Europe and later was the director of the National Defence College in Oslo, before retiring in 1975. He was leader of the Norwegian Civil Aviation Accident Commission from 1977 to 1989.
A modest man, Mohr was reluctant to emphasise his own role in the Second World War or his service in the RNoAF. He retained a deep interest in air force doctrine, however, and contributed numerous articles to Norwegian military publications and lectured to air force cadets. He was often described as “the grand old man of the Air Force”.
In October 2010, aged 94, he flew in a Vampire jet of the RNoAF’s Historical Squadron, more than 50 years after his last flight in the fighter. Mohr was appointed a Commander of the Order of St Olav (Norway) and a Knight of the Order of Danneborg (Denmark). He was also awarded the Legion of Merit (USA).

*Wilhelm Mohr, born June 27 1916, died September 26 2016
*
source: The Telegraph


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## michaelmaltby (Oct 26, 2016)

Then and now ....

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## Old Wizard (Oct 26, 2016)




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## v2 (Oct 26, 2016)

*Ken Cranefield*, pilot wounded dropping supply panniers into Arnhem 

Ken Cranefield , who has died aged 94, dropped supplies to men of the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem, despite having been severely wounded and for his courage he won a DFC. 
Operation Market Garden, the capture of a series of key bridges in the Netherlands, began on September 17 1944. Cranefield was the pilot of one of 22 Dakota transport aircraft of No 233 Squadron that took off from an airfield near Swindon, each towing a Horsa glider carrying elements of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and the Border Regiment. Little opposition was encountered and all but one of the gliders arrived on Landing Zone “S”. As the situation on the ground at Arnhem deteriorated, the re-supply of the beleaguered positions became critical. The RAF suffered increasing losses as the enemy reinforced its anti-aircraft capability.
On the morning of the 23rd, No 233 Squadron was given the task of dropping more supplies and 17 Dakotas took off. Cranefield was the pilot of one of them. 
Approaching the dropping zone, the Dakotas met heavy resistance. Later Cranefield remembered that the anti-aircraft fire “sounded like peanuts raking the length of the fuselage”. Then his wireless operator shouted over the intercom: “Skipper, the starboard wing is on fire.”
A large hole had been torn in the wing, making it difficult to control, but Cranefield pressed on. 
Close to the dropping zone, his Dakota was again hit and he was badly wounded in the knee and thigh. Refusing treatment he remained at the aircraft’s controls and the panniers were dropped successfully. 
Only then did he allow the second pilot, Flight Sergeant Stapleford RNZAF, to take control and fly the aircraft back to base. A member of his crew tended to his wounds, using the flex from a microphone as a tourniquet. In hospital Cranefield met an RAF nursing sister who would become his wife. 
The citation for the award of an immediate DFC described him as “a courageous and resolute captain who set a very fine example”. 
His wounds were so serious that he was unable to return to flying duties.
Knivett Garton Cranefield, always known as Ken, was born in Ealing on May 2 1922. He enlisted into the RAF in February 1941. He trained as a pilot under a joint US/UK Training Scheme. He completed his training in Britain on the Wellington bomber and ferried one to North Africa. En route, his aircraft was intercepted by three long-range German fighters, but he managed to evade them. 
His return to Britain coincided with the build-up of the RAF’s transport force in preparation for the Allied landings in Normandy and he converted to the Dakota aircraft. In the period following the successful D-Day landings, Cranefield made numerous sorties to rudimentary airstrips in Normandy, transporting supplies and men. On one occasion his load included 2,000lbs of newspapers.
On the return trips, the empty Dakotas were loaded with wounded soldiers and flown back to hospitals in England. As the Allied armies advanced east, the Dakotas landed at recently captured German airfields and finally at Brussels, which became a major airhead. 
After his final operation to Arnhem, Cranefield remained in hospital for many weeks and he had to receive treatment over the next 10 years. Unable to remain in the RAF, he left in September 1946 as a warrant officer and took up a career in the Civil Service. He rose to fill senior appointments in the Department of Employment. 
In September 2014 he returned to Arnhem for the first time to attend a service marking the 70th anniversary of the battle. With other veterans he was warmly welcomed by the Dutch people, including many children from the town, who recognised his medals and came up to thank him. 
Ken Cranefield died on the anniversary of his first sortie to Arnhem. He married Marjorie Douglas in 1945 and she died in July this year. Their two daughters survive him.

*Ken Cranefield, born May 2 1922, died September 17 2016*

source: The Telegraph

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## Airframes (Oct 26, 2016)

R.I.P.


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## fubar57 (Oct 26, 2016)




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## Old Wizard (Oct 27, 2016)




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## Eco-81 (Oct 27, 2016)

*Bob Hoover, Aviator Whose Aerobatic Stunts Are Legend, Dies at 94*

Bob Hoover, a pilot who escaped Nazi captivity in a stolen plane, tested supersonic jets with his friend Chuck Yeager, barnstormed the world as a breathtaking stunt performer and became, by wide consensus, an American aviation legend, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by Ron Kaplan of the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio, where Mr. Hoover was enshrined in 1988.
Even General Yeager, perhaps the most famous test pilot of his generation, was humbled by Mr. Hoover, describing him in the foreword to Mr. Hoover’s 1996 autobiography, “Forever Flying,” as “the greatest pilot I ever saw.”
The World War II hero Jimmy Doolittle, an aviation pioneer of an earlier generation, called Mr. Hoover “the greatest stick-and-rudder man that ever lived.”
Tall and lanky, Mr. Hoover forged a long career studded with aeronautical achievements and feats of derring-do. The subtitle of his memoir, written with Mark Shaw, suggests as much: “Fifty Years of High-Flying Adventures, From Barnstorming in Prop Planes to Dogfighting Germans to Testing Supersonic Jets.”
At a World War II air base in the Mediterranean, he wrote, he terrified senior pilots who had been lording it over him by flying a P-40 fighter under a bridge while they were standing on it. At an international aerobatic competition in Moscow in 1966, he put on a thrilling though unauthorized display, flying upside down and executing spectacular loops in a Yakovlev-18.
By his account, the stunt upset his Soviet hosts, and he escaped K.G.B. custody afterward only because of the intervention of a mildly inebriated Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. The two had struck up a friendship.
Indeed, Mr. Hoover could trace the history of aviation, to the dawn of the space age, by the men he came to know: Orville Wright and Charles Lindbergh, General Doolittle and the World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, and the astronauts Walter Schirra and Neil Armstrong as well as General Yeager and Colonel Gagarin.
Mr. Hoover’s trademark maneuver on the show circuit was a death-defying plunge with both engines cut off; he would use the hurtling momentum to pull the plane up into a loop at the last possible moment.
But his stunts were not foolhardy. Each involved painstaking preparation and rational calculation of risk. “A great many former friends of mine are no longer with us simply because they cut their margins too close,” he once said.
Mr. Kaplan, of the National Aviation Hall of Fame, said of Mr. Hoover, “You do not survive the life he lived without discipline and caution.”
His favorite plane in the 1950s and ’60s was “Old Yeller,” a P-51 Mustang fighter painted bright yellow. Mr. Hoover sometimes shunned flight suits to perform in a business suit (less trouble for the undertaker in case of an accident, he once said) and a trademark Panama straw hat.
He once invited a crew from the ABC program “That’s Incredible!” to film him in action, pouring a glass of iced tea with one hand while he rolled his plane 360 degrees with the other.
Robert Anderson Hoover was born on Jan. 24, 1922, in Nashville. His father, Leroy, worked for a paper company while his mother, Bessie, kept house. Bob started to fly as a teenager, “working 16 hours in a grocery store to earn 15 minutes of flight time,” as he told an audience of young admirers.
He soon taught himself the loops and hand rolls of aerobatics, enlisted in the Tennessee National Guard and received orders to Army Pilot Training School.
With the onset of World War II, he was sent to England as a flight instructor for the Royal Air Force. The Army Air Forces later assigned him to Casablanca, Morocco, where he tested newly assembled and repaired planes and ferried them to the front. Valued as an operations officer, he was nevertheless hungry to fight and, through persistence, persuaded his commanders to grant him combat duty.
“I can hit a target upside down or right side up,” he said he told a general.
As a pilot with the 52nd Fighter Group, based in Corsica, Mr. Hoover, a lieutenant, flew 58 successful missions before his Spitfire fighter was shot down by the Luftwaffe in February 1944. He spent 16 months in Stalag Luft I, a prisoner of war camp in Germany reserved for Allied pilots.
Mr. Hoover and a friend escaped from the camp in the chaotic final days of the war, according to his memoir. Commandeering an aircraft from a deserted Nazi base, he flew it to freedom in the newly liberated Netherlands, only to be chased by pitchfork-wielding Dutch farmers enraged by the plane’s German markings.
He remained in the military after the war as a test pilot based at Wright Field in Ohio (now part of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). There, with jet-propulsion planes replacing propeller aircraft, he took on the dangerous duty of working out kinks in workhorses like the F-80 and P-51 fighters.
Mr. Yeager was also a test pilot there, and in the fall of 1945 they became friends after getting into a spontaneous mock dogfight that ended in a draw. They were soon performing in air shows around the country.
Both men were recruited to train together at Muroc Field (later named Edwards Air Force Base) in California to fly the Bell Aircraft X-1, the rocket plane that broke the sound barrier in October 1947 over the Mojave Desert.
Mr. Hoover might well have gotten the call to pilot the plane if his rambunctious streak had not undone him, Mr. Kaplan said. Earlier that year, he had buzzed a civilian airport in Springfield, Ohio, in an experimental military jet as a favor to a friend; the friend wanted his relatives in the area to think that he was flying the aircraft.
Commanders discovered the episode, and Mr. Hoover was relegated to flying the “chase” plane during the X-1 test flights, making observations and taking photographs, while Mr. Yeager made history.
After leaving the Air Force (the successor to the Army Air Forces), Mr. Hoover became a test pilot for General Motors and then North American Aviation, a Los Angeles-based military contractor that later merged with Rockwell International.
He stayed with the company through the 1980s. But as the pace of jet innovation slowed, he became a roving ambassador and showman, flying North American planes at air shows around the world and taking part in a documentary film, “Flying the Feathered Edge: The Bob Hoover Project.”
Mr. Hoover was one of the most honored pilots in American history. His military awards alone include the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Soldier’s Medal of Valor, the Air Medal with Clusters, the Purple Heart and the French Croix de Guerre. In 2007 he received the National Air and Space Museum Trophy, the museum’s highest honor.
Mr. Hoover’s wife, Colleen, died recently. They had lived for many years in the Los Angeles area. Survivors include a son, a daughter and several grandchildren.
Mr. Hoover flew well into his 80s, but not before clashing with the authorities when he was 72, in 1994, when medical examiners from the Federal Aviation Administration declared him unfit to fly, saying that his “cognitive abilities” had diminished.
Mr. Hoover quickly recertified himself in Australia and began a legal battle back home, led by the defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who had befriended Mr. Hoover through a mutual love for flying helicopters.
Mr. Hoover emerged victorious 18 months later, and his United States license was restored. His campaign found support among fans who wrote thousands of letters. At the Oshkosh Fly-In and Air Show in Wisconsin, posters were displayed everywhere saying, “Let Bob Fly.”


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## Gnomey (Oct 27, 2016)




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## v2 (Nov 4, 2016)

*Molly Rose*, Spitfire pilot. 

Molly Rose, who has died aged 95, was a pilot in the wartime Air Transport Auxiliary and became one of the “Spitfire Women” when she delivered 273 of the fighters from aircraft factories to RAF units. 
Already a qualified pilot, she joined the ATA in September 1942, flying light aircraft such as the Tiger Moth before advancing to more powerful single-engine aircraft. As she became more experienced, she started flying the Hurricane fighter and then the Spitfire (“a thrilling moment”). For much of her service she flew from Hamble airfield, an all-female unit near Southampton. 
On some days she flew three or four different types of aircraft. Before flying a new type the pilots read aircraft notes and used a detailed checklist before starting up. They flew without radios, and many airfields were camouflaged and difficult to find. 
She also delivered twin-engine aircraft such as the Anson and the Hudson, before she started flying the Wellington bomber, and she mastered the Beaufighter and Mosquito, aircraft which many pilots found a handful. As the war progressed she transferred to the more advanced Spitfire variants, the Typhoon and the powerful Tempest fighter-bomber.
While at Hamble she saw the forces assembling for the forthcoming invasion of Europe in June 1944. Her husband Bernard, a captain in the 4th City of London Yeomanry (Sharpshooters), was embarked in a tank landing craft and a week later it was reported that he had been killed in action. But she continued with her flying duties and six weeks later learnt that he had survived and was a PoW.
That was her busiest year and during it she delivered 253 aircraft. She added a further 94 the following year, which included the Mustang, before leaving the ATA in May 1945 as a first officer. Altogether she delivered 486 aircraft and flew 38 different types. She never flew again as a pilot. The daughter of David Marshall, the founder of Marshall Aviation of Cambridge, Molly was born on November 26 1920 and educated at a school near Cambridge before spending a year at a finishing school in Paris. In 1937 she joined the family business as an apprentice engineer. Her older brother kept a Tiger Moth in a field behind the family home and she persuaded him to teach her to fly. She gained her pilot’s licence aged 17; the same year she got her driving licence, and in 1939 she married Bernard Rose.
In 1942, just after her husband had left for North Africa with his regiment, she received a call inviting her to join the ATA. She travelled to London in her new uniform to have a photograph taken and sent a copy to her husband with a note: “I hope you don’t mind darling, I’ve just joined up!”
After training she was based at Luton before moving to the ferry pool at White Waltham and then, in September 1943, to Hamble. 
Post-war she settled in Oxford where her husband became a lecturer in music at Queen’s College; he was later appointed Informator Choristarum and fellow in music at Magdalen. 
Molly Rose sat as a magistrate for the Bullingdon circuit and was later the chairman of the bench. She was a dedicated charity fund-raiser and was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Oxfordshire in 1983, and, in 1990, OBE. She was for many years a parish councillor for Appleton-with-Eaton. Molly Rose was a generous hostess and many music scholars and choristers enjoyed tea and dinner parties at their home. After the death of her husband in 1996 she continued to lead a busy social life and on September 11 this year former musical protégés were invited to celebrate what would have been her husband’s 100th birthday. After lunch and a tea, a concert of Bernard Rose’s music, conducted by one of their sons, was performed to a full St Mary’s Church, Bampton. 
In 2008 the service of the “Forgotten Pilots” of the ATA was finally formally recognised and Molly attended a ceremony at 10 Downing Street, where the prime minister, Gordon Brown, presented her and other survivors with the ATA Veteran’s Badge. 
In 2014 she was one of the veteran guest judges at The Great British Menu: the D-Day Banquet on BBC television. 
She is survived by her three sons.
Molly Rose, born November 26 1920, died October 16 2016 

source: The Telegraph


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## Airframes (Nov 4, 2016)

R.I.P.


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## Old Wizard (Nov 4, 2016)

They don't make many like that any more.


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## Gnomey (Nov 4, 2016)




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## v2 (Nov 28, 2016)

Tuskegee Airman *James B. Williams* dies at age 97 

One of the famed Tuskegee Airmen who supported the Allied victory in World War II, New Mexico native Dr. James B. Williams, died Wednesday at age 97. Williams was one of the few remaining survivors who served in the U.S. Army Air Forces program that trained African-Americans for the war effort – a pioneering group that would play a key role in the desegregation of the military.
Before 1940, African-Americans were barred from flying for the U.S. military, according to Tuskegee Airmen Inc., a national organization with chapters in New Mexico that supports the airmen’s legacy. Civil rights groups lobbied against that ban, leading to the formation of an all-African-American pursuit squadron based in Tuskegee, Ala., in 1941. From 1942 through 1946, 994 pilots received their wings at Tuskegee.
Born to Jasper and Clara Belle Williams – the first black woman to graduate from what is now New Mexico State University – Williams was studying medicine when he joined the military in 1942. 
He was selected to attend the Medical Administrative Officers Candidate School at Camp Pickett, Va., but he wanted to become a pilot and asked for transfer to the Army Air Forces, according to TheHistoryMakers.com, an online collection of African-American oral histories.
He received basic training as an aviation cadet at Boca Raton Club, Fla., and technical training at Yale University, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Forces. Williams served as an engineering officer in the 99th Fighter Squadron. He did not see combat. In 1942, Williams was among the more than 100 black officers who tried to integrate a whites-only officers’ club at Freeman Field in Indiana. They were arrested, but all were eventually exonerated and their military records cleared. 
The incident became a bellwether for the end of segregation in the military in 1945. 
Williams’ daughter Brenda Payton Jones recalled hearing the story about Freeman Field and feeling “just so incredibly proud.” 
Williams told his superiors: “If I can’t go into the officers’ club, then I shouldn’t be an officer,” Payton Jones said. “That was the way we heard it growing up. “When I thought of a young man, 21, standing up on his own for what he knew was right … .” 
After his military service, Williams obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from NMSU and earned his M.D. from Creighton University School of Medicine. He founded the Williams Medical Clinic in Chicago with two brothers, practiced as a general surgeon and eventually retired in Las Cruces. 
In 2007, Williams and other Tuskegee Airmen won the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by Congress.

source: Stars and Stripes

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## v2 (Dec 16, 2016)

General* Imrich Gablech *

Imrich Gablech was born on November 4th 1915 in Hrachoviště village in Slovakia. Here he also attended grammar school. His parents were Daniel and Anna Gablech. Imrich had another six siblings. His father was a farmer. After Imrich finished the grammar school, as fourteen years old he started to visit Gymnasium in Nové Mesto nad Váhom town in Slovakia. Although he did rather badly from the start he managed to improve his grades and to become the best student at the end. He even gained nice scholarship. In 1936 while reading a newspaper he got curious about the 1000 new pilots for our Republic enrollment advertisement and he applied immediately. His parents wanted him to become a priest though. On October 1st 1936 he started his military training in Piestany town (Slovakia) and shortly after that he has been transported to the Pilot academy in Cheb town (West Bohemia). From January 1937 he attended pilot school in Prostějov town. After he finished this school he was included to the training wing and then to the field wing operating near by Bratislava (Slovakia) and also in Žilina town, where he spent wonderful times. Already on Gymnasium he sensed the upcoming Hitler’s danger through his teacher’s telling. When the State of Slovakia has been established on March 14th and the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia came about all he wanted to do was to fight for his homeland (Czechoslovakia). He decided to fly abroad. His opportunity arose on June 7th 1939. Four planes with eight people crew flew in Poland without any problems. Mr. Gablech has been consequentially sentenced by military curt in Slovakia to twenty years of heavy jail for desertion and espionage and also he has been demoted. After their planes landed in Deblin the Poles found out that there were foreign pilots. The pilots were namely (except for I.G.) Jozef Káňa, Ján Lazar and Jozef Hrala. This was probably the very first departure from Slovakia. Due to the fact that Poland wasn’t at war yet, they couldn’t officially accept Slovakian pilots into their groups. The pilots received warm hospitality and many apologies for violently occupied Teschen region. Then finally after few weeks of investigating in Warsaw he returned back to Deblin and started to work by Polish Aviation. Except for regular flights the young boys enjoyed their free time as well. But everything ended with the beginning of the war. The German planes have been flying pointedly over the Polish airports, including the one in Deblin, already since the end of August. On September 2nd 1939 German bombing planes carried out a massive air attack on Deblin. Imrich Gablech managed to escape on plane though, but he has been chased and he crashed. After he came around he went to the nearby support airport where he found flyable plane and he flew to the set up meeting point in Góra Pulawska airport where he got as the first one. The pilots from the Deblin destroyed by bombing were centralized in Pulawa town. Imrich Gablech has been part of the captain Chriniewicze wing. At the instance of Capt. Chriniewicze he and another pilots headed back to Deblin to collect airplanes ready for the departure to Pulawa. After a distressful journey he really got to Pulawa where he collected his gun and uniform and after he found a flyable plane he headed back to his troop. His group gradually made it close to the Romania border line where they have landed. Imrich Gablech and his friend started to search for something to eat throughout the houses around, but before they could find something they have been disturbed by shouting of one of the Poles that the Bolsheviks are coming. Mr. Gablech didn’t pay much attention to this warning and walked back toward his plane. On September 18th the whole group of the pilots has been surrounded and arrested by the Red army. During the personal check up he lost his flight diary and his pilot-aviator certificate. He has been transported together with his friends to Ukrainian Gorodenko town where they all have been interned without servings. Only after three days they were allowed to search for something to eat. The plunder has begun. One of the Poles got shot because he refused to give his wedding ring. Mr. Gablech experienced also an investigation of the NKVD. (The People’s Commissariat for Internal affairs - translator’s note) He was convicted of espionage for which he was apparently being trained in Poland. His punishment was supposed to be five years of hard work in camps of Siberia. He almost didn’t survived the questioning. After he refused to sign the record the NKVD officer pointed the gun at his forehead and made him sign it. After few days he was transported to black coal mines works. He went through all this together with his friends-pilots Zdeněk Bachůrek and Miroslav Havlíček. After some time another transport came, this time they went across the whole Russia to the Pečora River basin. Mr. Imrich Gablech has been included to the labor camp number 19 in independent Russian socialistic republic Komi. His friends Bachůrek and Havlíček left him on March 4th 1940 and went to Buzuluk town. Mr. Gablech-being a Slovak- must have stayed until spring of 1941. On the Pentecost a revolt arose in the camp, when the Poles refused to go to work. There were some stand-ups, which have been punished later. Mr. Gablech was among the guilty ones and he got another ten years in labor camps plus the correctional stay in the icy bunker without anything to eat and drink. Mr. Gablech managed to escape the camp after the war with the USSR began. Taking turn walking and the train rides the prisoners made it all the way to Moscow. From there they continued to Archangelsk and then in September 1941 they took of to Great Britain. On October 13th Mr. Gablech arrived to Scotland. From there he took a train ride to the Polish bombing wing and then he continued to the Czech inspectorate and the Czechoslovak troop in Wilmslow town. Soon he reunited with his friend Bachůrek. With others they were telling each ones stories about what the have been through in the USSR. Nobody would believe them though. He spent his first Christmas in England. He visited several English families and also suffered the appendix surgery. His dream was to fly though. He underwent the necessary re-check up and although the results were not perfect, after two years he was sitting in cockpit again. During one of his landing he passed out and suffered the so-called black-out. After short hopeless attempt to fly at least on the bombing plane (there were two pilots), his health conditions got very serious and he had no choice but to quit flying. As a result of being through the Soviet gulag he was slowly loosing his sight and he also suffered from some stomach problems. Mr. Gablech began his new life period with the help of his former commander from Piešťany town Mr. Josef Duda. Thanks to him he was accepted to the airfield-control class. At first he carried out his profession straight on the runway and after he successfully finished the course for flying controllers he was sent to Coltishall airport nearby Norvich town. He remained there until the end of the war. On August 2nd 1945 Imrich Gablech returned back home. He was charged with the traffic control in Prague airport. Thanks to this fact he got promised from the commander of the Aviation HQ Gen. J. Hanuš that he can stay in Prague for good. But after he came back from his Carlsbad spa medical treatment he was sent immediately to Havlíčkův Brod town. He worked there again in traffic control and after most of the so called Westlers have gone he also functioned as the airport and airbase commander. In February of 1949 he received a telegram with the order to report himself immediately in Brno town. There he found out that he has been dismissed from the army. He couldn’t find any job until finally he was employed in the construction company where he worked as a planner and invoice adjuster. In 1951 he has been arrested and questioned for short time in Jihlava town. He was released after a week though, but soon after that he lost his job again. Thanks to his friend he was employed in 1954 at least as an accountant in the rough file company. In 1958 he didn’t passed through the company purge and he was sent to perform worse work as a file controller. His aged injuries developed again and he must have undergone the stomach surgery. At the end he left the file company for unbearable conflicts with his boss and he worked at the dressing material company, where he remained until his retirement. His family has been also thrown out from their apartment few times, therefore they decided to run into debt and in 1959-1960 they built their own house. Mr. Gablech has one son from each marriage (two sons together). He welcomed the democratic changes in 1989, although as he says himself, he wouldn’t expect ´such a jungle´. His books entitled ´Hallo, airfield control, go ahead! ´ was published in Slovakia in 2005. He still visits schools where he tells his stories and memories. He is the owner of many medals and distinctions, not only Czech, but Polish and Russian and English as well. Imrich Gablech passed away on December, the 16th, 2016.

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## michaelmaltby (Dec 17, 2016)

my god ... what a saga.


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## v2 (Jan 8, 2017)

Gen. *Ludwik Krempa* 

It is with deep regret that I have to report the death of Ludwik Krempa. He would have been 101 years old on 22nd January 2017. His story appears elsewhere on this site.
He was a pilot in 304 Squadron during the Second World War, a loyal servant of the Polish Air Force and a good friend to Great Britain. He has, as the Poles say, joined the Niebieska Eskadra (the Blue Squadron). May he rest in peace.

He was born to Wawrzyniec Krempa, a Post Office worker, and Anna de domo Kita on 22nd January 1916 in Sanok, Southern Poland, (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). His father died shortly after the end of the Great War; the cause being complications to wounds suffered whilst serving in the Austro-Hungarian army. He was educated in Sanok, Krystynopol and completed his final year in Krakow, at the Stanislaw Staszic State School of Industry, where he gained a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering.
In 1936 he developed his interest in flying by taking a glider pilots course at Biezmiechowa Gorna, which he passed with flying colours and became a Class A pilot. The following year he was conscripted into the army and he started at the Cadets School of Communication in Zegrze, near Warsaw; his gliding qualification helped him to get into the SPRL (Szkola Podchorazych Rezerwy Lotnicwa) Reserve Officers School of Aviation at Deblin in January 1938. He graduated as a pilot in June 1938 and was attached to the 6th Air Regiment reserves in Lwow, with the rank of Cadet Corporal Pilot. His flying training was in Sadkowo, where he trained on Bartel BM-5 bi-planes, RWD-8 monoplanes and the advanced PWS-26 bi-plane mainly used for aerobatics and pilot training. In the same year he started work in Krakow as a draftsman, designing compressors for meat refrigerators. Whilst working as an engineer he maintained his flying Potez XIVs part time with the training squadron of 2nd Air Regiment based at Rakowice. Due to the imminence of war he was posted back to the 6th Air Regiment, in July 1939, and attached to 66 Reconnaissance Squadron. He took part in exercises for reservists starting on 21st July 1939 but, due to full mobilization, he was not released when they were completed and by the end of August he was based at Skniłowa Lublinek aerodrome near Lodz. On 7th September 1939 he was based at Polkowszczyzna near Naleczowo but due to a serious illness he was taken to hospital in Lublin. After a few days he was discharged but he was unable to walk properly and took little part in the September Campaign. He had been warned by the hospital staff, that the Germans were closing in on the city and he should get out as soon as possible. He was unable to communicate with his unit but joined up with III / 2 Squadron aircraft pilot liaison and made several flights in an RWD-8. On 17th September 1939 he was based at Tarnopol airfield and witnessed the Soviet attack from the rear. This second invasion trapped him in Stanislawowo but he managed to get on a train to Lwow. When he realised that he was heading into Russian territory, he jumped train and returned home to Sanok by way of Krakow.
He took work in the mines at Grabownica Starzenskaand in the spring of 1940, he joined a group who crossed into Hungary but he was arrested and sent back to Poland. His second attempt was successful and he travelled by Ungwar and a refugee camp for displaced Poles at Zahony. He travelled on to Budapest, Belgrade, Greece and the port of Mersin in Turkey where he boarded the Polish ship SS Warsaw, bound for Haifa in Palestine (now Israel). On 19th August 1940 he joined the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade (Samodzielna Brygada Strzelcow Karpackich). When it was realised that he was a trained pilot, he was diverted to the newly formed Polish Air Force in exile in England. He travelled through the Suez Canal, via the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, round the Cape of Good Hope to Gibraltar and on to Britain. His exact date and port of arrival are uncertain (but probably Liverpool or Glasgow), however, he was in the Polish Depot at Blackpool on 26th October 1940. On 20th November 1940, he was sent to 15 EFTS at RAF Carlisle to learn the basics of British aircraft and procedures. In August of that year he moved on to 16 SFTS at RAF Newton in Nottinghamshire where, on 1st February 1942, he was granted the British rank of Pilot Officer and in July 1942 he was posted to 18 OTU at RAF Bramcote in Warwickshire where he learned British methods and tactics and was prepared for actual combat. On 20th October 1942 he was posted to 304 Squadron and made his first operational flight eight days later. At this point, the Squadron was based at RAF Dale in Pembrokeshire, Wales and was part of Coastal Command. His duties included anti-submarine warfare, harassment of enemy shipping and convoy protection. He also took part in a bombing attack on the French Channel Port of Bordeaux on 26th January 1943. In May 1943 he was sent on a crew commander’s course at RAF Cosford, Shropshire and from July 1943, he was involved in creating his own crew at 6 OTU, RAF Silloth , near Carlisle, Cumberland (now Cumbria) before returning with his crew to 304 Squadron at RAF Davidstow Moor in Cornwall on 10th September 1943. He was also promoted to Flying Officer at this time. The other members of his new crew were F/O Sawicki, Sgt Pawluczyk, Sgt Guminski, Sgt Piotrowski and Sgt Zientek. He then undertook a further 34 combat missions over the Atlantic Ocean, the Irish Sea and the Bay of Biscay during which time he successfully located and directed naval forces to three enemy ships which posed a threat to Britain. He and his crew were involved in a considerable amount of skirmishes with enemy vessels and aircraft before completing his tour of duty. In June 1944 he was posted to 16 SFTS where he trained as a pilot instructor on Airspeed Oxfords until the end of the war when he transferred back to 304 Squadron in its Transport Command role. On 24th January 1946 he transferred to 301 Squadron (also in Transport Command) flying Handley Page Halifaxes to Italy and Greece; he remained with them until they disbanded in December 1946 and was himself demobilized in January 1947.
He was unwilling to return to Poland and so he enrolled in the Polish Resettlement Corps at East Wretham, Norfolk and served there for two years until January 1949. During his military service, he was awarded the Virtuti Militari, the Cross of Valour and bar and the Air Medal as well as British Campaign medals.
He re-trained as a draughtsman and went to work for Sentinel, a company who manufactured steam and diesel vehicles. His work was specifically on designing engines for buses. After about five years he went to work for Stone Platt Ltd in Crawley, Sussex, designing submersible pumps and emergency power systems. He stayed with them until he retired in 1981. In 1988 he returned to Poland and settled in Krakow. He became involved with the activities of Air Force veteran organisations and was present at the 60th Anniversary Memorial Ceremony for Sgt Stefan Bohanes in 2004. In 2013 a film entitled “Wspomnien Czar” (Charming Memories) by E. Wyroba was dedicated to him.

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## swampyankee (Jan 8, 2017)

Capt. Vick said:


> Hey I heard Bob Hoover died... What a man, what a life!



Unfortunately, what you heard was correct.

His aerobatic routine in a Rockwell Twin Commander was legend, especially when you saw videos of him pouring iced tea while doing his routine. Or the energy management finish to his show, where he shut down both engines, did some aerobatics, landed, and coasted to his original parking spot.

He may also have had the best PoW escape ever: he stole a Luftwaffe FW190 and flew to a USAAF base in the liberated Netherlands.


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## buffnut453 (Jan 10, 2017)

Clare Hollingworth, journalist who first reported the Nazi invasion of Poland, has passed away in Hong Kong aged 105!!!

Obituary: Clare Hollingworth - BBC News

What an amazing life!!


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## Old Wizard (Jan 11, 2017)




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## Wayne Little (Jan 12, 2017)




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## v2 (Feb 1, 2017)

Flight Lieutenant* Bernard Brown *

A man believed to be New Zealand's last Battle of Britain veteran has died in Tauranga, just a few weeks after his 99th birthday.
Bernard Brown, known as Bernie, died of pneumonia on January 23.
Author Max Lambert, who wrote the 2011 book _Day After Day: New Zealanders in Fighter Command_, said Mr Brown flew briefly with Royal Air Force fighter Squadrons 610 and 72 before being shot down by a Messerschmitt at the height of the battle and was slightly wounded. Mr Brown was born in Stratford in December 1917 and was working there as a postman when he applied for a Short Service Commission in the Royal Air Force in 1938. He was accepted and sailed for Britain late that year. After graduation he was posted to an army co-operation unit flying Lysanders and operated over the front lines in France, spotting the enemy before Dunkirk. Mr Brown then volunteered for pilot-short Fighter Command and went through the abrupt conversion to Spitfires. In Mr Lambert's book, Mr Brown said an instructor told him: "Here's the book of [Spitfire] pilot notes, learn it and get up there and fly it." Mr Brown first served briefly with 610 at Biggin Hill but because the squadron was being transferred to Scotland for rest, newcomer Mr Brown was posted to 72 Squadron.
Mr Lambert said Mr Brown's stay with 72 was short. Attacked from above and out of the sun, he was shot down by an Messerschmitt Me 109 on September 23, 1940 on his second patrol with the squadron.
"A cannon shell came through the side of my aircraft, hit me in the left leg and exploded on the throttle box ... I had no control ... so I thought, 'out you go'," Mr Brown was quoted as saying. Mr Brown landed by parachute in a marshy field on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent and could not stand up - his leg was bloodied. He was quickly picked up and taken to hospital.
Recovered, the New Zealander was certified unfit to fly fighters in combat again because of his wound's effect. He instructed for a year in Rhodesia then saw out the war piloting for RAF Transport and Ferry Commands. Postwar, he flew with British European Airways (now British Airways) for more than 30 years before returning to New Zealand and buying an orchard in Matua. He married his wife, Elizabeth, a BEA flight attendant, in 1965.
Mrs Brown said her husband was a "very, very practical person" who was very easy to live with. "We had a very happy life. After moving to New Zealand, we always lived in Tauranga although we moved around often after selling the orchard. "After the orchard, we retired and always had big gardens, that kept us occupied." Mrs Brown said her husband was a real handyman who always repaired everything himself. "He would always repair his own cars. He was a very practical person." Mr Brown is survived by his wife, his son and his daughter. He also has a grandchild, who is based in England.
A New Zealand Defence Force spokeswoman said Mr Brown was believed to be the last Battle of Britain veteran from New Zealand, but was not able to confirm this with a historian during the long weekend.

source: The New Zealand Herald
* 







*

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## v2 (Feb 17, 2017)

Lt. Bryan Jones 

Sadly today we say goodbye to Lt. *Bryan Jones*, the last SA survivor aviator of the Warsaw flights. 
Bryan was the navigator of Liberator EW105 "G", the very first SA aircraft to go down on those terrible supply drop flights to Warsaw in 1944. Bryan was a key person for years with the Warsaw flights commemoration services and his messages of hope was always a source of inspiration. Bryan will be remembered as a man of God, his survival experience of 1944 key to his choices being a clergyman. 
Sincere condolences to his wonderful wife Olive. Also condolences to Darryl Heather and other family and friends.

Bryan, your kind and friendly presence will be missed, RIP.

_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM5z6U1jUCs_


_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7vfmDyNtEU_


_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p66IMMbTCY_

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## Wurger (Feb 17, 2017)




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## vikingBerserker (Feb 17, 2017)

A huge


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## Old Wizard (Feb 17, 2017)




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## pbehn (Mar 10, 2017)

John Surtees, World Champion on two and four wheels died today, before my era as a spectator but a true gent and giant of motor sport.
John Surtees, former F1 and motorcycle world champion, dies aged 83


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## Old Wizard (Mar 10, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Mar 10, 2017)




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## v2 (Apr 20, 2017)

Squadron Leader *Dennis Barry* 

Squadron Leader Dennis Barry, who has died aged 95, was one of the first RAF pilots to convert to the Meteor jet fighter before flying against the V-1 flying bomb and on operations over Germany in the final weeks of the Second World War.
An experienced flight commander on No 616 (South Yorkshire) Squadron, Barry led offensive patrols over northern France in the build up to D-Day. Shortly after providing support for the Allied landings in their Spitfires in June 1944, the pilots left for Farnborough to convert to the Meteor.
After two flights in a training aircraft, the pilots clustered around the cockpit of the Meteor, were shown the instruments, briefed on the drills and the flying characteristics and then told to take off on their first familiarisation sorties. After five flights, they were deemed “qualified on jets”.

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## Kai Stemm (Apr 20, 2017)

v2 said:


> Squadron Leader *Dennis Barry*
> 
> Squadron Leader Dennis Barry, who has died aged 95, was one of the first RAF pilots to convert to the Meteor jet fighter before flying against the V-1 flying bomb and on operations over Germany in the final weeks of the Second World War.
> An experienced flight commander on No 616 (South Yorkshire) Squadron, Barry led offensive patrols over northern France in the build up to D-Day. Shortly after providing support for the Allied landings in their Spitfires in June 1944, the pilots left for Farnborough to convert to the Meteor.
> ...


Intresting


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## Old Wizard (Apr 20, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Apr 20, 2017)




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## fubar57 (Apr 20, 2017)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 25, 2017)




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## v2 (Apr 28, 2017)

Group Captain *Joe Dalley *

John Dalley, known as ‘Joe’ was born on 7 April 1920 at Silwood Park, a private residence—the Manor House of Sunninghill. His Father was the Head Gardner and Mother the Housekeeper. He was educated at the village school in Sunningdale; an all-round sportsman. He excelled at English and Mathematics, and at the age of 16 won a scholarship to Oxford. However, his parents being considered ill-placed to support him through university, he was pointed in the direction of the Civil Service. At the age of 17 he entered the Post Office and was reported in the London Gazette (6239) of 8 October 1937 to have qualified as a Mail Sorting Clerk and Telegraphist. He did well and by 1939 was appointed Assistant Post Master at Maidenhead, where he met his future wife, Marjorie, who was working locally as a Master Printer in the Newspaper print works. 
On the outbreak of WW2, he volunteered to join up but was refused because he was in a protected employment “essential to the war effort”! However, by late 1940 he was able to join as a trainee pilot. Not at university he could not be commissioned, and was sent for flying training in the rank of aircraftsman. He was went to Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, Canada; qualified as a Fighter pilot, gaining his wings after 8 hours and being promoted to Sgt. He was posted to 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron RAF at Hornchurch, Essex in June 1941 as a Spitfire pilot. 
In February 1942, the Air Ministry trawled for combat experienced pilots to undertake Photographic Reconnaissance (PR) training at RAF Benson in Oxfordshire. Joe was snapped up and posted to 1 PRU enroute to the Mediterranean. In May 1942, flying a new Spitfire Mk IV PR, promoted to Flt Sgt, he took off for Malta, flying at high altitude over neutral Spain and into Gibraltar. He refuelled and flew to Luqa, with an accompanying signal for the AOC that he join 69 Squadron PR Flight. 
Joe joined 69 Squadron PR Flight and began 8 months of intensive photographic duties. He flew almost every day, often for sorties of several hours, establishing the air ORBAT within 450 miles of Malta. The secondary task was maintaining the Italian Naval ORBAT in the same area. Thirdly he searched for resupply convoys and escorts supporting the Africa Korps under Rommel, eastwards to Greece and westwards to Sicily, northwards to Bari, Messina, Naples, Palermo and Taranto, Finally, providing intelligence to defend Allied resupply convoys to Malta. During these months he lost one third of his bodyweight. The bombing of Malta was at its most intense and times were bleak for everyone, especially the local population. He returned to the UK in late December, having earned his DFM and a Commission. 
He was medically downgraded, having contracted ‘the bends’ in Malta, and he took over a PR training role. Once fully fit, and with the intervention of the AOCinC, he was posted to 1 Squadron RAF in the South of England, to continue his war over Europe, including D Day, the ‘Battle of the Bulge’, Op MARKET GARDEN and on into Belgium and Germany. He was awarded his Légion d’honneur for his services to France from D Day onwards. On cessation of the War he was granted a permanent Commission in the General Duties Branch. He qualified as a jet pilot and went on to obtain his Master Pilots authorisation, becoming a future test pilot with Vickers at Weybridge.
By 1949 he was seconded to the RCAF, serving on Prince Edward Island, and then attending the Canadian Staff College in Toronto, before joining a Squadron at St Hubert, Quebec. He returned to the UK in 1953 and was posted to RAF Coltishall to command 141 Night Fighter Squadron, flying Venoms. His career followed a glittering path, with command of the Guided Weapons Trials Unit at RAF Valley, from which he was appointed an OBE. Postings to NATO HQ, in Paris at the time, attendance at JSSC Latimer, becoming CO of RAF Binbrook in Lincolnshire in 1964 followed. Further tours included MOD, RAF Bentley Priory, Shape and LIVE OAK. Throughout his career he continued flying on a weekly basis.
Joe married Marjorie at St Michael’s and All Angels Church in Sunninghill in 1945; together they had 27 changes of residence, living latterly in Maidenhead and finally Wokingham. He had two sons, Michael and Timothy. There are five grandchildren, Christal, Sarah, Julian, James and Kimberley. There are 7 great grandchildren. 
Joe completed a full career in the RAF, leaving in 1975 to rejoin the Civil Service. On retirement he and Marjorie moved to Wokingham, where his wife predeceased in 2013. He passed away on 3 February 2017. He led a full life - a challenging life; and one of fond memories of Malta through which he maintained a strong bond via the George Cross Island Association.

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## fubar57 (Apr 28, 2017)




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## Wurger (Apr 28, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Apr 28, 2017)




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## v2 (May 18, 2017)

Wing Commander *Gerald Lane* 

A decorated Perth aviator who was in the thick of the action during the Second World War has died shortly after celebrating his 101st birthday.
Wing Commander Gerald A Lane OBE DFC was the first pilot of the war to bomb Germany in a four-engined aircraft. 
From rising through the ranks of the RAF as Britain battled for its survival, to a distinguished post-war career, Mr Lane had a strong urge to take to the skies from an early age. 
Born in Somerset, he left school aged 16 and after a short time in an “uninteresting job” in London he decided to pursue his dream along with friend, Glyn Harries. “In 1936 I decided that flying was for me and told Glyn that I was planning to join the RAF. He said ‘I am coming with you’,” recounted Mr Lane in 2016. They passed the medicals and interviews and Mr Lane went for training at Prestwick before being posted to No 166 Bomber Squadron at Leconfield, Yorkshire. In 1939 he married Boyce Smythe, with his friend Glyn as best man.
Following the outbreak of war, Mr Lane was stationed at various bases but was soon to hear shocking news about his good friend. 
“It was about this time I learned that Glyn had been shot down and was missing,” he said. 
Mr Lane was later posted, with other experienced pilots, to No 35 Squadron at Linton on Ouse, which was being equipped with the new four-engine bomber, the Halifax, and he had the “privilege” of being the first pilot to bomb Germany in a four-engined aircraft. 
Promoted to squadron leader, he was posted to Wellesbourne station which took part in 1,000 bomber raids. Later, he became wing commander and his next posting was to command 75 NZ Squadron at Newmarket.
From there he joined the Joint Staff in Washington, USA, where his duties included assisting in the planning of the proposed British bombing of Japan. In 1947, after flying thousands of troops home, he decided to leave the RAF and was taken on as an executive with Lancashire Aircraft Corporation near Blackburn. 
Then in 1951 he was appointed assistant secretary to the Territorial and Auxiliary Forces Association for Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine. 
He came to Perth in 1967 after restructuring of the Territorial Army and lived in Woodside. 
Mr Lane and his wife lost their son Andrew in the 1990s, while Boyce died in 1999.
He is survived by daughter-in-law Laura, his two grandchildren and his four great-grand-children.

source: The Courier


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## Wurger (May 18, 2017)




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## Gnomey (May 18, 2017)




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## fubar57 (May 18, 2017)




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## Wayne Little (May 28, 2017)




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## Old Wizard (May 28, 2017)




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## v2 (Jun 9, 2017)

Wing Commander Dick Summers 

ONE of the last remaining Battle of Britain pilots and former 'Old Boy' of Ermysted's Grammar School has died at the age of 95. 
Wing Commander Richard Gordon Battensby 'Dick' Summers OBE, OStJ, AFM, who died on May 7, was born in Beverley, East Yorkshire, in 1921 and attended Ermysted's from 1935 to 1939. When he left Ermysted’s, he joined the RAF and was fast-tracked into active service. With the 219 Squadron, he took part in the Battle of Britain and became “one of the few” immortalised in Winston Churchill’s famous speech.
In 1940 he joined the Ferry Pool and Defence Flight at Takoradi, West Africa, where pilots suffered extreme contrasts in temperature and, because of the sand, the average life span of an aircraft engine was just 40 hours. 
In July 1941, the young Summers crash-landed on a beach in Liberia. To avoid capture, he set off barefoot, walking 48 miles before taking to the sea, where he was picked up by a passing British merchantman. 
Aged just 21, he was awarded the Air Force Medal. Two years later, he was posted as bomber leader to 48 Squadron at Gibraltar and in 1944 he returned home to be bombing leader at Aldergrove. He continued to hold a number of armament office positions until the end of the war.
From 1953 to 1956, he was again in the midst of action as deputy station commander at RAF East Leigh, Kenya, during the Mau Mau emergency. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his “gallant and distinguished services”. He retired from the RAF in 1968 as a Wing Commander. 
In November, 2010, he returned to his old school to take part in its Armistice Day service and to receive a 70th anniversary memorial plaque in his name. The plaque was one of a number presented by The Battle of Britain Historical Society with the aim of preserving the memories of those who took part in the Second World War battle. 
Wing Commander Summers, who was 89 at the time, travelled to Skipton from his home in Cheltenham, accompanied by his family.
But his involvement happened by chance after an appeal for information about him was seen in the Hull Daily Mail by his niece. His details were then published on the Battle of Britain Forum and seen by the twin brother of the then head of music at Ermysted’s, Simon Gregory. After being presented with the plaque by the then headteacher, Graham Hamilton, Wing Commander Summers spoke of how pleased he was to be back at his old school. 
He said when he was a pupil, the then headmaster, Mr McIntosh, was keen on corporal punishment, but despite being caned, he had survived. 
From 1953 to 1956, he was again in the midst of action as deputy station commander at RAF East Leigh, Kenya, during the Mau Mau emergency. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his “gallant and distinguished services”. He retired from the RAF in 1968 as a Wing Commander.

source: Craven Herald

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## fubar57 (Jun 9, 2017)




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## Old Wizard (Jun 9, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Jun 9, 2017)




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## v2 (Jun 29, 2017)

*John Francis Reed*, age 94, died Monday, February 27, 2017 at home in Annapolis, MD. Mr. Reed was born August 22, 1922 in Paterson, NJ the son of the late William and the late Jennie (Cole) Reed. He was one of thirteen children and lived in Wayne before moving to Toms River in 1978.
Mr. Reed joined the Army in 1943 during WWII. He was transferred to the Army Air Corp and became a waist gunner in a B-17. Shot down on his second mission, October 11, 1944, he became a POW i...n Germany. He was liberated on April 26, 1945 and received a purple heart for injuries he received on that mission.
On June 11, 1949 he married the love of his life, the late Ruth Clara Simpson. Together they had five children. He was retired from the Motor Vehicle Commission in Freehold, NJ in 1985 where he was a supervisor for 20 years. Mr. Reed was a member of VFW in Toms River.
Mr. Reed is survived by his beloved children, David Francis and his wife Donna, Susan Ruth and her husband John Schulte, William John and his wife Christine, Steven Michael and his wife Janie, and daughter-in-law, Constance Reed; fourteen devoted grandchildren; fifteen cherished great-grandchildren and many nieces and nephews. He was predeceased by his wife, Ruth (Simpson) Reed, his son, John Richard and all of his siblings.


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## Robert Porter (Jun 29, 2017)




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## Old Wizard (Jun 29, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Jun 29, 2017)




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## fubar57 (Jul 5, 2017)




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## v2 (Aug 4, 2017)

*Ken Wilkinson*, one of the last Battle of Britain veterans, dies aged 99 

Ken Wilkinson, one of the last Battle of Britain veterans, dies aged 99


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## Old Wizard (Aug 4, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Aug 4, 2017)




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## Robert Porter (Aug 4, 2017)




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## at6 (Aug 4, 2017)




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## Wurger (Aug 5, 2017)




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## v2 (Aug 29, 2017)

*Charles Cawthorn *

One of the last surviving Lancaster bomber pilots, 92-year-old Charles Cawthorn of Swindon, Wiltshire, known as Charlie Boy, died at march, 2017 in the Swindon's Great Western Hospital. 
Cawthorn flew 27 missions, often into Germany’s feared Ruhr Valley; he served with Bomber Commands in the 61st squadron. 
The courageous wing commander joined up at age 15 and served for 30 years. After being shot down in 1944 and bailing out in Nazi-controlled Deurne, Holland, he made an incredible escape by hiding in a haystack before burying his uniform underground and escaping dressed as a peasant. He was listed as missing in action, but returned to Britain thanks to the Dutch Resistance – and eventually appeared at his mom’s house asking what was for super.
His heroic feat earned him a Distinguished Flying Medal, personally presented by King George. 
His son, Stuart, a Toronto, Canada resident, said he had never known a more courageous man than his father. He was very thorough, and he always thought there were no pretexts, a person had to put in the effort and try diligently. His daughter-in-law Roslyn added that he was unpredictable. He was strict but could also be the life of the party. He was accustomed to being in control and he did not suffer fools gladly.

Cawthorn was born in Dalston, London and had a keen interest in boxing and football in his early years. He enlisted in the RAF as an apprentice when he was 15. Despite his young age, he gained flying experience with the Lancaster Bomber Squadron during hazardous missions in Germany. 
He married his sweetheart Hazel in 1946, and they had two children, Stuart and Cherie. His career took the family, living on RAF bases scattered around the world, to Germany, Cyprus, and Singapore. Many years later his career would come full circle when he returned to RAF Halton, where he began as an apprentice, and now served as wing commander to teach new recruits. Stuart said he would always treasure the memory of his father’s visit to Hamilton, Canada, and a surprise sojourn to one of the only existing Lancaster bombers. 
The trip saw Cawthorn return to the controls of the famous warplane. He was telling the pilots things they did not know, Stuart explained, and he was absolutely ecstatic. 
Charles relocated to Swindon in the 1970s before settling down in Highworth in 1985. He had eight great-grandchildren including two named after him and five grandchildren.

During his time living in Swindon, he enjoyed traveling, golf, and gardening.


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## Old Wizard (Aug 30, 2017)




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## michaelmaltby (Sep 30, 2017)

*Typhoon Pilot*

‘Frankie always had a war story to tell’: Last surviving member of RAF Squadron 174 dead at 95


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## fubar57 (Sep 30, 2017)




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## Robert Porter (Sep 30, 2017)




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## v2 (Sep 30, 2017)




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## v2 (Sep 30, 2017)

S/L Nigel Stuart Rose 

Squadron Leader Nigel Rose, who has died aged 99, flew Spitfires during the height of the Battle of Britain when he engaged enemy bombers and fighters on regular occasions.
Stuart Nigel Rose was born on 21st June 1918 and was a trainee quantity surveyor before joining the RAFVR at Southampton in December 1938 as an Airman u/t Pilot. He began his flying training at 3 E&RFTS Hamble and had logged 87 flying hours before being called up at the outbreak of war. On 22nd November 1939 Rose went to No. 1 ITW Cambridge and was posted to 14 FTS Kinloss on 3rd February 1940, moving to 14 FTS Cranfield on 19th April. With his training completed on 17th June he was commissioned on the 18th and he joined 602 Squadron at Drem on the 20th.
Rose claimed a Me110 destroyed on 25th August and on 7th September he shared a Me110. He was slightly wounded on the 11th, in the elbow, and was non-effective sick until 6th October when he rejoined 602. He began flying again on the 7th. He probably destroyed a Me109 on the 29th and on 6th November he shared in damaging a Ju88. Rose was posted to 54 Squadron at Hornchurch on 2nd September 1941. Tour-expired, he went to 57 OTU Hawarden on 12th November as an instructor. Rose was sent to CFS Hullavington on 11th November 1942 for a course before returning to 57 OTU, then at Eshott, on 11th February 1943. He went to CGS Sutton Bridge on 2nd June for a gunnery instructors course and returned to 57 OTU on 1st July. Rose was posted to 15 APC Peterhead on 10th January 1944, moving later to 14 APC Ayr. He went to the Middle East on 1st July to the B&GS at El Ballah. He returned to the UK in late May 1945 for a gunnery instructors course at CGS Catfoss. He went back to El Ballah in July but returned again to the UK in December and was released from the RAF in February 1946 as a Squadron Leader. He returned to his pre-war training and qualified as a chartered quantity surveyor. 
He maintained his interest in the Royal Air Force through the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust. He was regularly seen at air displays, particularly at Duxford and Goodwood which was Westhampnett in darker days. 
In 2013 he made a trip to Glasgow and was delighted to see the Spitfire in Kelvingrove Art Galleries although it was a more up-to-date version than those he had flown. He spoke about his affection for Glasgow 602. "The squadron was my closest relationship in the RAF," he said. "There was great camaraderie and friendship." 
Nigel Rose was a real gentleman in temperament and manners and rather mild in demeanour and yet he was a Spitfire pilot during Churchill’s Finest Hour. He was a widower and is survived by his daughter Barbara Erskine, the historian and novelist.

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## v2 (Sep 30, 2017)

WARRANT Officer *Andrew Morgan*, who has died aged 96, was a Spitfire pilot with 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron who took part in the operations to attack targets in Europe as a prelude to the D-Day Landings. The missions, combined with Bomber escort duties to France, were designed to minimise the enemy resistance to the eventual invasion of Normandy. He later had a career as a footballer, playing for Dundee, Chelsea and Fulham. 
Andrew Hargreaves Morgan was born in Freuchie, Fife, the youngest of 12 children. He attended Freuchie Primary and completed his education in Auchtermuchty. He worked as an errand boy in the village chemist before being attracted by the lure of the linoleum works.
His dream, however, was to be a pilot and at 18 years he joined the Royal Air Force. After examinations in London he was sent for training in Florida. On graduating he initially towed gliders until he was posted to an operational training unit on Spitfires before being posted to 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron, a leading unit from the Battle of Britain. In celebration, he did a low, unauthorised run over Freuchie and frightened the milkman’s horse. When Andrew Morgan joined it in 1943, 602 Squadron was operating from Kingsnorth in Kent commanded by Sqn Ldr RA "Max" Sutherland. The early tasks for Sergeant Andrew Morgan’s section was to escort bombers to targets in France. A typical operation called for escorting 21 Marauder Bombers of the US Army Air Corps to protect them from the attacking enemy fighters, thus allowing them to bomb on target. Similar operations continued when the squadron moved to Newchurch in Kent. These were combined with fighter sweeps looking for "opportunity targets" to harass the enemy. The squadron then moved to RAF Detling in November. As Christmas approached, in a sweep in the Cambria area, they were ‘bounced’ by 40 FW190 German aircraft. A Spitfire was seen to be hit emitting smoke and was spinning earthwards from 18,000ft. It was identified as being Andrew Morgan in Spitfire MK492. He was listed as ‘Failed to Return". Flight Sergeant Morgan was taken prisoner and after interrogation was held in Stalag IVB. This was the main camp in Germany east of the Elbe River. He suffered the usual privations of a prisoner of war. In one of the so-called "medical trials" he was left naked in the freezing climate to test his endurance. Fortunately, he survived. He did succeed in obtaining parts of a camera, a very dangerous activity and captured photographs of the living conditions of the prisoners. 
He thought that his release had come in 1945 by the advancing Red Army but this was an illusion. The prisoners were held by the Russians as hostage for the Cossacks who had fought alongside the Germans. On return to UK, he was promoted to Warrant Officer. On leaving the Royal Air Force he returned to Freuchie and the linoleum factory. He was always a sportsman and played cricket for the famous Freuchie Village XI and had a nine handicap at Ladybank Golf Club. He also performed with Kingskettle Brass Band until they discovered he could not read music! He did, however, turn to Freuchie Village Theatre Company before following his real love and signing for Dundee Football Club. Promotion at work saw him move to London in the sales office. He was pursued by Chelsea FC but decided on Fulham. He achieved fame as a striker but felt, in his own words, his career was eventually sabotaged by his experience in the POW camp as he could not stop eating and taking the ‘odd’ drink. He moved down the leagues eventually coming to Guildford City and his eventual retirement from the game. 
He married Nita, a teacher, in 1950 and settled down to married life in Guildford. In 2001 he sadly lost his sight, a terrible affliction to one who loved flying. Despite this handicap he still continued with his daily keep-fit exercises and maintained his physical fitness. 
He became involved with the Blind Veterans Association and indeed was invited to their centenary celebration at Buckingham Palace hosted by The Countess of Wessex. His wife, Nita, died in 2016 and he therefore appreciated the help of the SSAFA team in Guildford.
He is survived by two daughters, Isabelle and Jane, and four grandchildren.

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## Wurger (Sep 30, 2017)




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## fubar57 (Sep 30, 2017)




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## at6 (Sep 30, 2017)

Heroes all. R.I.P.


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## Gnomey (Sep 30, 2017)




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## Old Wizard (Oct 2, 2017)




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## v2 (Nov 1, 2017)

*Ronnie Buckland*, Halifax bomber pilot 

*Ronnie Buckland*, who has died aged 94, was piloting a Halifax bomber when shrapnel from an anti-aircraft shell struck a cigarette case in his breast pocket, which almost certainly saved his life. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve 1944, Buckland and his crew of No. 640 Squadron took off from RAF Leconfield in East Yorkshire to attack an airfield near Essen. It was their 22nd operation. On the bombing run at 20,000 ft the aircraft flew through a barrage of flak, and shrapnel smashed through the windscreen, narrowly missing Buckland's head. He pressed on but almost immediately a heavier burst exploded on the starboard side of the cockpit and Buckland was hit, thrown across the cockpit and rendered unconscious. The flight engineer, pilot officer Trevor Watkins, standing next to Buckland, leaned across his inert pilot, grabbed the controls and steadied the aircraft. He opened the bomb doors and steered the bomber over the target, at which point the Canadian bomb-aimer, pilot officer Bill Holman, released the bombs.

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## Gnomey (Nov 1, 2017)




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## fubar57 (Nov 1, 2017)




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## at6 (Nov 1, 2017)




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## v2 (Nov 12, 2017)

*Frank Lozito *

Frank, age 98, passed away on October 6, 2017. He was born in Newport, R.I. on January 22, 1919.
After graduation from Rhode Island State College, he was a police officer in Newport, R.I. prior to being drafted into the Army in 1942. He trained with the Army Air Corps becoming a B-24 Bomber pilot and was stationed in Venosa, Italy with his crew. 
On August 10, 1944, the “Miss Fitz” bomber and her crew flew a mission to the Astro Romano oil refinery in Ploesti, Romania. Their plane was hit by German anti-aircraft fire over Ploesti, losing three of the four engines and most of the fuel. The mortally wounded plane flew as far as Yugoslavia where the crew parachuted to the ground. Yugoslav Partisans rescued the crew amidst enemy firing from the ground. The crew eventually made it back to Italy thanks to the daring partisans. He earned a Purple Heart among other medals.
After the war, he was stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Field in Dayton for several years where he met his future wife, Beverly. They married at the Chapel at Wright-Patterson.
He was transferred to Wiesbaden, Germany briefly, then to The Hague in Holland for 3 years. He was stationed at the Pentagon for 5 years, then to Albuquerque for 4 years with the Atomic Energy Commission Weapons Office and finally back to the Pentagon. He later retired and worked for 17 years at Honeywell as a manager for the Air Force/NASA Program Analysis Aerospace and Defense Group.
After retiring from Honeywell, he and his wife ran an antique/folk art shop, Recollections, in Clifton, Va. As enthusiastic antiquers, he and his wife became close friends with the Shakers at Sabbathday Lake, Maine; he served on the board for the United Society of Shakers.
His interests included sailing, stamp and coin collecting, antiquing and traveling. He was an avid photographer for several decades and anenthusiastic animal lover with many pets and horses surrounding him and his family.
As the pilot, Frank was the last to jump from his mortally wounded B-24 plane and the last of his crew to forever soar in the heavens. Fly with the Angels! 
Frank will be buried with full military honors. Services will be held at Arlington National Cemetery at a date and time to be determined.

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## ARTESH (Nov 12, 2017)

v2 said:


> *Frank Lozito *
> 
> Frank, age 98, passed away on October 6, 2017. He was born in Newport, R.I. on January 22, 1919.
> Frank will be buried with full military honors. Services will be held at Arlington National Cemetery at a date and time to be determined.


Dear V2,

Do you have any pic from these men?


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## v2 (Nov 12, 2017)

ARTESH said:


> Dear V2,
> 
> Do you have any pic from these men?


Yes, I have...

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## ARTESH (Nov 12, 2017)

v2 said:


> Yes, I have...
> View attachment 472000


and may i ask you to post with photos?

God bless them all.

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## fubar57 (Nov 12, 2017)




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## at6 (Nov 12, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Nov 12, 2017)




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## v2 (Nov 16, 2017)

*Joy Lofthouse* – ATA Pilot 

Female Spitfire pilot who flew the planes from factories to the front lines and was celebrated as 'a lovely lady and a trail-blazer for all women' has died aged 94. Joy Lofthouse, who also flew Hurricanes, was one of only 164 women who were allowed into the Air Transport Auxiliary. The small group of female pilots dubbed the 'Attagirls' were based at White Waltham in Berkshire and were trained to fly 38 types of aircraft between factories and military airfields across the country.
The ATA was formed in 1940 when, despite some male opposition, women were allowed to fly military trainer and communications aircraft. Mrs Lofthouse, from South Cerney in Gloucestershire, learned to fly before she learned to drive.
Mrs Lofthouse joined the ATA in 1943 after spotting a notice in a magazine calling for women to learn to fly. The Royal International Air Tattoo said she was an "amazing character with even more amazing stories".
In an interview last year, she said: "I saw this caption in the Aeroplane magazine that said the ATA had run out of qualified pilots and were training. So I applied and I was in." Trained at Thame in Oxfordshire, she learnt to fly all types of single-seater aircraft but without a driving licence, she said she found "taxiing much more difficult than flying". "We had nine days of technical training - it wasn't very technical - no navigation, just map reading," she said. "After about 10 hours [of flying], they sent you off solo. My first solo flight I think you're only afraid if you're going to find the airfield again." The auxiliary suffered 156 casualties, mostly due to bad weather, but Mrs Lofthouse said when you are young "you don't think about the danger". "It was just part of the war effort. I felt very lucky that I was allowed to do something so rewarding," she said. In 2015, she returned to the skies, taking control of a Spitfire 70 years after last flying in one. Last summer, she was guest of honour in the Royal Box at Wimbledon, where she received an ovation from the centre court crowd.
And last November, she and fellow ATA pilot Mary Ellis were honoured in front of members of the Royal Family at the annual Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall in London. In all, she flew 18 different types of aeroplane across her career but the "wonderful" Spitfire remained her favourite. "It's the nearest thing to having wings of your own and flying," she said.








Nick Bunting, Secretary General of the RAF Association said: “The RAF Association is saddened to hear of the passing of Joy, who was a pilot from the very beginning. She delivered all types of aircraft – including Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mosquitos and Lancasters – all over the country during WWII and was an honorary life member of the RAF Association. We have lost an inspirational member and send our condolences to her friends and family.”


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## vikingBerserker (Nov 16, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Nov 16, 2017)




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## at6 (Nov 17, 2017)




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## v2 (Nov 24, 2017)

S/L Franciszek Kornicki 

Squadron Leader Franciszek Kornicki, who has died aged 100, was the last surviving Polish fighter pilot to command a squadron during the Second World War. He was born in the village of Wreszyn in what is now south-east Poland on December 18 1916 and educated at a boarding school at nearby Hrubieszow. He attended the Polish Air Force Academy and graduated in March 1939, passing out third of an entry of 173. Kornicki was flying outdated Polish fighters when Germany invaded his country on September 1 1939. Despite a brave fight, the Polish squadrons were hopelessly outclassed. With the arrival of Soviet forces on the eastern border on September 17, the surviving pilots were told to escape to Romania. Kornicki travelled overland and reached the Black Sea port of Balchik where he boarded a ship sailing for Marseille. He was completing his flying training in France when the French government capitulated and he and his many Polish colleagues headed for the Spanish border and caught a boat to Liverpool. He joined the Polish Air Force in Britain before joining No 303 Squadron, which was resting in the North of England, before transferring to No 315 Squadron in January 1941 to fly the Hurricane. The squadron soon re-equipped with the Spitfire, and later in the year Kornicki started flying sweeps over France. He remained with the squadron for almost two years before being given command of No 308 Squadron at Northolt in February 1943. At the age of 26 he was the youngest squadron commander in the Polish Air Force. When the squadron moved north two months later, Kornicki transferred to command No 317 Squadron. Over the next eight months he flew and led many sweeps, bomber escorts and attack sorties over the occupied countries. In January 1944 he was rested after three years of flying on operations and joined the Polish Air Force staff before completing the Staff College course. He then joined the air staff of the Rear HQ of No 84 Group, part of the Second Tactical Air Force, which he joined in Belgium before the group and its squadrons advanced into the Netherlands and Germany. After the war he decided to remain in England following the Soviet occupation of his homeland. He married and managed a hotel but rejoined the RAF in the summer of 1951 when he resumed his flying career. Two years later he transferred to the catering branch and over the next 20 years served at various RAF stations at home and overseas, including tours in Malta, Cyprus and Aden. He retired as a squadron leader in 1972. For his long and outstanding wartime service he received Poland’s highest honour for courage, the Virtuti Militari. He also received the Cross of Valour with two Bars. In June 2011 he was made a Commander of the Order of Polonia Restituta, which was presented to him by the President of Poland a year later. During the 70th Anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Britain in 2010, Kornicki was reunited with one of the Spitfires he flew when commanding No 317 Squadron. The Spitfire flew into Northolt and Kornicki was able to sit in the cockpit. In his final years Kornicki, a humble, modest man, became a national celebrity when he was voted “the People’s Spitfire Pilot” in a poll launched by the RAF Museum. His story will be featured at the museum at Hendon in an exhibition to celebrate the RAF’s centenary. Earlier this year he visited the RAF College Cranwell and signed the Wall of Gallantry, before meeting RAF officer cadets. Franciszek Kornicki is survived by his wife Pat and by their two sons. Franciszek Kornicki, born December 18 1916, died November 16 2017.

source: The Telegraph


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## fubar57 (Nov 24, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Nov 24, 2017)




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## v2 (Dec 5, 2017)

Squadron Leader *Geoffrey Rothwell* 

Squadron Leader Geoffrey Rothwell, who has died in New Zealand aged 97, completed 71 operations as a bomber pilot, awarded DFC and Bar, Chevalier of Order of Leopold II and Palme, Croix de Guerre and Palme flew with the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command and the subject of a biography, The Man With Nine Lives, not only survived seventy-one operations in a war in which the average pilot's chances of surviving were one in three, but also a near-fatal crash in which several of his crew were killed, and through which he subsequently became a prisoner-of-war.
At the time of D-Day Geoff was a Flight Commander in Special Duties 138 Squadron which was equipped with Stirling aircraft and which was attached to the renowned Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.). This squadron dropped secret agents and supplies to the Resistance Movements in enemy-oiccupied countries. However, on the eve of D-Day the squadron of Stirlings took part in a special mission to hoodwink the Germans into thinking the invasion was taking place in the Pas de Calais area many hundreds of miles from Normandy where the assault on the beaches would take place some hours later.
The Stirling dropped a phantom army of dummy parachutists knowns as "gingerbread men" with packages simulating gunfire. These dummy parachutists were made of hessian stuffed with straw. "They were about two feet six inches in height and looked like pigmy scarecrows," says Geoff.
After several hundred of the dummies had been dispatched Geoff's Stirling flew on through the night, eventually dropping containers of arms and ammunition to a Reistance reception in the Loire Valley. Geoff flashed a "V for Victory" sign and received a similar signal in return. He set course for base and as he did so he saw gun flashes and lights from vehicles speeding along the field. It must be the Germans. His first instinct was to fire at the lights but then he remembered that the Resistance often used transport to carry away the containers. He had to identify the vehicles and as he dived figures in the vehicles now distinct as German transport stood up and fired at the Stirling. "O.K. Wally, let 'em have it!" Geoff told his rear gunner who opened fire as the aircraft passed over the vehicles. "We beat it for home like bats out of hell," said Geoff.
At debriefing a mission was received to say the Gestapo had been tipped off that a drop would take place and they were on their way to the field when they were sighted by the crew of the Stirling.
The "gingerbread men" mission was successful and so, while nineteen German divisions of Hitler's best troops and Panzer forces sat motionless in the Pas de Calsis area, the battle for the beaches of Normandy was won by the Allies. It was the beginning of the end of the Thousand Year Nazi Reich...

more info: Squadron Leader Geoff Rothwell DFC & Bar


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## Wurger (Dec 5, 2017)




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## at6 (Dec 5, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Dec 5, 2017)




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## fubar57 (Dec 6, 2017)




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## vikingBerserker (Dec 7, 2017)




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## pbehn (Dec 19, 2017)

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5191163/Dambusters-radio-operator-dies-aged-97.html

Maureen Stevens, radio operator on the dambusters raid and wife of a bomber pilot passed away, a nice story.

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## Gnomey (Dec 19, 2017)




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## at6 (Dec 20, 2017)

A truly great woman. May she rest in peace.


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## v2 (Dec 22, 2017)

Cpt. *PHIL BRENTNALL*, who has died aged 99, led a small force of RAF bombers that created a “ghost invasion” on the night of D-Day in June 1944; he went on to have a distinguished career as a training captain and fleet training manager with British Overseas Airways Corporation and British Airways.

During the build-up to the invasion of France the Allied command had devised a complex deception plan to convince the German defences that a large army had been formed in the South East of England and was being prepared for an amphibious assault across the narrowest part of the English Channel. The culmination of this intricate operation during the night of June 5/6 was to create the impression that a large fleet was approaching the Pas-de-Calais at the same time as the true invasion fleet was heading for Normandy. 
To deceive the German radars, the scientists devised a plan for bomber aircraft to drop “window” – thin metallic strips which confused enemy radar – in a precise manner to create a “ghost fleet”. This required extremely accurate flying, navigation, timing and co-ordination with a small fleet of boats towing radar-reflecting balloons and using electronic jammers and fake broadcasts. For almost a month the two squadrons tasked with the operation conducted trials and flew practice missions against radar sites in Yorkshire to perfect the techniques. 
Brentnall was a flight commander on No 218 Squadron and one of its most experienced pilots. Late in the evening of June 5, he took off with seven other Stirling bombers (two were reserves) on this unique and vitally important operation. A similar force of Lancasters of No 617 Squadron had the same task approaching Cap d’Antifer. 
Brentnall’s crew was reinforced with a second pilot, two navigators and four airmen to act as “window” dispatchers. After take off they started to fly the complicated series of orbits while dispensing window as they crept to within 10 miles of the French coast. The operation, the most elaborate piece of “spoofing” in the electronic jamming war, was successful and drew high praise from the senior Allied commanders.
Shortly after this event, Brentnall was awarded the DFC, the citation commenting that his involvement resulted in “an outstanding success”. He was assessed as an exceptional pilot, his squadron commander writing: “His contribution to the success of the squadron was unequalled.” 
Philip Brentnall was born in Manchester on December 15 1918. He joined the RAF in 1940 and trained as a pilot in the USA under the US/UK bi-lateral Arnold Scheme. After a period as a flying instructor he converted to bombers and joined No 218 Squadron in October 1943. 
By the autumn of 1943 the four-engined Stirling was coming to the end of its time as a strategic bomber following heavy losses. The aircraft was being used increasingly to lay sea mines in the Baltic and close to the U-boat bases in the French ports along the Bay of Biscay. It was an operation not without its dangers, particularly when flying at low level. 
Brentnall flew his first mining operation on October 17, and over the next few weeks he visited the Frisian Islands, Jutland, Kiel and numerous French ports. In the build-up to the D-Day landings he reverted to the bombing role and attacked railways and marshalling yards in northern France and the flying-bomb sites in the Pas-de-Calais region. 
After his sortie on D-Day, the squadron replaced its Stirlings with the Lancaster and Brentnall bombed targets in Germany. After flying 30 operations he was rested and became an instructor on the Lancaster. Towards the end of 1945 he trained pilots to fly the new Avro York transport aircraft and early in 1946 he was seconded to BOAC. 
Brentnall’s early experiences of flying as a first officer to more elderly Imperial Airways captains, and their reluctance to accept advice convinced him of the need to formalise the roles of the monitoring pilot, now known as part of Crew Resource Management or CRM. Over the next three decades, Brentnall was to concentrate on training and the development of the company’s first officers to become effective pilot monitors and future captains.

Brentnall flew the company’s early piston-engined airliners and became a training captain on the Argonaut and then the new Comet 1, the world’s first jet airliner. Following the Comet’s withdrawal in 1954 he moved to the Douglas DC 7C fleet. 
He was one of the company’s first pilots to operate the Boeing 707 and in 1959 became the Fleet Training Manager when he developed the operating procedures for the aircraft, which were subsequently used throughout the airline. In addition to being an outstanding pilot and training manager, Brentnall was also an innovator. He ensured that first officers were able to operate with a complete role reversal when flying a sector and they were trained on instrument and procedural flying to the same standards as captains. In January 1961 he was awarded a Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. In 1969 he and a fellow captain delivered BOAC’s first Boeing 747 to Heathrow and he became responsible for the introduction of the airliner into BOAC service. Following the merger with British European Airways (BEA) in 1977, he became the General Manager Flight Training for all of British Airways until his retirement. In 1979 the Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators (GAPAN) awarded him the Cumberbatch Trophy for his “outstanding contribution to aviation safety”. A senior BA captain and colleague described him as “the architect of the fine safety and performance record achieved by BOAC and BA”. 
A kind, modest and understanding man, Brentnall was greatly admired in the airline industry. A keen theatre and operagoer, he made a formidable bridge pair with his wife, and after her death he continued playing doubles; he and his bridge partner topped their club and came 21st out of 640 pairs across the UK. 
He spent much of the summer months each year picking fruit, bottling it and making jam. The pantry was full on his death.

Phil Brentnall married his wife Hannah in 1958 and she died in 2012. A son and daughter survive him.

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## fubar57 (Dec 22, 2017)




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## vikingBerserker (Dec 22, 2017)




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## at6 (Dec 22, 2017)




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## Gnomey (Dec 22, 2017)




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## rochie (Jan 14, 2018)

Cpt Rick Jolly dies.

the only man from decorated by both sides that fought in the Falklands 

'Hero' surgeon of Falklands War dies

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## Airframes (Jan 14, 2018)

R.I.P.


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## Gnomey (Jan 14, 2018)

His books are great reads too.


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## at6 (Jan 15, 2018)

R.I.P. Being decorated by both sides is a real honor to an honorable man.


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## Wayne Little (Jan 17, 2018)




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## fubar57 (Jan 17, 2018)




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## v2 (Jan 31, 2018)

*Gordon Mellor*, bomber navigator who escaped down the Comet Line... 

Gordon Mellor, who has died aged 98, was shot down over Belgium and managed to evade capture. With the help of the Comet Escape Line, he made his way to Spain and eventually reached England.
Serving with Bomber Command 103 Squadron, Gordon aged 22 was shot down in November 1942 while his Halifax bomber was returning from a raid over Germany. 
“Returning from a short night raid over Aachen we were chased by a Messerschmitt 109. He cracked us four times on each set of engines and we started to hurtle down fast. I managed to bail out and crashed into a tree. The flight engineer came out behind me but his parachute failed and he hit a roof on the side of a house and was killed. I saw the plane burning in a field about 2km away. Inside were the pilot and rear gunner who hadn’t managed to get out. I got out of the tree, stuffing my parachute between the branches.
As I stood in the darkness looking at the flames I had the loneliest feeling of all my life – a desperate feeling of being completely alone. I decided I had to get away as quick as I could so started heading south west across the blackness.” Gordon was taken to a farmhouse and his long journey to freedom began. Dressed in civilian clothes, Gordon, now travelling with other allied escapees, was passed from one safe house to another as he made his way across Nazi-occupied France heading up towards the Pyrenees. 
“As we passed through one town we boarded a tram and it was quite full so we stood on the platform,” Gordon says. “Suddenly a group of German soldiers got on and we were all squashed up together on the platform. Further along, five German officers got on, so we all had to squeeze up even more. 
“After a while the officers got off and the soldiers gave them the Nazi salute. All we could do was just try to look as nonchalant as possible. 
“Sometimes I was certain that we looked different and the local people must have spotted us, but if they did, they never showed it.”
Gordon’s long journey took him through Belgium, France, over the Pyrenees and then to Bilbao, Madrid and finally Gibraltar where he was once again kitted up in uniform and flown back to Britain in a Dakota...

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## Airframes (Jan 31, 2018)

R.I.P. Gordon Mellor, a brave man.

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## Totalize (Jan 31, 2018)

R.I.P. all


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## at6 (Jan 31, 2018)




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## Gnomey (Jan 31, 2018)




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## fubar57 (Feb 1, 2018)




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## v2 (Feb 12, 2018)

Col *Andrzej Jeziorski* , a Polish pilot who flew Wellingtons in the 304 Polish Bomber Squadron during the Second World War, died last week in London aged 95. 


_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLKtmyTMUMI_

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## Wurger (Feb 12, 2018)




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## at6 (Feb 12, 2018)

R.I.P.


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## Airframes (Feb 12, 2018)

R.I.P.


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## Gnomey (Feb 12, 2018)




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## Wayne Little (Feb 13, 2018)




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## fubar57 (Feb 14, 2018)




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## v2 (Feb 21, 2018)

*Margot Duhalde*, wartime ATA pilot. 

Margot Duhalde, who has died aged 97, was Chile’s first female pilot; She started flying when she was 16 years old, gaining her pilot's licence two years later, just before the outbreak of World War Two. During the Second World War she travelled to Britain to join the Free French forces, but soon transferred to the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) and spent four years ferrying a wide variety of aircraft to RAF airfields.
Later she became Chile's first female air traffic controller. 
A government statement said: "We are grateful for the huge contribution she made to Chilean aviation and recognise the courage she had to fulfil her life's dream, breaking stereotypes and showing the way to other women." 
Last year Mrs Duhalde told a Chilean TV station "the men were convinced they were the only ones who could do things". "They always looked down on us women, it is only recently that they are beginning to realise we are equal and actually better than them."
Margot Duhalde got her flying licence in 1938 but there were few opportunities for a woman pilot in Chile. 
When war broke out a year later, she went to the French consulate in Santiago to volunteer for the Free French Forces in London because she had family connections with France. Not yet legally an adult, she lied to her parents and told them she was going to Canada as an instructor.
She ended up in the UK with 13 other volunteers and presented herself at the headquarters of the Free French Forces. 
"The truth is that the French.. didn't know what to do with me. They mixed up my name with that of a man, Marcel, in other words they thought I was a man." She left the French after they assigned her to look after wounded pilots. 
Despite speaking no English, she got a job with the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), which flew aircraft into combat zones. 
"The work was very difficult," she said. "We had to fly in terrible conditions with a minimum of visibility." "It was very dangerous, and we had no contact with the ground because the Germans were listening." 
She returned to Chile in 1947 where she lived the rest of her life, marrying three times and working as a commercial pilot, instructor and finally as an air traffic controller, retiring at the age of 81.
In 1946 Margot Duhalde was made a Knight of France's Legion of Honour, later being given the honorary rank of colonel by the Chilean air force.

source: BBC


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## v2 (Feb 21, 2018)

Squadron Leader *Peter Hearne *

Squadron Leader Peter Hearne, who has died aged 98, flew Spitfire and Mustang fighters during the Second World War and was credited with destroying at least five enemy aircraft and damaging others.
Peter Hearne was born in February 1919 in Allahabad, India, where his father was a member of the Indian police force and as a youngster lived in Belgium before going to school in England. He cut short his degree studies to join the RAF in 1941 and went to Canada to train before becoming operational in 1942. “He was quite free to talk to about the war,” said one of Mr Hearne’s sons Damian.
Mr Hearne flew all three types of fighter planes that took part in the war: the Spitfire, Hurricane and Mustang. Hearne was in command of No 19 Squadron when it was sent to Peterhead in north Scotland on February 13 1945 to escort Beaufighter and Mosquito formations attacking shipping in Norwegian and Danish waters. The squadron was equipped with the long-range US-built Mustang fighter.




He mostly piloted these aircraft over the North Sea, helping to escort other vehicles to Norway, and would have been involved in a potential invasion of the country had it taken place. During the war Mr Hearne had five confirmed kills and damaged other aircraft. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross and is listed in the second volume of the well known ‘Aces High’ book which documents the activities of notable fighter pilots. 
After the war he continued to fly at bases across the world before leaving the RAF in 1962 and moving to Capel St Mary, where he and his wife raised nine children.
Having left the RAF a chance encounter led him to the world of mushroom growing. Whilst sat in the barbers one day Mr Hearne saw a man come in with a box of mushrooms. Fascinated, he decided he wanted to know more about how they were grown and ended up growing them himself. 
“That’s exactly how it happened,” says Damian, “he grew a wonderful business.” As well as his business Mr Hearne became a stalwart in the church community in Capel, helping to bring together different denominations for annual events. 
Reflecting on his father’s life Damian said: “We need to sometimes stop and think what these people did.”


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## Gemhorse (Feb 21, 2018)

Damian, may I pass on my sincerest condolences to you and your family ~ I have only just returned to the website after a number of years and remember your fathers warm comments to my posts - I had no idea he was a WW2 pilot, indeed an 'ace', but I suspect he wouldn't see it like that, it was a job that had to done. Also, he was a very brave man, flying cover for those other brave men of the Banff & Dallachy Wings that attacked the German convoy traffic in & out of Scandanavia - I am familiar with these squadrons, I have read of their exploits, very dangerous work in sometimes shocking weather over long stretches of cold sea and fiords, mountains and a ready enemy of Fw-190's to oppose him... thanks God he was flying a Mustang! - I wish I had known before, the questions one would liked to have asked... May God bless him, and all of your family and friends, he was a real gem to me on this website !
Cheers


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## fubar57 (Feb 21, 2018)




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## Gnomey (Feb 21, 2018)




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## v2 (Mar 2, 2018)

Group Captain *John Ivor Spenser Digman* OBE DFC 

Group Captain John Digman passed away on December 11th 2017, aged 94 years.

He had a long and distinguished career of 29 years in the Royal Air Force. In March 1942 he undertook his navigator officer training in Canada. Four months later, as Flying Officer, he was sent to Bomber Command to a Wellington Operational Training Unit and crewed up with a multinational crew. They remained together throughout the war. In September 1944 they were assigned to 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron flying Lancasters based at Spilsby in Lincolnshire. From here they completed 36 sorties over Germany, Norway and Poland. John recalled “My abiding memory is of feeling extremely apprehensive when nearing the target area and then of hearing the calm voice of the master bomber over the radio who was directing the pathfinders in marking the target. His measured tones helped no end in settling my mind.” He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in October 1945. 
Shortly after being posted to Spilsby, John married (Ethel) Babs Pilbeam. In October 2017 they celebrated their 73rd wedding anniversary. 
In 1947 John became a navigation instructor. On a liaison flight to the South Africa Air Force, he was part of a world record-breaking crew by completing the flight via Kano in 26 hours and 57 minutes. In 1948 he was stationed at RAF Upwood as Station Navigator officer. Two years later as Squadron Leader he moved to the Central Navigation and Control School as Officer Commanding Specialist Navigation Courses. In 1953 John was the first officer to take specialist navigation course students to the geographic North Pole.
Between 1956 and 1958 a posting took John and family to the Far East Air Force base in Singapore. In 1959 he was promoted to Wing Commander and spent 4 years at the Air Ministry in charge of policy for navigator, air electronics officer and combat survival training.
In 1963 John went to RAF Coningsby as Wing Commander Operations of three Vulcan nuclear bomber squadrons. In November 1964 the Squadrons moved to RAF Cottesmore. In January 1966, as the senior navigator, John took his final flight in a Vulcan to Auckland, New Zealand, to display at the opening of the new airport – flying time of fifty five and a half hours.
At the end of 1966 John was awarded the OBE for his valuable service to the RAF. The next 5 years were spent at the Ministry of Defence and in 1969 he was promoted to Group Captain as Deputy Director RAF Security. He took early retirement in 1971.
John remained an active member of the RAFA and Aircrew Association. He raised thousands of pounds for the Wings Appeal and the RAF Benevolent Fund. 
John kept in touch with two of his crew and this ceased only in 2017 when they both passed away. 
He is survived by his wife Babs, their 2 daughters, granddaughter and 3 great grandchildren.
John was a man proud of and devoted to family and country. Like others of his generation who fought during the Second World War, these remarkable men showed courage and modesty in equal measure and their passing is mourned deeply as their numbers diminish.


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## fubar57 (Mar 2, 2018)




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## Wurger (Mar 2, 2018)




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## Gnomey (Mar 2, 2018)




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## v2 (Mar 28, 2018)

*



F/O Adam Ostrowski* 

Adam Ostrowski, who has died aged 99, was a Spitfire pilot during the second world war, a design engineer in peacetime and a supporter of UK-based Polish cultural organisations in later life.
He was born in the Polish city of Lwów, which is now in Ukraine, to Wacław, a landowner, and his wife, Antonina. As a 20-year-old university student he abandoned his studies to take part in the defence of Lwów when Poland was invaded by the Soviet Union at the outbreak of the second world war.
Captured and arrested by the Soviet authorities, he was deported to a labour camp in Siberia but survived that ordeal and was released when the Soviet Union switched to the allied side in 1941. As he had some experience of flying, he volunteered to join the Polish Air Force, which was in exile in Britain, and travelled on HMS Trinidad to Scotland, arriving in February 1942.
He trained as a fighter pilot at various RAF stations, eventually joining 317 Polish Squadron of the RAF and flying mark V, IX and XVI Spitfires in ground attack, bomber escort and occasional air combat missions. In 1944, while based at an airfield in newly liberated Belgium, he met Marie-Louise Milcamps, a physiotherapist and young member of the Belgian resistance. They were married in 1946 and he was demobilised with the rank of flight lieutenant. Ostrowski and his family settled in Britain after the war, partly because by then Lwów, along with a swathe of eastern Poland, had been annexed by the Soviet Union. Marie-Louise worked as a physiotherapist at Middlesex hospital and Adam studied engineering at Willesden Technical College in north-west London, where they lived for the rest of their lives. He became a design engineer, working for Simon Carves, Humphreys and Glasgow, and then Balfour Beatty – primarily with pre-stressed concrete in the design of bridges and buildings.
Aside from his work he also immersed himself in various Polish cultural organisations in the UK, helping to establish the Polish Airforce Association and the Institution of Polish Engineers. With the restoration of democracy in Poland in 1989 he received a number of honours from the Polish government, including the Order of Polonia Restituta.
In 2013 he was guest of honour at an Operation Spitfire dinner, raising funds for the restoration of a Spitfire Mk XVI displayed in the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. At that dinner actual footage from his Spitfire gun camera had somehow been acquired and was shown to guests.
In 2017 he was invited to lay a wreath for fallen airmen on behalf of 317 Squadron at the Polish war memorial in Northolt, Middlesex. His final resting place will be the Polish war graves cemetery at Newark in Nottinghamshire, where he lies with his fallen comrades and his uncle Stanisław Ostrowski, a former president of Poland in exile.

He is survived by Marie-Louise, by two children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

source: The Guardian

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## Gnomey (Mar 28, 2018)




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## Airframes (Mar 28, 2018)

A long, and interesting life. May he rest in peace, and be remembered - and a huge thank you for his service for what is now the free world.

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## Wurger (Mar 30, 2018)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 2, 2018)




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## michaelmaltby (Apr 20, 2018)

A legendary nun
‘Angel of Dieppe’ who stood up to Nazi soldiers to treat wounded Canadians dies at age 103

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## vikingBerserker (Apr 20, 2018)

That took massive courage.

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## Gnomey (Apr 20, 2018)




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## Wildr1 (May 3, 2018)

I met Merle in the late 90's, he had an interest in observation A/C that I was posting from my collection. He generously added to that as well as sent me information on early U.S. aviation and Bendix racers. Let me tell you about Merle. Enlisting in the Air Corp in 1942, he became a member of the 357th Fighter Group with the 8th Air Force and Crew Chief for the P-51 Mustangs flying out of Leiston Air Field, England during WWII. He served 22 years active duty, then 20 years in the same capacity in the Air Force and Army Aviation, retiring in 1985. He was historian for the WWII 357th Fighter Group and a lifetime member of the Air Force Sergeants Assn., the Mighty 8th AF Museum and the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum. He also was a lifetime member of the American Aviation Historical Society. Olmsted wrote many articles and supplied hundreds of pictures and much information for the AAHS Journal (a very good publication). He was an amateur aviation artist, an expert scratch-built modeler, and shared his knowledge of aviation with many enthusiasts worldwide. His extensive collection of information, pictures, film, and other items are being donated to the Mighty 8th Museum. He was a noted historian and author of numerous articles and 3 books, his latest being "To War With the Yoxford Boys". Olmsted was honored in September 2007 at the Gathering of Mustangs and Legends at Rickenbacker Airport, Columbus, Ohio, as one of the 51 men and women who flew or maintained the P-51 Mustangs in WWII. Olmsted died January 9, 2008, at age 84 in his Springfield, Mo. home. I will post info and photos he sent me from his collection.





Merle in his 80's,
Merle is on the right below

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## Wurger (May 3, 2018)




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## Wildr1 (May 3, 2018)



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## Wayne Little (May 5, 2018)




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## v2 (May 20, 2018)

F/Lt Humphrey Phillips 

Flight Lieutenant Humphrey Phillips, who has died aged 97, flew as a flight engineer on Lancasters at the height of Bomber Command’s main offensive against Berlin. In November 1943 he joined No 626 Squadron just as the main bombing effort was directed against the German capital. The Luftwaffe night-fighter force was at its most formidable and losses among the bomber crews were higher than at any other period of the war. Within the first five days of joining the squadron Phillips and his crew made three hazardous sorties to the city. Over the next few weeks he went on to complete nine operations to Berlin in addition to attacking other major industrial centres. On the night of April 26 1944 he was flying with the deputy squadron commander when they were tasked to bomb an armaments factory in Essen. Just as the attack from 18,000 ft was completed, bombs from an aircraft flying just above them hit their Lancaster. Phillips grabbed an oxygen bottle, moved down the fuselage to investigate and discovered extensive damage near the gun turret and bomb bay. He found the mid-upper gunner unconscious, having lost his oxygen mask, and with a bad head wound. 
He reported to the pilot who immediately descended to a safe altitude. With another crew member, Phillips administered oxygen to the wounded gunner and managed to get him to the rest bunk. At the end of the journey back to Lincolnshire, the pilot landed the badly damaged bomber and the gunner was taken to hospital where he recovered. A few weeks later, Phillips and his New Zealand pilot, Squadron Leader Johnny Neilson, were awarded the DFC.
Humphrey Bernard Phillips was born in North London on August 20 1920 and left school aged 15 to become an apprentice motor mechanic. He joined the RAF in June 1940 and became a fitter/mechanic, serving on bomber squadrons in Lincolnshire. With the introduction of the four-engine bomber, a new aircrew category of flight engineer was created to be responsible for the management of the engines and fuel system. The initial candidates were drawn from serving RAF mechanics and in April 1942 Phillips was one of the first to volunteer. After a brief course he joined No 102 Squadron Conversion Flight as an instructor. On the night of May 30-31 1942 Bomber Command launched the first of the “Thousand Bomber” raids.
To make up the numbers, the bombers in training units had to be used and Phillips flew in a Halifax with a scratch crew on the raid to Cologne, his first operation. A few nights later he flew on the second raid, this time to Essen. During his time as the engineer leader on the conversion unit, Phillips supervised the training of flight engineers and invented a number of training aids. At the end of his tour he was commissioned and mentioned in despatches. He left No 626 Squadron in the summer of 1944 having completed 27 operations, becoming an instructor and engineer leader at a bomber training unit where he was again mentioned in despatches. 
Phillips was demobilised in April 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant. For many years he enjoyed a successful career as transport manager for the 600 Group, a manufacturer and distributor of machine tools. 
He became involved in the Freight Transport Association, serving on various committees and liaising with the Ministry of Transport. 
He was an enthusiastic tennis player and in 2017, when his autobiography, A Thousand and One, was published, he became, aged 97, one of Britain’s oldest published authors. 
In 1949 Humphrey Phillips married Iris Webber. She died in 2011. Their three daughters survive him.
Humphrey Phillips, born August 20 1920, died April 26 2018.

Source: The Telegraph

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## Gnomey (May 20, 2018)




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## v2 (May 24, 2018)

Stanley Chambers 

Stanley Chamber a born-and-bred Ipswich veteran who flew Spitfires during the Second World War.
Stanley spent some time at RAF Martlesham. Fighting over the coast of England protecting England from German bombers, then later in the war shot down two doodle bugs. Stanley also took part in the D-Day landings and the liberation of France, protecting the sky's from enemy fighters as the landings took place. After the War he joined the navy. Stanley has lived in Ipswich all his life going to school at Northgate high. His earliest memory was seeing horses ,artillery and soldiers filling the streets of Ipswich during the First World War...


_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM4EMzxFrfU_

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## Gnomey (May 25, 2018)




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## vikingBerserker (May 25, 2018)




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## at6 (May 26, 2018)




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## fubar57 (May 27, 2018)

Posted in the wrong thread


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## N4521U (May 27, 2018)

So many of the last will be joining their mates sooner than we would like.
We salute them all, lest we forget.


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## v2 (Jun 4, 2018)

*Donald John "Don" Sheppard *

Commander Don Sheppard, who has died aged 94, saw service from the Arctic to the Far East and became an air ace while only 21.
On the afternoon of January 4, 1945 during the Fleet Air Arm raid on Pangkalanbrandan, an oil-terminal in North Sumatra, Sheppard flew fighter cover over a force of some 100 aircraft from three British carriers, _Victorious_, _Indomitable_ and _Indefatigable_. He saw enemy fighters ‘coming straight down at top speed and as I rolled over to attack [one] he attempted to evade me by rolling over on his back and pulling through but I fired a burst at him from short range and he bailed, whether he was hit or because he was merely frightened’. While regaining height to re-join the escort Sheppard saw a second Japanese Oscar fighter and ‘was able to quickly despatch him’.
He was wingman to Lt Col Ronnie Hay RM, was in overall charge of the attack, who wrote that Sheppard had ‘shown the greatest keenness and determination to get to grips with the enemy; He has trained himself to a high standard of skill in the air and had made every effort to become a first class fighter pilot. He was worked with energy and success improving the standard of armament maintenance in the squadron’. The latter was a reference to Sheppard’s role in ensuring that that every gun in his squadron worked and that there were no jams. He was awarded the DSC.
Then on January 24, while flying combat air patrol during a raid on Japanese-held oil refineries at Palembang, Sheppard was jumped from above by another Oscar; Sheppard turned his aircraft and hit the Japanese with his second burst. During another raid, five days later ‘a vigorous dogfight’ developed at low level ‘against a very competent and aggressive opponent’, when Sheppard shared two kills with Hay.
By May 1945 the allies were gaining air superiority, and the Japanese introduced kamikaze, or suicide air attacks. Sheppard, now a leader of his own flight of three Corsairs, was launched to investigate an intermittent radar contact. High above him just out of the cloud, Sheppard spotted a Japanese dive-bomber, which he shot down at his first pass, He could not avoid a massive fireball, but nursed his damaged aircraft back to _Victorious_.
Donald John Sheppard was born in Toronto where his father was a lawyer and mother a schoolteacher, and he was educated at Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute, Toronto. With his two brothers they spent their summers on Lake Simcoe where they learned to sail: all would join the wartime Royal Navy. Don, inspired by reading about the Fleet Air Arm’s attack on Taranto and the hunt for the _Bismarck_, volunteered and took ship to England to join No 38 Pilots Course. After basic training he recrossed the Atlantic to learn to fly, and first flew solo in September after 13 hours. On his first day in 738 Naval Air Squadron, unused to the higher torque of the high performance machines with which the FAA was becoming equipped, he made a rare pilot error and crashed on take-off, but soon he had clocked up several score hours flying in single-engined warplanes. In October 1943 Shepard joined 1835 NAS and learned to fly the Chance Vought Corsair, which had been rejected as a carrier aircraft by the USN. With its air of scarcely concealed menace, it inspired almost as much fear in the hearts of those who were going to fly it as in the enemy, but once mastered it could out-fly most aircraft, and it had an endurance of five hours. Sheppard made his first deck-landing on USS _Charger_ on 22 November 1943, and in March 1944 he embarked in the British fleet carrier _Victorious_ to prepare for Operation Tungsten, the raid on the German battleship _Tirpitz_ which was hiding in Kaafjord in northern Norway. On April 3 1944, the German was hit by 16 bombs which left her useless as a warship. After further raids in northern waters, _Victorious_ deployed to the Far East.
Postwar Sheppard joined the Royal Canadian Navy, where he completed 112 decklandings and flew 2,655 hours in 25 types of aircraft. After six years at NATO Headquarters in Europe he retired in 1974. Sheppard never bragged about his war, and embraced reconciliation, his son once finding him watching old television movies with a German who had been in his gunsights.
Sheppard farmed for several years in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. An avid woodsman, who fed his young family on moose and salmon, gradually his relationship with animals changed, and he gave up hunting. He wept openly when his favourite horse was struck by a car. Instead he built a home overlooking Aurora, Ontario, where he enjoyed walking his dogs in the early mornings before the golfers were up. There he and his wife hosted a new generation of children, and he was the best of neighbours, up early after snowstorms to clear their drives, and for many years driving the elderly to medical appointments and picnics at the beach.
In 1947 he married Gwen Falls, the sister of a fellow navy pilot, the future Canadian Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Robert Falls. They married in December, for maximum tax benefit, and after a brief, extravagant wedding at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, they set off in his old car on the long drive to Nova Scotia, and spent their honeymoon broken down in a blizzard in rural New York. She predeceased him in 2016 and he is survived by three daughters and two sons.
A brother who also flew Corsairs, was killed in a flying accident in the carrier _Formidable_ in March 1945.
*Don Sheppard, born January 21, 1924, died May 2, 2018*.

…




_Lt. Barry Hayter, Lt. Don "Pappy" McLeod and Lt. Don J. Sheppard aboard HMS Victorious_

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## Wurger (Jun 4, 2018)




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## Wayne Little (Jun 4, 2018)




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## fubar57 (Jun 4, 2018)




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## Gnomey (Jun 4, 2018)




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## v2 (Jun 20, 2018)

Air Commodore *Alastair Mackie* 


Air Commodore Alastair Mackie, who has died aged 95, flew Dakota transport aircraft on the three major airborne operations in north-west Europe towards the end of the Second World War, and commanded a Vulcan nuclear bomber squadron; later, in an unusual development, he became a committed and active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Just before midnight on June 5 1944, Mackie was piloting one of 24 Dakotas of No 233 Squadron that took off from RAF Blakehill Farm near Swindon as part of the Allied air armada heading for Normandy. On board were men of the 3rd Parachute Brigade who were dropped near Toufreville. Throughout the summer of 1944 he flew many re-supply sorties into the hastily prepared landing strips in Normandy and on each occasion returned with wounded soldiers. On August 27 he flew into an airfield at Orleans with food for distribution to the liberated Paris. On September 17, Operation Market Garden was launched, with the 1st British Airborne Division assigned the task of capturing the bridge at Arnhem. Mackie towed a Horsa glider and released it over the landing zone west of the town. Over the next few days, the anti-aircraft defences intensified and Mackie dropped supplies to the beleaguered force.
On the final day, his dispatch crew encountered difficulties over the dropping zone and he was forced to make three runs against intense enemy fire before all his supplies were dropped. He finally escaped at low level, only to discover later that the dropping zone was partly in German hands. He was awarded a Bar to a DFC that he had earned earlier in the Middle East. 
In March 1945 Mackie flew on Operation Varsity, the airborne landings across the River Rhine. At dawn on March 24 1945, he and his colleagues of No 233 Squadron took off from a forward airfield in Essex each with a Horsa glider in tow carrying men of the 2nd Battalion, Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. The gliders were released over Wesel and landed on the east bank of the river. As the war came to an end, Mackie flew supplies into captured German airfields and ferried liberated prisoners of war back to airfields in England. 
The son of a British doctor awarded the DSO during the First World War, Alastair Cavendish Lindsay Mackie was born in Yorkshire on August 3 1922, but spent much of his early life in Malvern. He was educated at Charterhouse and won an Exhibition to read Medicine at Cambridge University, but deferred his entry to join the RAF. He was a kinsman of the Aberdeenshire political dynasty that produced one Labour minister, one Liberal MP and a Conservative county council leader. After training as a pilot, he ferried a Wellington bomber to the Middle East via Gibraltar. In August 1941 he joined No 108 Squadron, based at Fayid in Egypt, and his first operation was against Tobruk. Over the next few months he attacked targets in support of the British 8th Army including Benghazi and Tripoli. He converted to the US-built four-engine Liberator bomber and his first raid was a daylight operation against a harbour in Crete. In addition to regular attacks against Tripoli, he completed numerous daylight anti-shipping sorties in the Mediterranean. Towards the end of his long period in the Middle East, he attacked the Tunisian port of Sfax in December 1942. After dropping his bombs on the quays, he descended to 400 ft and made three runs to allow his gunners to strafe the warehouses and shipping. In mid-January he flew his 53rd and final sortie when he bombed Tripoli. He was just 20 and was awarded the DFC for his “great perseverance and tenacity”. He returned to Britain and became an instructor on Dakotas at RAF Nutts Corner in Northern Ireland where he met Corporal Rachel Goodson, to whom he would be married for 66 years. In February 1944 he joined No 233 Squadron and began an intensive training period prior to the D-Day landings. After the war, Mackie flew Dakotas on worldwide routes before becoming a flying instructor. This led to his appointment to the Examining Wing at the Central Flying School. He was assessed as an A 1 instructor, the highest qualification, and he and his team travelled widely assessing the standard of pilot instruction in the RAF and in Commonwealth air forces. After attending Staff College he was posted to Singapore, where he enjoyed a stimulating appointment as a member of the Joint Intelligence Staff. Throughout his career, Mackie had a passion for flying and took every opportunity to fly during his ground appointments. In Singapore he often flew RAF aircraft at weekends on exercises to test the island’s air defences. In early 1956 he returned to a flying appointment as the Wing Commander Flying at RAF Waddington, where he flew the Canberra bomber. In October 1957 he took command of the second squadron of Vulcan bombers to be formed, No 101 Squadron. He found the four-engined bomber an exhilarating aircraft to fly (second only to the Spitfire in his opinion) and he travelled widely to demonstrate its capabilities including visits to Nigeria, Kenya, the Far East and Canada. 
The Vulcans of No 101 Squadron formed part of the UK’s strategic nuclear deterrent, and Mackie and his crews were regularly tested in war procedures. Much as he loved to fly the aircraft, Mackie, an intellectual with an inquiring mind, began to have doubts about the validity of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent force, which he saw more as a tool for domestic politics rather than a viable threat to the Soviet Union. This view was reinforced during his next appointment when he served on the directing staff of the Joint Service Staff College.
After serving in Whitehall as the Deputy Secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee Secretariat, an appointment he disliked and where his contempt for the British nuclear weapon policy increased, he was appointed to command RAF Colerne near Bath, which housed two squadrons of Hastings long-range transport aircraft. He flew regularly, including weekend sorties giving air experience to Air Training Corps cadets in Chipmunk aircraft. With the support of his wife, he made major improvements for the welfare of his people and oversaw a base modernisation programme. He was appointed CBE.
In April 1966 he moved to the MoD in the key appointment of Director of Air Staff Briefing, responsible for keeping the RAF’s chiefs fully briefed on key issues affecting policy and operational capabilities. He became increasingly frustrated by inter-service rivalry and the overt ambitions of some fellow officers of more modest ability. He was also disillusioned by defence policy – including the impending severe cuts masterminded by civil servants. So, in 1968, he decided to retire at the age of 45. During his later service he completed an external degree course in Law. After retiring from the RAF he became the under treasurer of the Middle Temple and then the registrar of the Architects’ Registration Council. Later he was the director general of the Health Education Council. Prompted by his Christian faith, his experience of war and his disillusion with national policy, he became a committed and active member of CND and later served as its vice president. In his memoirs, Flying Scot (2012), he reflected: “Man’s inhumanity to man has given place to man’s suicidal inhumanity to the planet and his determination to destroy it. My shame at having been part of it as a Vulcan pilot is mitigated only by decades of membership of CND.” As one of the few surviving officers involved in D-Day, he was proud to join members of the 3rd Parachute Brigade Association during their annual pilgrimage to Normandy to honour the dead. The French Government awarded him the Legion d’Honneur.
Alastair Mackie’s wife Rachel predeceased him and their two sons survive him.
Air Commodore Alastair Mackie, born August 3 1922, died May 19 2018.

source: The Telegraph"

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## Wayne Little (Jun 20, 2018)




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## Gnomey (Jun 20, 2018)




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## herman1rg (Jul 12, 2018)

Wing Commander Tom Neil, Battle of Britain fighter ace – obituary


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## Gnomey (Jul 12, 2018)




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## v2 (Jul 13, 2018)




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## Wurger (Jul 13, 2018)




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## herman1rg (Jul 20, 2018)

Sadly, another of "The Few" has passed.
Youngest Battle of Britain RAF pilot dies


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## at6 (Jul 20, 2018)

Another hero gone. My condolences to his family and may he rest in peace.


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## v2 (Jul 20, 2018)




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## buffnut453 (Jul 20, 2018)

Had the privilege of meeting Geoffrey Wellum many moons ago at Duxford. He signed my copy of "First Light" which is, IMHO, among the very best flying memoirs. His writing was both vivid and passionate, and I've yet to find a better book describing what it was like to be a young fighter pilot in 1940.

Fair winds Geoffrey. You were an absolute gentlemen and will never be forgotten.

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## Gnomey (Jul 20, 2018)




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## Ascent (Jul 26, 2018)

It's just been reported in the news that Mary Ellis, last of the surviving female ATA pilots has passed away at the grand age of 101, one year older than the RAF.


Obituary: Mary Ellis the air pioneer

A really amazing woman.


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## v2 (Jul 26, 2018)

*Mary Wilkins Ellis*- ATA Association Commodore and First Officer 'Spitfire Girl'. :salutepilot:

The last of the Spitfire girls Mary Ellis, who flew 76 different aircraft during the Second World War, has died at her home on the Isle of Wight aged 101.
The Oxfordshire native died in Sandown on Tuesday, and was one of the two last surviving UK female Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) pilots.
Mrs Ellis flew 400 Spitfires and 76 different types of aircraft during WWII, and just before her 100th birthday she was able to fly once more in a Spitfire.
Just two weeks ago, Mrs Ellis attended the London premiere of Spitfires, where she was seen smiling on the red carpet and received a standing ovation after the film. Mrs Ellis took her first flying lesson as a teenager and flew for pleasure until 1939 when she heard a radio appeal for women pilots to join the auxiliary service. As news broke of her death, people took to social media to pay tribute to the legendary woman and to thank her for her service.
John Nichol, a former prisoner-of-war and author, wrote: 'Another giant leaves us to john her heroic friends in Blue Skies. Rest in peace Mary; you truly deserve it. Thank you.' 
Twitter user Mike said: 'More awful news. RIP Mary Ellis. A legend of the Air Transport Auxiliary. Over 1000 aircraft; 76 different types and over 400 Spitfires alone. I hope you’re enjoying a well-earned sherry up there with Joy Lofthouse again. Blue skies Ma’am #LestWeForget.' Kevin Powell added: 'I saw Mary Ellis interviewed recently. Her selflessness and belief that she had a duty to do all she did for the greater good shone through. A Truly inspirational lady who achieved so much for Britain.' Melody Foreman, author of A Spitfire Girl, described Mrs Ellis as 'one of the world's greatest female ferry pilots'. She wrote: 'Mary helped the war effort by delivering much needed aircraft including Wellington Bombers, Mustangs and many more to the aircrews of RAF fighter and bomber command squadrons.'
'She flew 400 Spitfires and maintains that it is her favourite aircraft of all time. It is a symbol of freedom and liberty,' said Ms Foreman.
'When the ATA was closed in November 1945, Mary was seconded to the RAF to fly the new Meteor fast jet.
'The next few years saw her working as a personal pilot to a wealthy businessman and by 1950 she became the boss of Sandown Airport on the Isle of Wight.
'Mary became Europe's first female air commandant and remained as managing director of Sandown until 1970.
'[She] heard an appeal on the radio from the BBC for women pilots needed to help the war effort,'
'She joined the Air Transport Auxiliary, an organisation which ferried aircraft from factories and maintenance units to RAF airfields all over Britain.'
When Mrs Ellis turned a century old, a surprise party was held in her honour at Sandown Airport, where more than 60 guests attended.
Mrs Ellis said at the event: 'The war was a challenge and one had to do something about it. I went on and on until I flew everything. I love the Spitfire – it's my favourite aircraft, it's everyone's favourite, it's the symbol of freedom.'
Then as part of her celebrations, Mrs Ellis was handed the controls of a 275mph twin-seater Spitfire as it swooped over West Sussex.
After about 15 minutes, she turned for home, and told her co-pilot Matt Jones: 'Goodwood on the nose, you have control…'. Then she settled back to enjoy the ride back to base.
Earlier that day, Mrs Ellis watched in delight as Spitfire MV154 took its place beside her in an extraordinary airborne tribute. It was a plane she had delivered to RAF Brize Norton from Southampton on September 15, 1944, and it hides a sentimental secret.
For at the end of the 25-minute wartime flight, she signed the cockpit, scrawling her maiden name Wilkins and the initials ATA.

Mary died yesterday (Tuesday 24th July) in Sandown…

source: Dailymail

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## Wurger (Jul 26, 2018)




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## buffnut453 (Jul 26, 2018)

Agreed. A remarkable lady. Perhaps she and Geoffrey Wellum can share a few war stories over a heavenly beer!

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## vikingBerserker (Jul 26, 2018)




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## Gnomey (Jul 26, 2018)




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## v2 (Aug 10, 2018)

*Michael Lapage* 

Michael Lapage, who has died aged 94, served in World War II as a Fleet Air Arm pilot, won a silver medal as a rower in the 1948 Olympic Games in London and went on to become a Christian missionary in Kenya.

Michael Clement Lapage was the son of a vicar from Dorset, southwest England. He won a place at Selwyn College, Cambridge, to read geography but his ambition of making the university boat team was put on hold by the war. After training, he joined 807 Naval Air Squadron in 1944, flying the Seafire, a navalised version of the Spitfire. Its undercarriage was too weak for deck landings, and on six occasions he suffered damage or bounced into, over or through the flight deck barrier. He flew reconnaissance and air-to-ground strafing missions during the Allied landings in southern France, and on one occasion was flying as wingman when his flight was told to investigate a ship off Marseille: they came under heavy fire and his No 1 was shot down. He was more successful flying the Grumman Hellcat, an American fighter specially designed for shipborne operations. Deployed to the Far East, in July 1945 he narrowly avoided being shot down during a patrol off the coast of Malaya. By the time he got to Selwyn College in 1946, he had missed the first term, and was thus ineligible for that year’s Boat Race crew. He was somewhat put out to discover that, unlike most university freshers, he was too old to qualify for the special provision in a time of rationing of bananas, which were available only from the college bursar’s office for ‘‘gentlemen under the age of 18’’. It took him two years to establish himself in the Cambridge rowing crew. He rowed at seven in the team that won the 1948 Boat Race and which would form the main part of the Olympic team later the same year. 
On Wednesday July 29, Lapage and his colleagues attended the ceremony at Wembley Stadium at which George VI declared the Games open. ‘‘It was over in two hours flat and during which we sung the Hallelujah Chorus,’’ he recalled. ‘‘There was no dancing or anything. They released all the pigeons and we put our hats on in case we got hit.’’ Apart from a free pair of underpants and malt drinks in the evenings, British athletes enjoyed little in the way of special treatment.
The rowing events were held on the Thames at Henley and the British eight, which had got together as a crew only a month or two earlier, had no great hopes of success. Yet they beat the Canadians in the semifinal, reached the final, against Norway and the United States, and led for the first 500 metres before the Americans pulled away. Lapage always wondered if rationing, which continued in Britain until 1953-54, might have had something to do with the British team’s failure to win gold. Although crew members’ butter ration was increased from two to four ounces a week, the big problem was lack of meat. ‘‘We had about eight ounces,’’ he recalled. ‘‘I was about 13 stone and 6ft but height and weight can be a handicap if it is not used correctly. The Americans had more meat. It was imported every day from the States, which was vital because it is muscle-building. With rationing we just accepted it. We ate the best food that was available, and we managed with other things.’’ But he recalled the Games as ‘‘very amateur and pleasant’’, and he enjoyed camaraderie and the riotous champagne and sherry-fuelled celebrations afterwards with the other crews. After the Olympics, Lapage resumed his studies at Cambridge then took up a teaching post at Winchester College, where he helped run the Scout troop and coached the school’s first eight to victory in the Schools’ Head of the River Race and in the Princess Elizabeth Cup at Henley. 
In 1950 Lapage’s Great Britain rowing team travelled to Australia and New Zealand for the Empire Games, the forerunner of the Commonwealth Games. ‘‘Our boat got lost,’’ he recalled. ‘‘We had to borrow one and we won a bronze, which was a good effort.’’ Even better, there was meat for every meal they had: ‘‘For breakfast, we had steak with an egg on the top.’’ 
Lapage’s evangelical upbringing, and the experience of nearly being shot down in 1945, eventually convinced him that he had been ‘‘saved to serve’’, and in the late 1950s he went out to Kenya, where he served as a schools inspector during the Mau Mau uprising. He was ordained in Kenya in 1961. 
In 2012 he carried the Olympic torch in the relay for the 2012 Games, in St Austell, Cornwall. The same year he joined the crew of 18 former Olympic oarsmen who rowed the barge Gloriana when it stole the show at the Henley Regatta. 
In 1953 he married Margaret Butcher, the daughter of a missionary. She died in 1995 and he is survived by two daughters and a son.

source: The Telegraph


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## Gnomey (Aug 13, 2018)




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## michaelmaltby (Aug 18, 2018)

Why the 114-year-old Lee-Enfield rifle is only now being retired by the Canadian Armed Forces


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## nuuumannn (Sep 6, 2018)

New Zealand fighter pilot Alan Peart has passed away. He was 96.

Quoted from a colleague of mine from another forum:

From Colin Hanson’s By Such Deeds – Honours and awards in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, 1923 – 1999 :

*PEART, Flight Lieutenant Alan McGregor, DFC.*
NZ412729 & 132746; Born Nelson, 25 Jul 1922, RNZAF 7 May 1941 to 7 Oct 1945, Res. to 25 Jul 1977; Pilot.
*Citation Distinguished Flying Cross *(2 Jun 1944): [81 Sqn RAF (Spitfire)] _Flying Officer Peart is a keen and courageous fighter who has destroyed five enemy aircraft and damaged several more. He has taken part in a very large number of sorties and set a fine example of devotion to duty throughout._
*WWII Fighter Ace*. Credited with the destruction of 7 1/3 enemy aircraft, plus seven damaged, Post-war research suggests that two of those damaged may in fact have been destroyed. He served in Britain (on 610 Sqn), North Africa, Malta, Sicily, Italy, India and Burma, completing three tours of duty - two operational and one instructional. In Aug 1993, Flt Lt Peart recalled two occasions in which he faced high odds in the air. The first was over Bone, North Africa, when alone, he was faced with 12 Me 109Gs. The second occasion was over Burma when he and his Squadron Commander faced 20 Japanese ‘Oscars’ - his CO losing his life. His twin brother, Wg Cdr R Peart, served in the RNZAF as an Engineer.

News article from Radio New Zealand: World War II flying ace Alan Peart dies

I took these photos a few years back at a special meet where funds were raised to get Alan a flight in a two-seat Spitfire. That's former 485 (NZ) Sqn, RAF Spitfire pilot Jim Robinson at right.




Alan Peart 1




Alan Peart 2

RIP Alan.

(Mods, I was going to post this in the News pages, but apparently I have insufficient privileges to do so!)


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## Wurger (Sep 6, 2018)




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## Gnomey (Sep 6, 2018)




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## v2 (Oct 20, 2018)

Captain *Johnny Meagher*, bomber pilot. 

Captain Albert “Johnny” Meagher, who has died aged 97, had a distinguished career as a squadron leader flying Lancaster bombers on operations over Europe and later as a pilot with British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), flying worldwide routes when he served as flight manager of the Britannia and VC 10 fleets.
Meagher flew his first bombing operation on June 25 1942, when he attacked Bremen in a Lancaster of 61 Squadron. This was the third of the so-called “Thousand Bomber Raids”. He returned to the German city twice more over the next few days before taking part in raids against Hamburg and Wilhelmshaven. During the next six weeks he attacked 11 more cities including Frankfurt, Munich, Kiel and the industrial cities in the Ruhr.
On October 17, 94 Lancasters of Bomber Command’s No 5 Group made a daring daylight attack against the Schneider factory at Le Creusot in Burgundy. The factory was regarded as the French equivalent of Krupps and produced heavy guns, railway engines, tanks and armoured cars.
The force flew at low level and crossed the French coast in the Bay of Biscay before climbing to bombing height. Meagher had to abandon his first run owing to problems with the bombsight. He circled and made a second run, by which time the target was shrouded in dense smoke.
He was able to identify the adjacent power station, and this was bombed. By the time he completed his attack the other bombers had left and he returned alone at low level to find his base covered in fog; he had to divert to another airfield after a flight of more than 10 hours.

Over the next few weeks he attacked the cities of northern Italy, including bombing a factory complex in Milan at low altitude. On later sorties he went to the Baltic ports to drop mines from low level at night.
Meagher regularly brought back photographs to confirm the accuracy of his attacks and in November 1942 he was commissioned, having just been awarded an Immediate DFM for his “outstanding ability as captain and his continued gallantry”.
In January 1943, Bomber Command returned to attacking Berlin for the first time in more than a year. The raid on January 16 was to be given maximum publicity and the prominent American NBC reporter, Stan Richardson, joined Meagher’s crew and was able to record the operation for an American audience. This was Meagher’s 30th and final sortie before being rested. He was awarded the DFC.
Albert Meagher, always known as Johnny, was born in Salford on February 24 1921 and educated at Salford Grammar School. After leaving school he joined the central laboratory of ICI Metals Division in Birmingham, where he met his future wife, Maureen Mail. Although in a reserved occupation, he volunteered for training as a pilot and was called up in July 1941. He completed his training as a bomber pilot and joined No 61 Squadron in June 1942.
After his operational tour, Meagher spent the next 18 months training pilots to fly four-engine bombers and returned to operations in October 1944 as a flight commander on the recently formed No 227 Squadron. Over the next eight months he flew another 20 operations over Germany, some during daytime. Many of his targets were associated with the oil production facilities in the Ruhr.
On three occasions enemy night fighters attacked his Lancaster. Over the Pölitz oil refinery in Poland his aircraft was damaged, but he pressed home his attack and returned to his base on three engines.
He flew on the Dresden raid, and on April 17 1945 made his last operational flight, when the target was Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. A Focke-Wulf 190 which attacked his Lancaster was destroyed by his rear gunner. Meagher was awarded a Bar to his DFC for his “inspiring example and outstanding courage”.
In the final days of the war, Meagher’s squadron helped repatriate prisoners of war. “It was quite a contrast to fly to Brussels on May 4 to bring back 24 British PoWs to an airfield near Oxford,” he wrote.
In August, Meagher was seconded to BOAC. Over the next four years he flew Lancastrian and York aircraft on the empire routes to Australia and Africa, having elected in June 1946 to remain with BOAC and leave the RAF.
Early in 1950, BOAC took delivery of the Handley Page Hermes aircraft and Meagher was involved in many of the proving flights to Africa. The Johannesburg service proved a particular problem, but eventually, in November 1950, the service opened with Meagher in command of the first flight.
In June 1951, following the Iranian nationalisation of the British-controlled Abadan oil refinery and expulsion of British nationals, Meagher flew to Iran to repatriate them. He took off with a full load of passengers; shortly after take-off one of the four engines failed, but he managed to reach Cairo.
In January 1952 Meagher was selected as one of the early Comet pilots. He flew routes to Africa and to Japan. On January 9 1954 he was in command of Comet Yoke Peter, which he flew from Karachi to Rome, having refuelled at Bahrain and Beirut. He handed the aircraft over to the new crew, who perished with their 29 passengers shortly after take-off when the Comet disintegrated over Elba. 
Over the next few years Meagher played a key role in the introduction into service of the Bristol Britannia airliner. For 10 years he conducted many proving flights and flew one to the US on a sales promotion tour across North America. For his services in introducing the aircraft into BOAC service he was awarded a Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air.
He became the flight manager of the more advanced version of the Britannia, and in 1958 he was in charge of the flight that took the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester on a state visit to Ethiopia. Before the flight he made visits to assess the suitability of local airfields, the one at Addis Ababa being at an altitude of 7,500 ft. He assessed the airfield to be suitable, and after a 12-hour direct flight he took the Royal party to Ethiopia on November 16. 
In January 1961 he took the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on a six-week state visit to India, Pakistan and Iran. This involved a great deal of planning and survey visits. Meagher arranged for the flight from West Pakistan to East Pakistan to fly along the southern edge of the Himalayas and pass close to Mount Everest at 25,000 feet.
In Iran, the Shah and his wife joined the Royal party on a flight from Tehran to Shiraz, and Meagher flew low-level passes to allow his passengers to see the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis. On March 6 the Britannia left Tehran to head back to the UK. As they flew over France, the Queen invited Meagher to join her, thanked him for his services and appointed him a Commander of the Royal Victoria Order.
In February 1965 Meagher converted to the Vickers VC 10, which he described as “a fine aircraft”. Two years later he was appointed flight manager of the fleet and was later a member of the BOAC team which negotiated the amalgamation of BOAC and BEA to become British Airways.
Meagher was a DIY enthusiast and built a reinforced concrete swimming pool in the family garden. He played squash and golf and won the autumn medal at his club, Burhill, when he was 58.
Albert Meagher married Maureen Mail in 1943; she died in 1996. Their two sons and two daughters survive him.
*Albert “Johnny “ Meagher, born February 24 1921, died September 21 2018*

source: The Telegraph


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## Wurger (Oct 20, 2018)




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## jetcal1 (Oct 20, 2018)




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## FLYBOYJ (Oct 20, 2018)




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## michael rauls (Oct 20, 2018)

**


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## Gnomey (Oct 20, 2018)




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## N4521U (Oct 20, 2018)




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## v2 (Oct 26, 2018)

Air Vice-Marshal *Charles Gibbs *

Air Vice-Marshal Charles Gibbs, who has died aged 97, flew supplies and personnel in support of the North African campaign, and later in Italy and to the Yugoslav partisans.
On December 3 1943 Gibbs took off in his Dakota aircraft from Bari in southern Italy, escorted by 12 USAAF fighters, to fly to a remote field near Glamoc in the Bosnia region of Central Yugoslavia. On board was Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean [Maclean was considered to be one of the inspirations for James Bond] and five of his staff, together with supplies. 
In worsening weather, Gibbs had to avoid low cloud in mountainous terrain before finding the landing area marked with bonfires. The aircraft, with the engines kept running, was unloaded before three British officers, six Yugoslavs and six German prisoners of war embarked. Nine minutes after landing, Gibbs was airborne again. This was the first successful daylight landing in enemy occupied Yugoslavia. Gibbs was Mentioned in Despatches.
Over the next four months he dropped supplies to the partisans, and on March 20 1944 he landed on a snow-covered field to deliver special equipment including a Jeep and trailer. He had 15 personnel on board on the return flight, including some British officers who had escaped from the Germans. Five days later it was announced that he had been awarded the DFC. He was described as “an officer of untiring energy, courage and devotion to duty, which merit the highest praise”.
Charles Melvin Gibbs was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on June 11 1921 and educated at Taumarunui. He worked as a student engineer with the Public Works Department in Turangi before joining the Royal New Zealand Air Force in May 1941. After completing his elementary flying training he travelled to England in November. 
After gaining his “wings”, he converted to transport aircraft and joined No 267 Squadron, based near Cairo. Flying Hudson aircraft, he flew supply missions in support of the Eighth Army. In March 1943 Dakotas replaced the Hudsons, and in June Gibbs was the captain of one of six crews that moved to an advanced landing ground near Tunis to provide support for the invasion of Sicily. Two nights after the initial assault on June 9, he flew a diversionary raid to drop dummy paratroops, flares and pyrotechnics to the west of the main landing areas. With a foothold gained in southern Sicily, he flew elements of the USAAF 33rd Fighter Group to a captured airstrip and over the next two weeks he took supplies into a number of airfields in southern Sicily. On each occasion he evacuated casualties on the return flight. He returned to Cairo a month later and, shortly afterwards, dropped supplies to a British force on the island of Leros. On November 11 Gibbs flew his Dakota into the airfield at Bari, which was found to be “in a chaotic state”. Nevertheless, the transporting of supplies from Malta and Egypt began immediately. After his sorties into Yugoslavia – the final one on March 19 1944, when he dropped supplies to partisans in Croatia – Gibbs had been flying at intensive rates for a year. He had a few weeks’ rest before converting to the Martin Marauder, a US-built medium bomber that equipped just two RAF squadrons, both in the Mediterranean theatre. In June he joined No 14 Squadron, based at Alghero, north-west Sardinia, to carry out anti-shipping and reconnaissance sorties, some for the planning phase of the landings in Southern France which took place on August 15. With the end of maritime operations in the western Mediterranean, Gibbs flew patrols from an Italian airfield on the Adriatic. In September 1944 the German Navy towed the 52,000-ton Italian luxury liner Rex to Trieste to blockade the port. No 14 Squadron shadowed its progress and on the 8th, a force of Beaufighters attacked the ship. The following day, after another strike, Gibbs arrived on patrol just after the liner had capsized.
At the end of the year the squadron moved to Chivenor in Devon and re-equipped with the Wellington, flying 10-hour patrols over the Southwest Approaches. In May 1945 the squadron searched for surrendering U-boats and, on May 29, Gibbs flew the squadron’s final operational sorties. He was again mentioned in Despatches.
After the war Gibbs was posted to Air Headquarters in India and was heavily involved in transport operations during Partition. He flew Dakotas with No 62 Squadron before joining the air staff in Karachi, and towards the end of 1947 moved to Mauripur, the RAF’s last airfield in the new state of Pakistan, where he witnessed many harrowing scenes. 
He transferred to the RAF during 1947. In April 1950 he once again served overseas, this time at RAF Khartoum on the Tropical Trials Experimental Unit. In early 1954 his flying career took a new direction when he started to fly single-seat fighter ground-attack aircraft. He became the commanding officer of No 118 Squadron, flying the Venom from Fassberg in Germany. After three years on the directing staff of the RAF Staff College at Bracknell, he was chosen as one of three RAF officers seconded to the Pakistan Air Force to advise on the creation of the PAF Staff College. He remained on the directing staff for a further two years. On return he was appointed OBE. In October 1961 Gibbs was based at his old wartime station at Chivenor, the home of the operational conversion unit, training pilots to fly the Hunter fighter ground attack aircraft. He was the chief flying instructor and in command of the flying wing. On promotion to group captain he trained on the Lightning. On one flight, the undercarriage of his Lightning collapsed and the aircraft rolled upside down. The fire and crash crew were able to rescue him from the upturned aircraft, which was a complete wreck.
For two years he commanded RAF Wattisham in Suffolk, where he maintained his flying currency on the Hunter and the Lightning. In 1966 he was advanced to CBE.
After attending the Imperial Defence College, he filled a number of senior posts in the MoD before becoming the Air Officer Administration in RAF Germany in 1970. The squadrons were re-equipping with the latest combat aircraft and helicopters, resulting in significant developments of the real estate and support facilities. With more than 50,000 personnel, together with their dependants and a large local civilian work force, Gibbs had an extensive remit spread over a sizeable parish.
His final appointment was as the Director of Personal Services (RAF) at the MoD. On retirement in 1976 he was appointed CB.
For 12 years he was the recruiting consultant with Selleck Associates in Colchester and in 1986 he returned to his native New Zealand, where he settled at Taupo near Auckland.
Gibbs exuded an air of calm authority. As a senior officer he made informal visits to stations to meet and listen to people at their workplace and was greatly respected for his measured advice to station commanders. One senior officer described him as “unflappable and a charming person who never needed to raise his voice to be heard … a true gentleman”.
In later life he was an active member of ACT New Zealand, a classic Right-wing liberal political party, and from 1996 was the chairman of the Taupo electorate. He was an avid fly fisherman – his freezer was always stocked with trout – and a keen golfer who remained active to the end of his life. He was still driving a car a few months before his death. He donated his uniforms and medals to the Auckland Museum.
Charles Gibbs married Pam Pollard in 1947. She died in 1991. Their daughter survives him. 
Charles Gibbs, born June 11 1921, died October 3 2018





source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Oct 26, 2018)

F/O* Maurice Webb *

Maurice Webb, who has died aged 93, flew as a navigator on a Mosquito squadron attacking shipping in the Bay of Biscay and off the Norwegian coast. Forced to bail out over France after an attack, he managed to return to England and was awarded an immediate DFM.
Webb and his pilot, Harold “Hal” Corbin, took off from an airfield in Cornwall on August 14 1944 to take part in a shipping strike on the Gironde River near the port of Bordeaux. Flying a Mosquito of 248 Squadron, they attacked a destroyer with rockets and cannons.
They encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire from other ships and land batteries and the port engine of their aircraft was severely damaged; all the fuel was lost from one tank and the navigation equipment was wrecked. Flying on one engine at 50 ft, hoping to find a beach to crash-land on, they headed for Brittany, where US forces had recently liberated the airfield at Vannes. The remaining engine continued to function and Webb navigated the aircraft to the coast, but it was too dark to locate the airfield. Corbin managed to climb to 4,000 ft when the two men bailed out. Webb landed in a field and made contact with local farmers, who sheltered him before passing him on to US troops. The following morning he was reunited with Corbin and they were flown to Normandy; a few days later they returned to the squadron in England. Corbin was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal (one of only 109 given to the RAF) and Webb the DFM, his station commander praising his “great courage and devotion to duty”.
Maurice James Webb was born on August 24 1924 at Willington, near Bedford, and educated at Bedford Modern School, where he excelled at maths and rugby. Aged 15 he volunteered with the Home Guard patrolling the Bedford-to-Bletchley railway line, and the day after his 17th birthday he enlisted in the RAF.
After training as a navigator in Canada, he joined 235 Squadron in February 1944 and teamed up with Corbin to fly the Beaufighter on shipping strikes. Two months later they transferred to 248 Squadron. They attacked naval vessels in the Bay of Biscay, and on June 30 damaged an M-Class minesweeper. On July 27 their Mosquito was hit by anti-aircraft fire as they attacked a convoy off the French coast and they were forced to return on one engine.
Following their successful evasion in France, they returned to fly operations just as their squadron moved to Banff in Morayshire to carry out attacks against convoys off the Norwegian coast. On September 14 they led the anti-flak section to attack escorts sailing with a convoy off Kristiansand. After attacking an armed trawler, Corbin and Webb scored many strikes on a merchant ship with cannons. Four days later, they discovered a surfaced U-boat (U-867) near Bergen. They strafed it with their 20mm cannons before dropping two depth charges, which damaged the submarine. Webb commented on his return: “It was one of the few times we returned from an ‘op’ without sustaining any damage to the Mossie.” The next day, the damaged U-boat was discovered by a Coastal Command Liberator, which attacked, causing further damage that resulted in the 50-man crew abandoning the submarine. In December 13 Corbin and Webb flew as part of a large force attacking an important convoy in Eidsfjord. As they dived behind their squadron commander, the flak was intense and they saw the starboard wing of their CO’s aircraft torn off, before the plane plummeted into the sea.
Two weeks later they led eight Mosquitos to attack two vessels in Leirvik harbour. One was left on fire, with the other emitting smoke, but their aircraft had been hit and one engine was damaged. As they departed, a force of German fighters appeared, but Corbin flew just above the sea, hoping the damaged engine would hold out.
They escaped but were forced to shut down the engine and return on one. As they approached the runway at Banff, the aircraft crashed just short of the runway and hit a stone wall. The two men were trapped and slightly injured, and the first to arrive on the scene to pull them from the wreckage was their commanding officer, Group Captain Max Aitken. It turned out to be their last operational flight. After VE Day, Webb joined the RAF communications squadron in Denmark and flew with the unit for 12 months before being demobbed in late 1946 as a flying officer. 
Webb took over the family fruit and vegetable firm, supplying local businesses. It flourished until the arrival of the aggressive supermarkets in the 1980s.
Many years after the war, Webb and his son returned to Brittany and met the farmer who had sheltered him. The farmer’s daughter presented Webb with a piece of his silk parachute, which she had used for her own wedding dress.
Webb was devoted to Bedford Rugby Club, serving on the club committee for over 30 years, and as the announcer at matches. Out of respect for his service, a minute’s silence was held before one recent match.
Maurice Webb met his future wife, Hazel, at the club and they were married in 1951. She survives him, with their son and daughter.
Maurice Webb, born August 24 1924, died August 15 2018

source: The Telegraph

Maurice Webb (right)


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## at6 (Oct 26, 2018)

To all above. They are vanishing from among us too fast.


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## fubar57 (Oct 26, 2018)




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## michael rauls (Oct 26, 2018)

Sadly, time continues its relentless march. Indifferent to even the greatest and most decent amoung us.

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## Gnomey (Oct 26, 2018)




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## fubar57 (Nov 12, 2018)

WW2 veteran/Marvel Comics Chairman Stan Lee passed away today

Marvel Comics co-creator Stan Lee dead at 95 | CBC News


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## Wurger (Nov 12, 2018)




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## vikingBerserker (Nov 12, 2018)

Sad day indeed, RIP.


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## N4521U (Nov 12, 2018)

One of those people you think will go on forever.
Lived a long and fruitful life.


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## Gnomey (Nov 12, 2018)




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## GrauGeist (Jan 16, 2019)

Corporal Newman, USMC, Navajo Code Talker, passed away on Sunday (13 Jan 2019).

He served in the PTO and survived battles such as Bougainville, Guam and Iwo Jima. He was 94.

Pilimaya Tunkasila 

Navajo Nation Mourns Passing of Navajo Code Talker Alfred K. Newman


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## michael rauls (Jan 16, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Jan 16, 2019)

John ‘Jack’ Lyle, one of the last Tuskegee Airmen...

'Captain Jack' Lyle, South Side native and one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen dies at 98


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## Wurger (Jan 16, 2019)




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## michael rauls (Jan 16, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Jan 16, 2019)

michael rauls said:


>


Deleted by JC1


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## jetcal1 (Jan 16, 2019)




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## v2 (Jan 16, 2019)

Joan Fanshawe 

Joan Fanshawe (98), one of the last of the Battle of Britain WAAF plotters, who was there when Churchill visited RAF Uxbridge, dies in NZ near family.
One of the last surviving "map plotters" of the Battle of Britain, Joan Fanshawe, has died in New Zealand.
Fanshawe, who was 98, was visiting her two daughters in Auckland and took ill while baking a Christmas cake. She later died in hospital.
Fanshawe, whose maiden name was Moxon, joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force at 19 on the declaration of World War II, abandoning plans to study for a social work degree. She enlisted out of a sense of duty, saying that since her father had no sons to volunteer, she would do it instead. She was on WAAF duty on September 15, 1940 - the day the Battle of Britain came to a head with 1500 aircraft fighting for control of the skies above London. The Royal Air Force was stretched to the limit as the German Luftwaffe pressed to gain supremacy in the air. 
One of 10 special duty WAAF staff, Fanshawe worked shifts in the operations room at RAF Uxbridge in West London.
Their role was to pinpoint both RAF and enemy aircraft positions using flagged blocks and arrows on a huge plotting table and grid reference map of southern England.
It was there that Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill famously asked New Zealander Air Vice Marshall Keith Park about committing his reserve aircraft: "How many more have you got?". 
Park replied: "None".
Park was in charge of the Uxbridge setup.
Witnesses of the event suggested that Churchill's response to news of the lack of additional aircraft was "quite grave".
Despite the visit from the British Prime Minister, Fanshawe noted in her diary that she was "rather annoyed" the commander-in-chief's visit had extended her shift by an hour.
In the last decade she became quite a celebrity in Britain given her role in the war and was an honoured guest this year at the RAF's centenary celebrations in London. Three years earlier she gave a reading at the Westminster Abbey Battle of Britain Day service.
Earlier this year she attended the premiere of British documentary _Spitfire_, which commemorated the men, women and aircraft involved in the victory in the Battle of Britain.
As one of the last surviving map plotters, she also appeared in a number of documentaries about the war.
Her funeral, attended by about 60 people, was held in Manurewa at the St Elizabeth Anglican Church. 
Fanshawe's ashes are to be returned to Britain where they will be interred in her local Anglican church's cemetery in Stroud, Hampshire.
A regular visitor to New Zealand over the past 18 years, Fanshawe is survived by her son, Lionel, who lives in Stroud, Hampshire, and her Auckland-based daughters, Althea and Dionys.


source: NZHerald

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## fubar57 (Jan 16, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Jan 16, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Jan 16, 2019)




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## rochie (Jan 16, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Jan 18, 2019)

Not often a man is decorated by both sides in a war.
Surgeon Capt Rick Jolly, from Torpoint, Cornwall.
Falklands, 1982

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## Gnomey (Jan 18, 2019)

'Hero' surgeon of Falklands War dies

Remarkable man. His book is well worth a read too.

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## rochie (Feb 1, 2019)

Timmo was a forum member and i just saw this on Facebook 

From the Kent Battle of Britain museum

It is with great sadness we have learned of the passing of our friend Wing Commamder John 'Tim' Elkington at the age of ninety-eight. 

Tim flew in No.1 Squadron during the Battle of Britain and was shot down on 16th August 1940. With his Hurricane, Serial No.P3137, on fire he baled out near Nab Light. Flight Sergeant Fred Berry saw he was in trouble and used his slipstream of his own aircraft to blow him inland, landing at West Wittering. Tim was taken to the Royal West Sussex Hospital at Chichester.

Sadly Flt/Sgt. Fred Berry was shot down and killed (1st September 1940) before Tim was unable to thank him for saving his life.

Parts from both their aircraft are on show in the Kent Battle of Britain Museum Trust at Hawkinge, guaranteeing their deeds and memory will live on for generations.

Our thoughts are with Tim's family.

RIP, Blue Skies

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## fubar57 (Feb 1, 2019)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Feb 1, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Feb 1, 2019)




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## N4521U (Feb 1, 2019)




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## Wurger (Feb 2, 2019)




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## Wayne Little (Feb 2, 2019)




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## at6 (Feb 2, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Feb 2, 2019)




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## Airframes (Feb 2, 2019)




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## michael rauls (Feb 2, 2019)




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## v2 (Feb 5, 2019)

W/C Tim Elkington 

John Francis Durham Elkington – known as ‘Tim’ was born in Edgbaston on 23rd December 1920.
He joined the RAF in September 1939 and carried out flying training at 9 EFTS at Ansty from October 1939 to April 1940. He then had 3 months flying Hawker Harts and Hinds at Cranwell. Commissioned on the 14th July 1940, Tim joined No.1 Squadron at Northolt the following day on Hurricanes. He had success on 15th August where he shot down a Me109 around Harwich. The following day Tim was vectored towards Portsmouth flying as top weaver above the squadron. Heading to engage a large formation of German aircraft heading for Portsmouth Tim’s Hurricane P3137 was hit by a cannon shell in the starboard fuel tank. Bursting into flames he baled out around 10,000 with some shrapnel wounds. During his descent, Tim passed out and had he landed in the sea would have likely drowned. However Flt Sgt Berry followed him and with his slipstream, amazingly blew Tim Elkington on to land at West Wittering. Sadly Tim never got to thank Fred Berry who was killed on the 1st September 1940.
Tim rejoined No. 1 Squadron after his recovery, then at Wittering, in 12 Group, on 1st October 1940 and first flew again the following day. He claimed a Ju88 on the 9th and shared in the destruction of a Do17 on the 27th. In April 1941 Tim was posted to 55 OTU at Usworth as an instructor and later Ouston. He joined 601 Squadron in late May at Manston.
In late July he joined 134 Squadron, then forming at Leconfield for service in Russia. The squadron embarked on _HMS Argus _on 12th August and on 7th September it flew off the carrier to the airfield at Vaenga, near Murmansk. During September and early October 134 took part in bomber escorts and airfield defence. In mid-October it began training Russian pilots on Hurricanes, which were handed over at the end of the month. Whilst in Russia Tim shared in the destruction of another Ju88. 
In mid-November 1941 the squadron pilots began the journey home, making their way in three minesweepers to Archangel, sailing from there in _HMS Berwick_ on 1st December.
134 reformed at Eglinton in January 1942 and Tim joined the MSFU at Speke in April, remaining with it until August, when he rejoined No. 1 Squadron at Acklington. He was posted to 539 Squadron there in September, a Turbinlite Havoc unit. When 539 was disbanded on 25th January 1943, Elkington was posted to the newly-formed 197 Squadron at Drem, equipped with Typhoons. He was warned for overseas in September 1943 and in December joined 67 Squadron at Alipore, India.
With his tour completed he went to the ADFU at Amarda Road in February 1944. He returned to the UK for a course at CFE Tangmere in May 1945 and went back to India in July.
He returned to the UK on 27th October 1946 and had a long post-war career in the RAF, retiring on the 23rd December 1975 at the rank of Wing Commander. 
Sadly Tim passed away aged 98 in early 2019. He has been another wonderful ambassador for a special generation and I’m honoured to have met another hero.

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## Wurger (Feb 5, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Feb 5, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Feb 5, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Feb 7, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Feb 18, 2019)

Sailor caught in the photo "The Kiss" passes away...It was one of the most famous photos of our time. Now the sailor at the centre of it has died | CBC News


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## at6 (Feb 19, 2019)

The girl in the photo died a couple of years ago. A very quickly vanishing generation.


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## michael rauls (Feb 19, 2019)

Just a couple years ago( I think 2 or 3) the last ww1 veteran passed away.
It's going to be quite the sad milestone when the last ww2 veteran does.

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## Gnomey (Feb 19, 2019)




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## Crimea_River (Mar 10, 2019)

Jack Hilton RCAF - Typhoon Pilot Dies at 99 

Blue Skies Jack 

Jack Hilton, WWII fighter pilot, dies at 99 | CBC News

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## BiffF15 (Mar 10, 2019)

RIP.


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## jetcal1 (Mar 10, 2019)




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## N4521U (Mar 11, 2019)




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## Airframes (Mar 11, 2019)




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## michaelmaltby (Mar 11, 2019)

"... The Typhoon was a mean, vicious machine."


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## fubar57 (Mar 13, 2019)




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## AMCKen (Mar 14, 2019)

Alberta WWII veteran Jack Hilton dies at 99


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## Wurger (Mar 14, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Mar 14, 2019)




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## michaelmaltby (Mar 31, 2019)

'When he spoke, people listened': 101-year-old WW II hero passes away | CBC News


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## Gnomey (Mar 31, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Apr 2, 2019)




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## michael rauls (Apr 2, 2019)




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## Torch (Apr 9, 2019)

Richard E. Cole - Wikipedia


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## vikingBerserker (Apr 9, 2019)

Dammit!

Blue Skies


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## Capt. Vick (Apr 9, 2019)

Damn...RIP Hero


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## Wurger (Apr 9, 2019)

R.I.P


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## FLYBOYJ (Apr 9, 2019)




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## buffnut453 (Apr 9, 2019)

Had the privilege of meeting him on 3 occasions. Always a charming and complete gentleman. Blue skies, sir!

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## soulezoo (Apr 9, 2019)

I met him once at a Doolittle reunion. Agree with buffnut. 

RIP Dick.


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## MIflyer (Apr 9, 2019)

From the National WWII Museum:

We are saddened to hear of the passing of the last surviving Doolittle Raider, Colonel Richard Cole at 103. Hear COL Cole's incredible story of bravery and heroism in this interview with Gary Sinise at the The National WWII Museum. #MemDayPBS

I loved the book and movie Thirty Seconds over Tokyo and because of that, as well as because the Doolittle Raiders were collected for the mission at my home town, Columbia SC, I have always felt a connection to them. That connection grew stronger when I was stunned to find out that my high school math and mechanical drawing teacher, Lt Col H. E. Crouch, was the Bomb/Nav on Plane No.10.

.

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## Gnomey (Apr 9, 2019)




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## N4521U (Apr 9, 2019)

Years ago I jumped into N4521U at Livermore CA, a 150D Cessna, picked up a friend at the San Jose AP
and flew off to Modesto to a Raiders reunion. Many of them were there, had to be around 1993.
Had a great time, attended the lunch and listened to tales. Doolittle was not there that year.
The fruits of my trip were the John Shaw print, as well as one done by one of the Riders, see attached below.
Each had been signed by Some of the Raiders, I made the rounds and had the rest present sign as well, no one else did this.
I later purchased a signed copy of Thirty seconds, includes a photo of the former General.
The best little flight I have experienced. A great day.
May all the raiders RIP. True volunteer heroes.

****These are hanging on my walls now, have for years.

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## MIflyer (Apr 9, 2019)

When I moved to my present home in 1993 I found out that my next door neighbor, Willard Smith, had flown B-25's in the Med in WWII. His squadron commander was Ted W. Lawson's co-pilot, Dean Davenport.

Davenport told Willard that the real Doolittle Raiders were used as extras in the movie "A Guy Named Joe" which, like "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" starred Van Johnson and Spencer Tracy.

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## Wurger (Apr 10, 2019)




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## Wayne Little (Apr 10, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Apr 10, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Apr 10, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Apr 10, 2019)

Moved from the other thread


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## Tieleader (Apr 10, 2019)

The last cup is turned over...


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## jetcal1 (Apr 10, 2019)




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## Fishboy (Apr 13, 2019)




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## dick56 (Apr 13, 2019)

a repeat


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## DBII (Apr 13, 2019)

I grew up reading 30 seconds, God is My Co-pilot and The Flying Tigers. Heros of my youth.


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## Fishboy (Apr 13, 2019)

I can remember my first week in junior high school. My first exposure to a library with a wide array of books. The first book I checked out was Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. The 2nd book was God is my Copilot. I agree.....heroes of my youth as well. Rest In Peace.

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## MiTasol (Apr 22, 2019)

Another write up on Richard Cole and an early post war write up on three other Raiders.
Dick Cole - Honorary Unsubscribe


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## v2 (Apr 23, 2019)

*S/L* *John Sauvage *

Born and bred Seychellois war hero John Sauvage who fought in World War Two, died on April 3 aged 100, after a short illness.
He was the last surviving member of his crew in the RAF’s 97 Squadron.
Seychelles’ high commissioner (HC) to the United Kingdom, Derrick Ally, will attend his funeral on April 29 at the Harwod Park Crematorium, Watton Road, Stevenage SG2 8XT in the United Kingdom.
HC Ally has described Captain Sauvage, a highly decorated Pathfinder, as a man of indomitable spirit.
“A man of indomitable spirit, Mr Sauvage played a major role in the fight for freedom during one of the darkest periods of the last century. His passing is a battle that he could not have won, he has won all others,” said HC Ally.
Squadron Leader Sauvage was born in Seychelles and moved the United Kingdom to further his education in 1939. But when war broke out he joined the RAF and trained for Bomber Command. He went on to join 97 Squadron and flew in sorties over German-occupied Europe.
HC Ally added that the Seychelles high commission team was invited to Captain Sauvage’s 100th birthday celebrations on February 9 at his home in Datchworth, Hertfordshire, in England. He celebrated his birthday with wife Rosemary, aged 94, and their five children at their home.
“Captain Sauvage was very pleased to see us and was touched when I conveyed to him the best wishes of the people and government of Seychelles on this important milestone,” added HC Ally.
Captain Sauvage’s favourite saying was: “Life consists of the quick or the dead, particularly when you have a Messerschmitt 109 up your arse”.
One of his sons, Peter Sauvage, had this to say to _Seychelles NATION_ about his father: “Jean Sauvage, Dad to us, was a man who we respected, admired and we’re very proud of. There is no one we know who has achieved so much not just during the war but afterwards in his working life. He has lived in the UK but his heart was always in the Seychelles, his true home, a place he always wanted to talk about, proud of his roots, a place he was always happy to be a part of. He missed it but knew he had to be here to achieve his aims … which he did.”
Squadron leader Sauvage was an RAF hero who survived 64 bombing raids, helped trick the Germans over the D-Day landings and pioneered the package holiday. 
He was one of the Pathfinder squadron’s most distinguished pilots in the Second World War, lighting up enemy targets with flares for the main bombing force to strike. And he was among the 10 per cent of Bomber Command airmen to survive the entire war, receiving three medals for his skill and courage.
To dupe the Germans that British and American forces were looking to land in France, he flew a lookalike for Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery to Gibraltar days before the landings. 
If German intelligence thought the British Army supremo was 1,500 miles away then the Allied invasion of Europe would not happen anytime soon, was the argument. The episode was immortalised in the 1958 John Mills movie ‘I Was Monty’s Double’ in which an actor played the part of Squadron Leader Sauvage.
After the war he flew planes in the Berlin airlift, before becoming a pilot at Eagle Airways based at what is now Luton Airport, developing the idea of packaged holidays abroad, and eventually becoming a chairman at the Thompson Travel Group. In 1943, he was awarded an immediate Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) following a hair-raising operation on industrial Friedrichshafen in southern Germany. 
While over the target area his Lancaster bomber was shot up by flak but he managed to fly it on to Algeria as planned and made a safe landing.
His plane was so badly damaged it couldn’t make the return flight to Britain and he and his crew had to catch a lift.
In August 1943 he took part in the bombing raids on the German V-2 rocket sites at Pennemunde on the Baltic coast.
He went on to be awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and Bar for being a ‘highly skilled and a determined pilot’ and for his ‘act of selfless bravery’.
Towards the end of the war Squadron Leader Sauvage became a VIP pilot to Battle of Britain supremo Sir Keith Parks and Lord Louis Mountbatten. 
His eldest son Paul said: “He enjoyed a stellar career in the RAF. He flew in 64 bombing missions in the war and survived unscathed. That is a remarkable statistic on its own.
“But it is a fact that less than 10 per cent of aircrew who flew at the beginning of the war survived to see the end of it.
“Dad never spoke a lot about the war but the older he got the more he started to reminisce and opened up and when he did I always made a point of writing it down.”
WO Tommy Doherty, of the RAF presentation team, said: “We are truly saddened at his passing and consider him a true legend.
“Squadron Leader Johnnie’ Sauvage OBE, DFC, DSO had an outstanding career and served our nation in its darkest hour, we will never forget him.”
Jennie Mack Gray from the RAF Pathfinders Archive said: “John Sauvage was one of the legendary Pathfinder figures, a brilliant pilot and leader, and a vivid and charismatic personality.” 
Captain Sauvage also served as a test pilot for the risky process of in-flight refueling and is credited with bringing the Boeing 737 aircraft to Europe.
In 1975 Squadron Leader Sauvage was awarded the OBE for his services to the airline industry.

source: Seychelles Nation

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## Gnomey (Apr 23, 2019)




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## Wurger (Apr 23, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Apr 23, 2019)




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## Marcel (May 5, 2019)

Jan Linzel passed away at an age of 103 at liberation day today.

He was one of the Dutch Heroes!

He was one of the D.XXI pilots during the 5 days war in May 1940, flying form Ypenburg, The Hague. After some resistance work, he escaped to the UK and flew Spitfires and Tempest fighters from there. After the war he was comander of the VlieHorst and as such was responsible for the training of countless NATO fighter pilots. He was one of our last airwarriors left. Rest in peace Jan 




> "I'm no hero. Soldiers on the ground, they are heroes. In an aircraft you can always evade the bullets." -_Jan_ _Linzel_



For the interested, I did a thread about him many years ago: The May fliers - Jan Linzel

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## Gnomey (May 5, 2019)




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## Wurger (May 5, 2019)




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## michael rauls (May 5, 2019)




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## fubar57 (May 8, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (May 9, 2019)

Marcel said:


> Jan Linzel passed away at an age of 103 at liberation day today.
> 
> He was one of the Dutch Heroes!
> 
> ...


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## michaelmaltby (May 30, 2019)

A great historian ....
John Lukacs, R.I.P.: The American Who Understood Europe :: Conrad Black
".. Roosevelt withdrew his ambassador from Berlin after the Kristallnacht outrages against German Jews in 1938, and Hitler responded in kind. But when Roosevelt did seek and win a third term, gave the British 50 destroyers, imposed peacetime conscription for the first time in American history, extended American territorial waters from three to 1,800 miles, ordered the U.S. Navy to attack any German ship on detection, and then passed the Lend-Lease Act offering the British and Canadians anything they wanted on relaxed repayment terms, Hitler had some reason to believe that he would soon be at war with America. In these circumstances, it made some sense for Hitler to imagine that if he was facing war in the west with Britain and America, Stalin might be induced to stab him in the back — but if he could flatten Russia first and then commit his entire strength to the defense of the German European fortress, the Anglo-Americans might have to acquiesce in German domination of most of Europe."


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## michaelmaltby (May 30, 2019)

Last of the Mohawk WW2 Code Talkers passes on ...
Last surviving Mohawk Code Talker kept his secret for seven decades


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## Gnomey (May 30, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Jun 5, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Jun 5, 2019)




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## michaelmaltby (Jun 14, 2019)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova...i-devils-brigade-veteran-dead-at-98-1.5173257


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## vikingBerserker (Jun 14, 2019)




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## Wurger (Jun 14, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Jun 14, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Jun 19, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Jun 24, 2019)

Robert Friend, one of the last Tuskegee Airmen passed away yesterday

Robert Friend, one of last original Tuskegee Airmen, dead at 99

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## Gnomey (Jun 25, 2019)




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## N4521U (Jul 31, 2019)

How come we don't know of these heroes until they pass. 
Just around the "corner" from me, William Ronald Cundy, 1922-July 22, 2019, 97 years of age.
A long time Cronulla, NSW, RSL Sub-branch member.
RAF 135, 260 Sqns. RAAF 452 Sqn.


Cundy, William Ronald, DFC and DFM
WII flying ace, Cronulla's Ron Cundy dies aged 97
Flt/Lt William "Ron" Cundy, Sattler
A Gremlin On My Shoulder; The Story of an Australian Fighter Pilot by Ron CUNDY on Rare Aviation Books

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## fubar57 (Jul 31, 2019)




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## rochie (Aug 1, 2019)




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## Wildcat (Aug 1, 2019)

Another hero passes...


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## Wurger (Aug 1, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Aug 1, 2019)




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## MiTasol (Aug 3, 2019)

Battle of Britain pilot dies hours after celebrating 100th birthday


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## fliger747 (Aug 3, 2019)

Does the Queen still send every Centarian a personal birthday greeting?


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## fubar57 (Aug 3, 2019)




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## pbehn (Aug 3, 2019)

fliger747 said:


> Does the Queen still send every Centarian a personal birthday greeting?


It now has to be requested I believe.


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## pbehn (Aug 3, 2019)

MiTasol said:


> Battle of Britain pilot dies hours after celebrating 100th birthday


I think we put too much on these guys in the twilight years of their life. The press make it a macabre last man standing competition and some of the questions they ask are an insult to veterans and humanity. Bless you Archie McInnes and have a nice rest, in peace.

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## BiffF15 (Aug 3, 2019)

RIP and thank you for your service.


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## Zipper730 (Aug 4, 2019)

Rest in Peace.


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## michael rauls (Aug 4, 2019)

Battle of Britain Huricane pilot. Survived being shot down and made it to one hundred........ To a life well lived.

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## rochie (Aug 4, 2019)

R.I.P Sir


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## Wurger (Aug 4, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Aug 4, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Aug 6, 2019)

Dorothy Olsen, one of the last WASPS passes away...Pilot Who Was a Daredevil Flier with WASPs During WWII Dies at 103

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## rochie (Aug 6, 2019)

R.I.P Ma'am


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## Wurger (Aug 6, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Aug 6, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Aug 23, 2019)

Squadron Leader John Hart, Battle of Britain’s last surviving Canadian pilot, dies at 102

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## michael rauls (Aug 23, 2019)

To Dorothy Olson and John Hart both, R.I.P. and thank you for your service. .
Such wonderful lives they lead.


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## at6 (Aug 24, 2019)

A generation rapidly vanishing into the mist. We shall see the likes of them no more.

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## michaelmaltby (Aug 24, 2019)

Canadian-born Squadron Leader who was one of the last surviving Battle of Britain pilots dies at 102 | Daily Mail Online


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## Gnomey (Aug 24, 2019)




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## rochie (Aug 24, 2019)

fubar57 said:


> Squadron Leader John Hart, Battle of Britain’s last surviving Canadian pilot, dies at 102


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## Airframes (Aug 24, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Aug 24, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Sep 20, 2019)

Lauren Bruner, from the U.S.S. Arizona passes away...

With death of Lauren Bruner, 98, only three survivors of USS Arizona attack remain

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## michael rauls (Sep 20, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Sep 20, 2019)




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## at6 (Sep 20, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Sep 20, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Sep 26, 2019)

Tuskegee Airman, Leslie Edwards Jr. passes away

Leslie Edwards Jr., local Tuskegee Airman, dead at age 95

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## jetcal1 (Sep 26, 2019)

Double


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## at6 (Sep 26, 2019)




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## michael rauls (Sep 26, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Sep 30, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Oct 10, 2019)

Francis Currey, one of the last three surviving WWII Medal of Honor recipients, dies at 94 | Daily Mail Online

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## michael rauls (Oct 10, 2019)




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## Wurger (Oct 10, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Oct 10, 2019)




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## at6 (Oct 14, 2019)




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## Peter Gunn (Oct 14, 2019)




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## michaelmaltby (Nov 8, 2019)

Remembering Hank Buttelmann, the ‘adrenaline junkie’ pilot who became the youngest Korean War ace


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## Gnomey (Nov 9, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Nov 9, 2019)




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## v2 (Nov 25, 2019)

*Noble Frankland, *former Bomber Command navigator who revived the Imperial War Museum but ran into controversy with his official history of the air offensive against Germany. 
In May 1960 the Imperial War Museum, a dusty institution cramped under the leaking dome of the former Bethlem psychiatric hospital in south London, was seeking a new director. The advertisement in the Times was noted by a man reading his paper with unusual attention that morning, having left at home the documents he had intended to study on the train.
Noble Frankland was a decorated RAF veteran and a military historian about to publish a monumental history of the second world war strategic air offensive against Germany. He had no museum experience at all, and had been profoundly unimpressed by his own research visits to the IWM, but with a young family to support he decided to go for his first permanent, pensionable job. Frankland, who has died aged 97, won over the 15-person interview panel bristling with grandees including Admiral of the Fleet Sir Algernon Willis, and believed many candidates with museum experience had been put off by what he described as the museum’s “dismal state of decay”. Over his 22 years as director Frankland transformed this backwater into an internationally renowned research and education resource, and a major tourist attraction. Within six years the Queen opened an extension that dramatically improved the facilities and displays, with for the first time a cinema, to show the huge film collection. Frankland went on to add HMS Belfast, the largest cruiser ever built for the Royal Navy, saved from being scrapped to tell the story of sea warfare, moored on the Thames near Tower Bridge. On an old airfield in Cambridgeshire, where Frankland first got permission to use a few hangars to store some of the museum’s more gigantic objects, he created Duxford, a world-famous air museum. Together the sites, now expanded to include the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall and the IWM North in Salford, attract more than 3 million visitors annually. Frankland had found the museum a sad place, with a decaying and barely catalogued collection including a vast photographic archive, tended by a few dozen demoralised staff: the workforce rose to more than 300 over his tenure. In his entertaining and peppery book History at War: The Campaigns of an Historian (1998) – which Frankland insisted was not a memoir, but merely used personal experience to illustrate the difficulties of recording and interpreting authentic history – he recalled one typical display: “A large case of shell fuses each of which looked very much the same as the others. The subtle differences between these only moderately interesting public exhibits were explained in lengthy handwritten captions.” The outgoing director, LR Bradley, had been there since the museum was founded in 1917, devoted, but avoiding outsiders and colleagues as much as possible. He was actually living in a tiny room off his office, and rarely left the building. He had strung a washing line across the boardroom, and was once saved by a staff member who got the laundry down just before the board members arrived. Bradley told Frankland that he had recommended the post of director be downgraded, and that he believed the museum, founded to mark the sacrifice and costly victories of the first world war, had lost its purpose with the advent of the second world war and the torrent of new material into its already overcrowded storage. Under Frankland’s aegis, and since, the museum’s mission has expanded to cover all the conflicts in which Britain or the Commonwealth has been involved since 1914. He used the collections in his role as a historical adviser to two major television series, the BBC’s The Great War (1964), which enraged him by not fully distinguishing between genuine archive film and reconstructed battle scenes; and ITV’s epic and award-winning 26-episode The World at War, produced by Jeremy Isaacs, at £900,000 in 1973-74 the most expensive factual series ever made. Frankland was known in his family as Bunny, a name he chose for himself as a small boy. His first name, Anthony, was never used, and according to his daughter, he detested the exotic Noble so much that at the museum he insisted on being addressed simply as Dr Frankland; to make clear he was not just pulling rank, he retained the increasingly old-fashioned honorific usage for all staff. He was the grandson of distinguished scientists, the chemist Percy Faraday Frankland (whose father was the chemist Edward Frankland) and the microbiologist Grace Toynbee. Noble’s father, Edward, was a somewhat dilettante gentleman farmer in Ravenstonedale, Westmorland, largely supported by his wife, Maud (nee Metcalfe Gibson), the daughter of a wealthy engineer, while in his ample spare time he wrote a string of mainly unpublished novels. Staff for the isolated farm was a problem. Frankland recalled a butler who once threatened to murder the two rowdy small boys – rather than sack him, Edward rigged a coal scuttle over their bedroom door to raise the alarm for Noble and his brother, Raven. Noble won scholarships to Sedbergh school and then to Trinity College, Oxford, where his history studies were interrupted by RAF service in 1941. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross after serving as navigator for 34 operations with Bomber Command, at a time when the lives of many crews were measured in days. He told his daughter the labour exchange sent him to his next post, at the Air Historical Branch of the Air Ministry. There, with the help of his first wife, Diana (nee Tavernor), who during wartime had worked at Bletchley Park and translated captured German documents, he began work on what became the four-volume The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, co-authored with Sir Charles Webster and published in 1961 – by which time Frankland had served a stint as official military historian at the Cabinet Office. It covered campaigns still provoking moral debate, including the bombing of cities such as Dresden and the resulting civilian casualties.
Their conclusion that the bombing was initially both inaccurate and ineffective led to some bitter attacks, particularly in the Beaverbrook press. Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, head of Bomber Command during the war, described Frankland as “a somewhat rabid individual”. Years after the book’s publication, access to cabinet and air ministry papers revealed to Frankland the battles that had raged above his head over what should be included and how it should be handled. “There were fierce and threatening attacks from some of the great figures of the second world war,” he wrote. His other published work included the biographies Crown of Tragedy (1960) about Tsar Nicholas II; Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1980), about the former president of the IWM trustees; and Witness of a Century (1993), about Queen Victoria’s third son, Prince Arthur, who became governor general of Canada.
Frankland was appointed CBE in 1976, and CB in 1983; in 2016 he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur.
He is survived by his children, Linda and Roger, from his 1944 marriage to Diana, who died in 1981; and by three stepchildren, William, Cathy and Serena, from his 1982 marriage to Sally (nee Davies), who died in 2015.
*Anthony Noble Frankland*, museum director, born 4 July 1922; died 31 October 2019 

source "The Guardian"

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## v2 (Nov 25, 2019)

Flight Lieutenant *Bill Paton*, who has died aged 101, was a Canadian navigator who used his baseball skills to distract German guards in Stalag Luft III while soil was dispersed during the digging of the tunnels used during the 'Great Escape'.
Paton arrived in the Luftwaffe-controlled camp at Sagan, 100 miles south-east of Berlin, after his Wellington bomber had been shot down on the night of April 16, 1943. He joined other PoWs in the north compound, where work had recently started on digging three escape tunnels.
Paton soon found himself involved in helping to disperse the excavated sandy soil carried in pouches made from blankets and suspended down the trouser legs of the "penguins" - so-called because of their ungainly gait when walking with full pouches. During the dispersal of the sand it was vital to distract the attention of the German guards, so sporting activities were arranged. In addition, the shuffling of the players' feet ensured that the sand was scattered into the ground. Paton played baseball, and formed a team from his fellow Canadians. He organised tournaments, sometimes against the PoWs in the south compound, which housed Americans. After the escape of 76 prisoners on the night of March 24, 1944, 50 of those recaptured were shot by the Gestapo, among them a number of Paton's friends. William Edgar Paton was born in Toronto on July 27, 1918 and educated at Riverside High School, after which he started work with Canada Life Insurance. In 1941 he joined the RCAF and trained as a navigator in Canada before joining an Atlantic convoy to sail to Britain. In July 1942 he was commissioned and attended a course at the Central Navigation School before converting to the Wellington bomber. In December he joined the recently formed No 431 (Iroquois) Squadron RCAF based at Burn airfield near Selby in the West Riding. During the 'Battle of the Ruhr', Paton and his crew flew six bombing operations against industrial complexes.
On the night of April 16, Mannheim was the target: during that raid Bomber Command suffered its highest losses so far. Among the casualties were Paton's crew.
Four managed to bale out, but the rear gunner was killed. On the ground Paton faced an angry mob, but he was soon captured and sent to Stalag Luft III.
After the 'Great Escape', life at Sagan resumed a more orderly pattern, until the winter of 1945. On January 27 the PoWs were given a few hours' notice that the camp was to be evacuated - Soviet troops were some 20 miles to the east. Paton and his colleagues gathered as much material and food as they could carry on an improvised sledge. Just before midnight the column of 2,000 men departed. The winter was exceedingly harsh. Initially they walked steadily for 10 hours.
The column marched on for a further 30 hours, in temperatures well below freezing, resting in whatever shelter they could find. They continued to Spremberg, where they eventually boarded railway goods wagons. There was not enough room for everyone to lie down and the sanitary arrangements were non-existent. After three days, the PoWs arrived at a camp 20 miles north of Bremen, where they remained until April. Paton and his colleagues finally arrived at Lubeck, and on May 1, soldiers of the British 11th Division liberated them.
His wife Marie survives him with two sons and a daughter.
Bill Paton died October 25, 2019.


source: Easy Branches

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## rochie (Nov 25, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Nov 25, 2019)




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## Crimea_River (Nov 25, 2019)

Blue skies.


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## Gnomey (Nov 25, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Nov 25, 2019)




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## michaelmaltby (Nov 27, 2019)

Legendary Soviet spy Goar Vartanyan dies | DW | 26.11.2019


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## Crimea_River (Nov 27, 2019)

From Gary Bridger on FB:

Glyn Powell QSM 1934 - 2019.
It is with a heavy heart and enormous sadness to announce that my dearest friend Glyn Powell passed away yesterday 26th November. Glyn passed peacefully in a rest home surrounded by his immediate family. Glyn had been unwell for some time but his sudden passing still comes as a huge shock.
It was Glyn’s enormous vision, courage and determination that enabled him to build from scratch, all the necessary tooling to rebuild the wooden DH Mosquito airframe, something thought impossible by everyone except Glyn. The complex fuselage moulds alone took Glyn five years to build and they are an engineering masterpiece in their own right. As a result of Glyn’s vision, there are now three NZ restored Mosquitos flying in the USA with two more on their way. Glyn received The Queens Services Medal (QSM) for services to aeronautical heritage preservation in 2014.
Sadly, Glyn never saw his initial ambition of completing and flying his own Mosquito NZ2308. However NZ2308 is earmarked for the Mosquito Pathfinders Trust in the UK, and all going to plan, it will be completed at Avspecs at Ardmore and operated by the Pathfinders Trust out of Duxford UK. A fitting legacy to Glyn and his remarkable achievements.
Glyn’s enormous self belief and never give up attitude is an inspiration to us all. He must rank as one of our most remarkable New Zealanders, who against all odds, achieved the impossible in his own shed on a shoe string budget. It has been a complete and utter privilege to have known him.

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## Snautzer01 (Nov 27, 2019)




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## jetcal1 (Nov 27, 2019)




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## Wurger (Nov 27, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Nov 27, 2019)




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## Snautzer01 (Nov 27, 2019)

Adding. I do think this man is the god of building. Making a new machine is difficult enough. But recreating tools long forgotten .... on youre own my, my, my.. i do hope he can rest in peace and somebody will take up his vacant space.

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## buffnut453 (Nov 27, 2019)

Now there is a modern day hero. The patience, skill and engineering acumen it must have taken to achieve that goal is truly remarkable. An incredibly sad loss to all those of us who love historic aviation.

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## MiTasol (Nov 27, 2019)

v2 said:


> *Noble Frankland, *former Bomber Command navigator who revived the Imperial War Museum but ran into controversy with his official history of the air offensive against Germany.
> 
> In his entertaining and peppery book History at War: The Campaigns of an Historian (1998) – which Frankland insisted was not a memoir, but merely used personal experience to illustrate the difficulties of recording and interpreting authentic history....
> *Anthony Noble Frankland*, museum director, born 4 July 1922; died 31 October 2019
> source "The Guardian"





Sounds like a most interesting book and surprisingly the cheapest version is on Kindle but I would prefer a paper version if I can find one at a reasonable price.
I will try my library but am not hopeful


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## MiTasol (Nov 27, 2019)

Crimea_River said:


> From Gary Bridger on FB:
> 
> Glyn Powell QSM 1934 - 2019.



A great loss to the restoration world but hopefully he will inspire others to "do the impossible"

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## Gnomey (Nov 27, 2019)




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## v2 (Dec 10, 2019)

Flt Lt *Maurice Mounsdon *
One of the last surviving pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain during World War Two has died aged 101. 
Flight Lieutenant Maurice Mounsdon was one of only four remaining members of The Few - a group of 3,000 airmen who defended the skies above southern England from the Nazis in 1940. The head of the RAF, Air Chief Marshal Mike Wigston, said Mr Mounsdon's bravery should never be forgotten. The Battle of Britain led to the deaths of 544 RAF pilots and aircrew. Their bravery and sacrifice in withstanding the greater numbers of German pilots of the Luftwaffe and a possible invasion was recognised by then Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few," he told MPs. Churchill's "Few", as RAF crew, who included Polish, Canadian and New Zealand pilots among others, became known, have been celebrated ever since. Mr Mounsdon was described by his nephew, Adrian Mounsdon, as a "great man" who would be missed by his family, the Daily Mirror reported. ACM Wigston said he was "deeply saddened" by Mr Mounsdon's death, saying the veteran had "fought for and won our freedom". "His was a remarkable story, which will continue to inspire this and future generations of the Royal Air Force, his bravery and sacrifice should never be forgotten," he added. In 2015, Mr Mounsdon told the BBC he was serving with 56 Squadron out of North Weald when he was sent out to intercept some bombers on 31 August 1940. He managed to shoot at one of them, but then a German cannon shell hit the fuel tank of his Hawker Hurricane. "I was on fire. There was only one thing to do and that was to get out as fast as possible," he told the BBC. "I was badly burned, but I rolled the aircraft over and came down by parachute from 14,000ft." He said it was the first time he had used a parachute and he was "jolly lucky". Mr Mounsdon, who had terrible burns to his legs and hands, landed in a field in the village of High Easter, Essex, where he was found by local people. He spent a number of years in various hospitals, where he had skin grafts. While in hospital, he married his childhood sweetheart Mary. The couple moved to the Spanish island Menorca in the late 1970s and lived there until she died in 1993. For Mr Mousdon's 100th birthday in September last year the Red Arrows paid tribute to him with a flyover off the coast of Menorca. 
The three surviving members of the Few are Flt Lt William Clark, 100, Wing Commander Paul Farnes, 101, and Flying Officer John Hemingway, 100.

source: BBC News.

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## Airframes (Dec 10, 2019)




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## Wayne Little (Dec 10, 2019)




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## fubar57 (Dec 10, 2019)




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## Wurger (Dec 10, 2019)




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## rochie (Dec 10, 2019)




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## Vahe Demirjian (Dec 11, 2019)

The Few are remembered in aviation legend as the airmen who beat the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain in late 1940, leading Winston Churchill to remark that "Never was so much owed by so many to so few". However, the death of Flight Lieutenant Maurice Mounsdon last Friday leaves just three remaining members of the The Few: William Clark (100), Paul Farnes (101), and John Hemingway (100). Just as this year marked the death of the last living participant in the Doolittle Raid, early 2020 could see the remaining members of the Few pass away.

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## Gnomey (Dec 12, 2019)




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## Gnomey (Dec 12, 2019)




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## michael rauls (Dec 12, 2019)

Quite a group of men that has unfortunately accumulated here in the obituaries since I last was here. Even someone who joined the military at the very end of the war would be in there mid 90s. Those from the first year or two pushing 100. Weve come to a tragic wall in time. Pretty soon we'll have lost them all.


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## fubar57 (Jan 7, 2020)

Oldest survivor of USS Indianapolis has died at 98
Don Howison was the last living officer of the USS Indianapolis


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## michael rauls (Jan 8, 2020)

R.I.P....... It was really brutal what those guys went through. Hope it was followed by a great life.


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## Gnomey (Jan 8, 2020)




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## Crimea_River (Jan 9, 2020)

W.C Russell Bannock RCAF, DSO, DFC & Bar died January 4, 2020 aged 100.

Remembering aviation legend Russell Bannock - Skies Mag

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## Wurger (Jan 9, 2020)




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## Gnomey (Jan 9, 2020)




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## Airframes (Jan 12, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Jan 12, 2020)




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## nsmekanik (Jan 12, 2020)




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## Vahe Demirjian (Jan 12, 2020)

My grandpa died last week at age 92. 

View Richard Demirjian's Obituary on eastbaytimes.com and share memories

He lived a special life sailing to Europe on a troopship by WW2's end and having Armenian youth enter into athletic competition in California. He wrote a number of books about Armenian Americans who fought for freedom in WW2:

_Triumph and Glory: Armenian World War II Heroes_
_The Faces of Courage: Armenian World War II, Korea, and Vietnam Heroes_


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## Gnomey (Jan 12, 2020)




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## jetcal1 (Jan 12, 2020)

Vahe Demirjian said:


> My grandpa died last week at age 92.
> 
> View Richard Demirjian's Obituary on eastbaytimes.com and share memories
> 
> ...


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## jetcal1 (Jan 12, 2020)

Crimea_River said:


> W.C Russell Bannock RCAF, DSO, DFC & Bar died January 4, 2020 aged 100.
> 
> Remembering aviation legend Russell Bannock - Skies Mag


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## Graeme (Jan 12, 2020)

Vahe Demirjian said:


> My grandpa died last week at age 92.



My condolences Vahe. Looks like he had a good life.

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## michael rauls (Jan 12, 2020)




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## MIflyer (Jan 13, 2020)

*Walter J. Boyne 1929-2020*

Jan. 10, 2020 | By John A. Tirpak

Walter Boyne, retired Air Force pilot, author of more than 50 books about aviation, former director of the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum, and former chairman of the National Aeronautic Association, died Jan. 9, at the age of 90. 
Raised in East St. Louis, Mo., Boyne attended Washington University in St. Louis for two years, then left to join the Air Force’s aviation cadet program, earning his wings and commission in 1952. He flew B-50 bombers before transitioning to the B-47 and then the B-52.
Boyne was selected for the 4925th Nuclear Test Group and was a “nuclear ace,” dropping five nuclear weapons in tests. Returning to school, he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh. As commander of the 635th Services Squadron, Boyne flew 120 combat hours in Vietnam as an instructor in the C-47. He retired from USAF as a colonel in 1974, having logged more than 5,000 flight hours during his 22 years in uniform. 
Boyne launched his writing career in 1962, ultimately building a catalog of 47 nonfiction aviation books, seven novels, and more than 1,000 magazine articles, including frequent contributions to _Air Force Magazine_. He had both fiction and nonfiction books make it onto the _New York Times_ bestseller list.

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## Wurger (Jan 13, 2020)




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## michael rauls (Jan 13, 2020)

Sounds like quite an impressive life.
R.I.P. ..

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## jetcal1 (Jan 13, 2020)

Boyne? He can't die. He is a fixture.


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## Crimea_River (Jan 13, 2020)

Blue skies....


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## Gnomey (Jan 14, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Jan 15, 2020)




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## v2 (Jan 21, 2020)

Jim Auton: Newark's hero of Warsaw Uprising dies. 

One of only three remaining RAF heroes of the Warsaw Uprising has died. Mr Auton and his comrades were instrumental in the British-led Warsaw Airlift operation, which resupplied the besieged Polish resistance, the Home Army, in their uprising against Nazi Germany during the second world war. 
Mr Auton grew up on RAF airfields in the 1920s and 1930s because his father was a member of ground crew who worked on the maintenance of the RAF's earliest aircraft.
He joined up in 1941 and, having seen the devastation poured on British cities caused by the Luftwaffe, hoped to do his bit. He wanted to be a Spitfire pilot, but was later re-trained as a bomb-aimer. At only 20, he flew 37 wartime missions with 178 Squadron, but is best known for his contribution and bravery during the Warsaw Uprising. On August 1, 1944, after five years of Nazi rule, the resistance in Warsaw rose up in an effort to overthrow their oppressors. Within the next few days around 180,000 Polish civilians were killed, including an estimated 60,000 children. The resistance had supplies to last only three days of fighting. On August 12, 1944, Mr Auton and his crew flew to Warsaw to drop 12 containers with essential weapons, ammunition and medical supplies. During a six-hour flight to the beleagured city, he witnessed one of their aircraft shot down before he found the drop zone. 
"We must have been mad," Mr Auton told. "Planes were being shot down all around us. "I said we had not come all this way to drop the supplies in the wrong place. "You just felt like a robot and the training took over." Two nights later, he and his crew would return to drop further supplies. On his 37th mission, Mr Auton was seriously wounded, suffering damage to his lungs and he lost an eye. After the war he became fluent in six languages and was even asked to spy for British intelligence — but refused. In 1989, Mr Auton was responsible for the creation of the Warsaw Air Bridge Memorial — another name for the airlift — in Newark Cemetery, which stands next to the Polish and Commonwealth War Graves section. 
The memorial cross was erected to commemorate both the Home Army and the 250 British, Polish and South African airmen who died in support of the freedom fighters of Warsaw.
His wife, Peggy, is buried by the cross and he has a plot next to her. Mr Auton raised £3m for the Air Bridge Association, which he also founded. 
For his wartime bravery, he was awarded 19 medals from different countries including France, Poland and Czechoslavia, as well as, an MBE from Prince Charles for his charity work.
In then letter sent him, Polish Ambassador to the UK, Arkady Rzegocki, said he was uplifted and grateful for the role he played. Mr Rzegocki wrote: "With the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war, I am all the more grateful that we can celebrate deeds of individuals such as yourself, who did not back away when your fellow human beings were in need. "You are an example to follow for future generations."
Mr Auton died on Saturday.


source: Newark Advertiser


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## Snautzer01 (Jan 21, 2020)

Quite a man.


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## Airframes (Jan 21, 2020)




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## Wurger (Jan 21, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Jan 21, 2020)




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## Gnomey (Jan 21, 2020)




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## v2 (Jan 29, 2020)

Wing Commander Paul Farnes DFM 

One of the last of the Few, Wing Commander Paul Farnes DFM, died peacefully at his home in Hampshire on Tuesday morning (28 Jan) at the age of 101. 
A huge supporter of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust and well known to Trustees, staff and many of the volunteers at Capel-le-Ferne, Paul was the last member of the Few who was fit enough to attend the annual Memorial Day and proudly represented his RAF colleagues at this year’s Service of Commemoration just over a week before his 101st birthday on 16 July.
A tall, distinguished man with striking silver grey hair that he retained throughout his life, Paul Farnes was known for plain speaking but was generous with his time in support of Trust activities. He was also very proud of the DFM he was awarded as a Sergeant Pilot, declaring in a recent interview that he “wouldn’t swap it for two DFCs”.
After joining the RAFVR in 1938 he took the opportunity In July 1939 of spending six months with the regular RAF before converting to Hurricanes and joining No 501 Squadron on 14 September, moving with the squadron to Bétheniville in France on 10 May 1940. His score during the Battle of France was one enemy aircraft destroyed, one possibly destroyed and two shared, but that was just a curtain raiser to his impressive tally in the Battle of Britain that followed.
On 12 August 1940 he claimed a Ju 87 destroyed, on the 15th two more, on the 18th a Do 17, on the 28th a Bf 109 and on the 30th a He 111 damaged. He damaged two Bf 109s on 2 September and a Bf 110 on 3 September, damaged Do 17s on the 14th and 27th, destroyed a Ju 88 on the 30th and got probable Bf 109s on 29 October and 8 November – just after the official end of the Battle. It was a remarkable tally – six destroyed, one probably destroyed and six damaged within the timeframe of the Battle of Britain – and saw him awarded the DFM on 22 October.
After being commissioned, Farnes served as an instructor and fought in Malta with No 229 Squadron as well as serving in North Africa and Iraq. As the war ended, he was in command of two squadrons in the UK.
Remaining in the RAF until 1958, he retired as a Squadron Leader, retaining the rank of Wing Commander.

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## Gnomey (Jan 29, 2020)




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## Vahe Demirjian (Jan 29, 2020)

Today, another valiant British airman bites the dust:

Paul Farnes, last Battle of Britain ace, dies aged 101 | News | The Times

With Paul Farnes' death at age 101, just two members of "The Few" who fought in the Battle of Britain (William Clark and John Hemmingway) are alive, and the death of the last fighter pilot involved in the Battle of Britain comes as the UK prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of that epic battle this year. Not hard to imagine Clark and Hemmingway passing away this year given that so many surviving British WW2 airmen have succumbed to the effects of old age, in which case there might be not any surviving British veterans of WW2 on the eve of the UK's celebration of the centennial of the Battle of Britain in 2040.


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## fubar57 (Jan 29, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Jan 29, 2020)

Vahe Demirjian said:


> Today, another valiant British airman bites the dust:



Bites the dust?..........classy

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## rochie (Jan 29, 2020)

Vahe Demirjian said:


> Today, another valiant British airman bites the dust:
> 
> Paul Farnes, last Battle of Britain ace, dies aged 101 | News | The Times
> 
> With Paul Farnes' death at age 101, just two members of "The Few" who fought in the Battle of Britain (William Clark and John Hemmingway) are alive, and the death of the last fighter pilot involved in the Battle of Britain comes as the UK prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of that epic battle this year. Not hard to imagine Clark and Hemmingway passing away this year given that so many surviving British WW2 airmen have succumbed to the effects of old age, in which case there might be not any surviving British veterans of WW2 on the eve of the UK's celebration of the centennial of the Battle of Britain in 2040.


Whilst i can appreciate the sentiment, i highly doubt any serving member of the RAF from 1940 will be alive in 2040 !
Even at 18 years old in 1940 they would be 118 if alive in 2040.

Badly spoiled your post with the "bites the dust" line, not very respectful

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## rochie (Jan 29, 2020)




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## Crimea_River (Jan 29, 2020)

Yep. Agree with Karl.


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## stona (Jan 30, 2020)

Last Battle of Britain flying ace Paul Farnes dies aged 101

Not much more to be said.


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## vikingBerserker (Jan 30, 2020)

Blue skies......


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## Crimea_River (Jan 30, 2020)

R.I.P.


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## rochie (Jan 30, 2020)

Sir !


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## Gnomey (Jan 30, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Jan 30, 2020)




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## Airframes (Jan 30, 2020)




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## Wurger (Jan 30, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Feb 3, 2020)

Navajo Code Talker dies at 96; less than a handful remain


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## Gnomey (Feb 3, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Mar 6, 2020)

Rosie the Riveter passes away Rosalind P. Walter, original 'Rosie the Riveter,' dies at 95

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## Peter Gunn (Mar 6, 2020)




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## Gnomey (Mar 6, 2020)




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## jetcal1 (Mar 7, 2020)




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## v2 (Mar 7, 2020)




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## Wurger (Mar 7, 2020)




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## v2 (Mar 27, 2020)

*Air Commodore Roger Topp- *pilot who flew gliders after D-Day and formed the Black Arrows display team. 

After a forced glider landing near the Rhine in March 1945 he destroyed an enemy gun emplacement with an anti-tank rocket launcher.
Air Commodore Roger Topp, who has died aged 96, created a sensation at the 1958 Farnborough Air Show when he led 22 Hawker Hunter fighters over the airfield and pulled up to complete a formation loop – a feat that has never been repeated. When he assumed command of No 111 Squadron (Treble One) in January 1955, the Hunter had started to replace the Meteor. Shortly after, Topp broke the Edinburgh-to-London speed record previously set by a Hurricane in 1938. Reaching speeds in excess of 700mph, the 332-mile supersonic transit was covered in 27 min 52 sec. The record stood for 32 years. An enthusiast for aerobatics, Topp led a five-aircraft display team which was soon performing to crowds in the UK and overseas. After winning Fighter Command’s aerobatics competition Topp and his team represented the RAF at every major air show in 1957. The aircraft were finished in an all-black gloss finish, which would play a key role in deciding the team name later that year. May 1957 was spent preparing for the major display of the year, the 22nd Paris Salon. Following a captivating display, a French journalist reported on the squadron’s exceptional flying abilities and referred to the team as “les Flèches Noires”. The squadron display team had been given its name, and from then on would be known worldwide as “the Black Arrows”. Although the Paris display was impressive, the highlight of 1957 came at the Farnborough Air Show. In place of the expected five-aircraft team, the Black Arrows displayed in a diamond nine formation. Topp was due to hand over command of Treble One at the end of 1958, and for his final display he devised a new and unique formation. At the annual Farnborough show, the 12 all-black Hunters thundered into the airfield as a further 10, drawn from other RAF squadrons, raced to join them. As the two groups of fighters started to join it became clear to those watching that something very special was about to occur. All 22 Hunters, in close formation, pulled up into the sky and completed a full loop. Just to prove this was not luck, and to the crowd’s delight, they then completed a second loop. Notwithstanding this stunning piece of precision flying, Topp had one further surprise. Six aircraft detached and he then led the remaining 16 into a barrel roll, a far more difficult manoeuvre for such a large formation. These two spectacular feats have never been repeated by such a large formation. Other fighter squadrons continued to adopt Topp’s innovative ideas for formation aerobatic teams. The RAF realised the publicity value of these displays, and a few years later it led to the creation of the world-famous Red Arrows team. For his leadership of Treble One Topp was awarded a Second Bar to the AFCs he had been awarded earlier. The son of a farmer, Roger Leslie Topp was born near Chichester on May 14 1923 and educated at North Mundham School. He left aged 15 and joined the RAF as a boy entrant in the apprenticeship scheme. In January 1939 he entered the wireless and radio school at RAF Cranwell for a three-year course. The war curtailed his training, and after two years he served at Gosport as a wireless mechanic. He was selected to be a pilot and trained in Canada. On his return to Britain in late 1944 the demand for pilots had reduced, but the losses of glider pilots on D-Day and at Arnhem had been heavy and replacements were needed. Topp volunteered, “in order to see some action”. On March 24 1945 he climbed into a Horsa glider loaded with a jeep, a gun and its crew. Taking off behind a Dakota towing aircraft he joined the huge armada heading for the River Rhine. He released from the tug aircraft near Wesel and was approaching his landing spot when his glider was hit by anti-aircraft fire, damaging the controls. He managed to make a heavy landing but the glider broke with all the occupants escaping injury. Once on the ground, the glider pilot became an infantryman. Topp was in charge of a Piat anti-tank rocket launcher and he engaged an anti-aircraft gun. A direct hit was achieved before Topp fired a second time, completely destroying the emplacement. The crew immediately surrendered to him. Two days later he was back in Britain. Topp elected to remain in the RAF and was soon flying Mosquito fighters with No 98 Squadron from an airfield in Germany. After two years he became an instrument flying instructor and was soon training and testing pilots from the many squadrons based with the British Air Forces of Occupation. At the end of his tour he was awarded the first of his three AFCs. After completing the course at the Empire Test Pilot’s School Topp flew as a test pilot from Farnborough where he evaluated new armaments including guided weapons and the 30mm cannon. In 1954, together with another pilot, he shared the 100 hours of intensive flight-testing of the Comet following three catastrophic crashes of the jet airliner. For this work he was awarded his second AFC. He then took command of Treble One. In July 1959 he went to Germany as a wing commander in charge of air defence operations at the sector control centre at Brockzetel, near Wilhelmshaven. Three years later he returned to the test pilot arena as a squadron commander at Boscombe Down, where he was responsible for fighter development and testing the early version of the Lightning supersonic interceptor and the Hawker P 1127, the forerunner to the Harrier jump jet. Topp was promoted to group captain in December 1963 to command RAF Coltishall, the base chosen for the introduction of the Lightning into RAF service.
His later years of service saw him intimately involved in the specification and development for a new multi-role combat aircraft. After serving in the operational requirements branch of MoD, he became the UK project officer in the Nato Management Agency in Munich for the joint British/German/Italian programme that led to the development of the Tornado. In 1972 he returned for a second time and served as the deputy director of the project. After retiring from the RAF in early 1978, Topp worked as a consultant for Ferranti, spending 10 years based in Bonn. He played golf all over the UK and abroad until late his life and his sailing progressed from dinghies to ocean-going yachts. But his greatest love was his garden where his creative talent transformed every garden he designed. On his 90th birthday he was reunited with his black Hunter, which had been restored at his old airfield at Wattisham in Suffolk. Despite worldwide fame for his leadership of the Black Arrows, and the adulation of a generation of young men and schoolboys who were inspired to become fighter pilots, Topp was a modest, stoical man who told his son: “Manners are paramount, as is respect for others.”
Roger Topp married Audrey Jeffery in May 1945. She died in 1999; a son and a daughter survive him.
*Roger Topp, born May 14 1923, died March 6 2020 *

Source: The Telegraph

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## fubar57 (Mar 27, 2020)




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## vikingBerserker (Mar 27, 2020)




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## Gnomey (Mar 27, 2020)




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## jetcal1 (Mar 27, 2020)




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## AMCKen (Apr 3, 2020)

Edward L. Feightner - Wikipedia

Rear Admiral *Edward Lewis Feightner* (October 14, 1919 – April 1, 2020) was a United States Navy officer who fought in a number of significant battles in the World War II Pacific Theater of Operations. During two combat tours, he shot down nine enemy aircraft to become a flying ace.
He was an early member of the Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron and flew the lead "solo" position. His work as a test pilot included aircraft, electronic systems, and operational tactics such as developing techniques for delivering nuclear weapons from small fighter aircraft. He commanded increasingly larger air units including VF-11 and Carrier Air Group Ten as well as training organizations that helped the Navy transition from propeller to jet aircraft. He commanded two Navy ships, served as the head of Navy Fighter Design, and was a key contributor to fighter studies that resulted in the development of jet aircraft that as of 2015 are still in active service.
Feightner was the only pilot to land the dash-1 variant of the Vought F7U Cutlass aboard a carrier. He led VF-11 to become the first Atlantic fleet unit in which every pilot received the coveted "E" award in a single exercise. After retiring from the Navy, Feightner promoted aviation and shared his experiences with others.


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## Gnomey (Apr 3, 2020)




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## v2 (Apr 7, 2020)

Air Chief Marshal Sir *David George Evans*, GCB, CBE (died 21 February 2020) was a senior commander of the Royal Air Force. 

Educated in Canada, Evans was commissioned into the Royal Air Force as a pilot officer under an emergency commission on 7 April 1944 during the Second World War. He underwent pilot training in Canada and he then completed in operational training in Ismaïlia in Egypt. On 7 October 1944, he was promoted to flying officer (war substantive). He was promoted to flight lieutenant (war substantive) on 7 April 1946. His promotion to flying officer was confirmed on 30 September 1947 with seniority from 7 April 1946. Evans was promoted to the substantive rank of flight lieutenant on 29 October 1948, with promotions to squadron leader on 1 October 1954, to wing commander on 1 July 1959 and to group captain on 1 July 1964.
In 1973 Evans was made Air Officer Commanding No. 1 Group, in 1976 he was appointed Vice Chief of the Air Staff and he went on to be Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief RAF Strike Command the following year. He was Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff from 1981 to 1983. 
On 9 June 1955, Squadron Leader Evans was awarded the Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. In 1985 he was made King of Arms of the Order of the Bath.
In retirement, Evans became a Non-Executive Director of British Aerospace. He died on 21 February 2020.


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## Gnomey (Apr 7, 2020)




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## jetcal1 (Apr 7, 2020)

v2 said:


> Air Chief Marshal Sir *David George Evans*, GCB, CBE (died 21 February 2020) was a senior commander of the Royal Air Force.
> 
> Educated in Canada, Evans was commissioned into the Royal Air Force as a pilot officer under an emergency commission on 7 April 1944 during the Second World War. He underwent pilot training in Canada and he then completed in operational training in Ismaïlia in Egypt. On 7 October 1944, he was promoted to flying officer (war substantive). He was promoted to flight lieutenant (war substantive) on 7 April 1946. His promotion to flying officer was confirmed on 30 September 1947 with seniority from 7 April 1946. Evans was promoted to the substantive rank of flight lieutenant on 29 October 1948, with promotions to squadron leader on 1 October 1954, to wing commander on 1 July 1959 and to group captain on 1 July 1964.
> In 1973 Evans was made Air Officer Commanding No. 1 Group, in 1976 he was appointed Vice Chief of the Air Staff and he went on to be Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief RAF Strike Command the following year. He was Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff from 1981 to 1983.
> ...


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## v2 (Apr 15, 2020)

Mjr. Jerzy Główczewski (Polish Air Force) 
Having fought in WWII and survived the battles over Europe, Jerzy Główczewski, a member of the heroic Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade and the No. 308 "City of Kraków" Polish Fighter Squadron of the RAF, passed away in Warsaw on Monday.
Jerzy Główczewski, who passed away at the age of 97, will be remembered as an example of a young man, who put their lives on the line fighting for their homeland’s freedom from totalitarian regimes. When WWII broke out, with Nazi German forces invading Poland in September 1939, the then 17-year-old Jerzy Główczeski eluded the Soviet forces assaulting Poland on September 17, fled to Romania and then to Palestine. In the Holy Land, which served as a rallying point for Polish forces and Polish civilian refugees, Główczewski continued his interrupted education at a local Polish school. That is when, having joined the Polish military, he was assigned to the Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade under General Stanisław Kopański. The soldier’s duty took him all the way through Egypt and to the besieged city of Tobruk in present-day Libya. With the aim to stop Erwin Rommel’s offensive, the Carpathian Brigade fought alongside the British 70th Infantry Division, taking part in the Siege of Tobruk. In December 1941, the Polish brigade seized the strategically important Madauar Hill, the town of Acroma, and broke through to the Eighth Army. In recognition of their impact on the battle, the Polish soldiers were awarded the prestigious title of Tobruk Rats by their Australian brothers-in-arms. After the African episode, Główczewski enlisted in the No. 308 "City of Kraków" Polish Fighter Squadron of the RAF. The squadron operated over France before its transfer to the 2nd Tactical Air Force as a fighter-bomber squadron. The squadron then followed the allied advance across Europe after the Normandy Landings in 1944.
When the war finally ended, Główczewski entered the Warsaw University of Sciences, graduated from the department of architecture and contributed to the rebuilding of Poland’s capital Warsaw. In 1962, he moved to the US where he worked at the Ford Foundation and for the UN, also teaching architecture at Pratt Institute, New York City. Later on, he became the head of the redevelopment project of the ancient Egyptian city of Aswan. The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the mission of advancing human welfare.
Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York, a satellite campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York (Pratt MWP). The school originated in 1887 with programs primarily in engineering, architecture, and fine arts. The Institute is primarily known for its highly ranked programmes in architecture, interior design, and industrial design, and offers both undergraduate and master's degree programs in a variety of fields, with a strong focus on research.

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## Wurger (Apr 15, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Apr 15, 2020)




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## rochie (Apr 15, 2020)




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## Airframes (Apr 15, 2020)




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## at6 (Apr 15, 2020)

To all of the fallen heroes. Rest in Peace.


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## Gnomey (Apr 15, 2020)




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## jetcal1 (Apr 15, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Apr 22, 2020)

John Dolny obituary: WWII fighter pilot dies at 99 – Legacy.com

John R. Dolny, A-36 Fighter-Bomber Pilot, P-47 & P-40 Pilot, MN Aviation Hall of Fame, MN Air National Guard - 8th Air Force Historical Society of Mn Presentations


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## jetcal1 (Apr 22, 2020)

fubar57 said:


> John Dolny obituary: WWII fighter pilot dies at 99 – Legacy.com
> 
> John R. Dolny, A-36 Fighter-Bomber Pilot, P-47 & P-40 Pilot, MN Aviation Hall of Fame, MN Air National Guard - 8th Air Force Historical Society of Mn Presentations


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## Gnomey (Apr 22, 2020)




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## v2 (Apr 28, 2020)

Flight Lieutenant *Ken Sumner*, bomb aimer whose targets included Hitler’s mountain retreat. 


Flight Lieutenant Ken Sumner, who has died of Covid-19 aged 96, was a bomb aimer who was awarded an immediate DFM for his actions after his Lancaster was badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire. 
On the night of April 26 /27 1944, Bomber Command launched a raid against Schweinfurt. It was Sumner’s 27th bombing operation. Some 250 miles from the target in the vicinity of Strasbourg the aircraft was hit by flak. This caused considerable damage to the bomber including several hits on the bomb bay and Sumner’s compartment in the nose of the Lancaster. Sumner informed his captain that he had been hit, but insisted in staying in his position. Sumner continued to drop “window” (metal strips to jam enemy radars) until reaching the target area, when he successfully directed his pilot on a good bombing run. He dropped the bombs in spite of damage to the bomb release wiring and then operated the aiming point camera.
On the return journey he remained at his post to drop window and to assist the navigator by getting visual fixes of the bomber’s position until they cleared the enemy coast. Only then would he allow his wounds to be dressed. The Lancaster had to make an emergency landing at an airfield near Peterborough and Sumner was immediately taken to hospital.
The citation for Sumner’s DFM concluded that “his conduct in the incident came as no surprise to his crew and squadron colleagues to whom his devotion to duty, efficiency and high personal courage have been an inspiration.” His pilot, Flying Officer Taylor, was awarded the DFC. 
Kenneth Law Sumner was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, in May 1923. His family travelled to England shortly after and settled in the North East. Ken attended Durham School, joining the OTC. He enlisted in the RAF in 1941 when he was just 18 years old and trained as a bomb aimer. After a brief spell with No 83 Squadron, in November 1943 he joined No 44 Squadron based at Waddington near Lincoln. This coincided with the beginning of the main phase of the Battle of Berlin, when Bomber Command suffered its heaviest losses. Sumner’s first four operations on No 44 were all to Berlin over a nine-day period. By the middle of January he had paid two more visits to the “Big City”. He also attacked Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich. After recovering from his injuries, he was rested from operations and commissioned. He spent six months on the staff of the bomber base at East Kirby and in March 1945 he joined No 617 Squadron, famous as the Dambuster squadron. The squadron was equipped with the 12,000 lb “Tallboy bomb”, and some crews dropped the even larger “Grand Slam” earthquake bomb of 22,000 lb. Sumner dropped “Tallboy” on the shipping area at Ijmuiden on April 7; the U-boat pens at Hamburg two days later; and on the 16th the target was the German battle-cruiser Lutzow at Swinemunde. On April 19 he dropped a “Grand Slam” on Helgoland and his final sortie of the war was against Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden.
Sumner was released for the RAF in 1946 when he moved to work on the family farm in North Yorkshire. In 1953 he moved to Gosforth and, with his son, he established NDY Coach Sales of Stanley in Co Durham. He was an ardent supporter of Newcastle United, where his son-in-law, the businessman Freddy Shepherd, was the one-time owner of the club. He enjoyed watching Newcastle Falcons Rugby Club and the sports teams at his old school in Durham. He competed six times in the Great North Run and walked the Great Wall of China at the age of 80.
Ken Sumner married his wife Phyllis Reynolds (known as Rennie) in 1946 and she died in 2015. They had two sons and a daughter.

source: The Telegraph


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## v2 (Apr 28, 2020)

*Basil Fish*, Lancaster bomber aviator who helped to sink the ‘Tirpitz’ 


Charles Basil Renshaw Fish was born in Bury, Lancashire, in 1922. He went to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Blackburn and then on to Manchester University to study engineering. He joined the university air squadron in 1941 and then decided to put his studies on hold for the war and volunteered for the RAF. He undertook part of his training in South Africa and qualified as a navigator in 1943. He then crewed up with a young pilot from New Zealand called Arthur Joplin. The crew were trained first on the Short Stirling heavy bomber, but then moved across to the more versatile Lancaster. They were then astonished to find that their first operational posting was to 617 Squadron, based at Woodhall Spa. This was a special duties squadron and normally only took on experienced crews who had already survived a tour of 30 operations. However, as an experiment, some new crews who had demonstrated above average ability were posted directly to the Squadron. They arrived on the Squadron in mid-August 1944, at first feeling rather overwhelmed. Their concern was unfounded since they were soon absorbed into the routine of extensive practice and training in order to achieve the precision for which the Squadron was renowned. It was a steep learning curve, but they found support and encouragement. The crew’s first operation came on 27 August 1944, no easy “milk run” but a daylight attack against shipping in the heavily defended port at Brest. Two more operations followed and then on 29 October the crew found itself on an operation to attack the Tirpitz, flying from Lossiemouth in Scotland. Although the battleship was damaged, it seemed from photo reconnaissance to be still afloat, and so a second operation was launched a fortnight later. On this occasion, Joplin’s crew dropped their own bomb into the smoke and observed one direct hit and two near misses. The Tirpitz was seen to capsize later, before the force left the area.
Several more operations followed and then on 21 December 1944, the squadron mounted an attack on an oil refinery at Politz, near Stettin (Szczecin) in Poland. The outward flight was uneventful and the crew reached the designated area, but found that the target marking appeared haphazard. After releasing their Tallboy they headed for home, setting course for their designated diversionary base in Scotland, which would have not only the advantage of clear weather, but would also shorten the length of the flight. However, they were then ordered to return to Lincolnshire. As they crossed the coast it became apparent that Lincolnshire was still shrouded in fog and a further instruction was received for all aircraft to land at the first available airfield. It seemed that Joplin, Fish and their colleagues were in luck, for very soon they saw a glow through the murk which was identified as Ludford Magna airfield. This was one of a small number of airfields equipped with FIDO – burning petrol to disperse fog on the runway approach to enable aircraft to land in such conditions. Joplin homed in on the glow and circled, calling up and asking permission to land. There was no reply. The crew were now in a perilous position as they were running out of fuel. They needed to land as soon as possible and were also aware of the rising ground beneath. A few minutes later, the port wing brushed a hillside and they crashed. Joplin was trapped in his seat while Frank Tilley, the flight engineer, had broken a leg but managed to drag himself to safety. Fish had been knocked unconscious but coming round he managed to rescue Joplin, who had broken both legs. The rear gunner, Jim Thompson, had survived but had fractured his spine and the wireless operator, Gordon Cooke, had a fractured skull. The other two – mid-upper gunner Bob Yates and bomb aimer Arthur Walker – were both dead. Realising that he was the least injured and the only one of five survivors with any degree of mobility Fish set off across the fields in search of assistance, having briefed Tilley to listen out for a series of whistle blasts that would signal his return. It took nearly three hours for him to locate help and bring it to the crash site, but luckily the four others were able to recover. Fish recovered well enough from his own injuries to be back flying by February 1945. Altogether he had flown on 24 operations by the end of the war, and had been commissioned. In early 1946 he applied for early release in order to complete his degree, and went back to Manchester University. He qualified as an engineer in 1947, and worked in industry until his retirement. For many years, Basil Fish was an active member of the 617 Squadron Association but recently he had been living in a care home near Harrogate.
Basil Fish died on 26 February 2020.

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## fubar57 (Apr 28, 2020)




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## Gnomey (Apr 28, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Apr 28, 2020)

Veteran Philip Kahn dies of Covid-19 over 100 years after his twin brother died from the Spanish Flu Pandemic

WWII veteran dies from coronavirus 100 years after his twin died of Spanish Flu


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## rochie (May 8, 2020)

One of the last two RAF survivors of the Battle of Britain has died 


William Terence Clark was born in Croydon on 11th April 1919. He joined 615 Squadron Auxiliary Air Force at Kenley in March 1938 as an Aircrafthand. He trained and flew as an Air Gunner in Hawker Hectors on Army co-operation duties.

Called to full-time service on 24th August 1939, Clark remustered as an Airman u/t Air Gunner.
He completed his training and joined 219 Squadron at Catterick on 12th July 1940.




With the advent of the Beaufighter and airborne radar some of the air gunners of 219 were trained on radar with the squadron as Radio Observers. Clark qualified in this category.
On the night of 16th/17th April 1941 Clark flew with 219's CO, W/Cdr. TG Pike, when his own navigator was taken ill. They intercepted and destroyed a Ju88 and a He111 in the Guildford area.

During the night of 27th/28th April, flying with F/O DO Hobbis, his regular pilot, Clark assisted in the destruction of an unidentified enemy aircraft, on 1st/2nd June and 13th/14th June they shot down He111's.
Clark was awarded the DFM (gazetted 8th July 1941).

In July 1941 he was posted to 1455 Flight, then forming at Tangmere with Turbinlite Havocs. In May 1942 he went to 1451 Flight at Hunsdon on the same duties, locating enemy aircraft by radar in the Havoc, for accompanying fighters to attack and destroy. The scheme was not a success and was eventually abandoned.

Commissioned in May 1942 from Warrant Officer, Clark moved to 60 OTU in October 1942 as a Navigation/Radar Instructor. In May 1943 he was posted to 488 (NZ) Squadron at Ayr as Navigator to the newly-arrived 'A' Flight Commander, S/Ldr. DO Hobbis, his original pilot from 219 Squadron and 1455 and 1451 Flights.
On 20th December 1943 Clark was flying with P/O D Robinson when they destroyed a Me410 over Sussex.

At the end of his tour in March 1944 Clark went to North Weald Sector Operations, where he trained as a Controller. Whilst there he was given leave to visit 488, then at Colerne. He went to dispersal to see Robinson, now a Flying Officer. His navigator was unfit to fly and Clark offered to take his place.
On this sortie, a beachead patrol on the night of 28th/29th July, they destroyed a Ju188. Clark returned to North Weald next day.

He rejoined 488 in August 1944 but two months later went to RAF Honiley Ground Approach School, after which he took No. 1 GCA Unit to Prestwick, as second-in-command.
Clark was released from the RAF in November 1945 as a Flight Lieutenant.

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## fubar57 (May 8, 2020)




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## rochie (May 22, 2020)

Saw this on Facebook page of the Typhoon preservation group

We have just received the very sad news that Harry Hardy DFC, formerly of 440 Squadron RCAF and pilot of the 'Pulverizer' Typhoons, has passed away, ten days shy of his 98th birthday.

Harry was well known and well loved by all and our thoughts and full hearts are with his family in Canada at this time.

We were humbled by Harry's support for the RB396 Project and we look forward to flying RB396 in his honour and those of his comrades who never returned home.

Harry's daughter also informed us that Harry did receive the card we created of all your messages you sent us recently. It was one of many cards and notes he received and we are told that he appreciated and delighted in them.

Thank you, Harry. Blue skies, sir.

Harry's autobiography of his time with 440 Squadron is a great read and can be found here: http://ow.ly/gk0f50zMUQF

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## Airframes (May 22, 2020)




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## Crimea_River (May 22, 2020)

Beat me to it Karl and a sad day for sure. More on Harry here:

Harry J. Hardy J20841


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## fubar57 (May 22, 2020)




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## Wayne Little (May 23, 2020)




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## v2 (Jun 1, 2020)

Squadron Leader *Jack Simmonds, *airman who assisted in the ‘Wooden Horse’ escape. 

After crash-landing in the Netherlands he spent four years in captivity and took part in the infamous ‘Long March’ in 1945. 
Squadron Leader Jack Simmonds, who has died aged 99, was 20 years old when he was shot down in his Whitley bomber; he spent the next four years in captivity and assisted in what became known as the “Wooden Horse” escape. The youthful-looking Simmonds, known to his colleagues as “Junior”, flew his first bombing raid on May 2 1941 as a co-pilot when he attacked Hamburg. Over the next few weeks he flew a further seven operations and was promoted captain. His first operation with his own crew was to join a force of 80 Whitleys to bomb the railway yards at Schwerte. On the night of July 6/7 he took part in a raid with 45 aircraft to bomb Dortmund. Over the target his aircraft was hit by flak and his observer was wounded, preventing him from baling out. With one of the two engines useless, Simmonds made a crash landing five miles from Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The crew were soon captured. 
Simmonds found himself at Oflag VIIC at Laufen Castle in Bavaria, but his stay was short and he was soon moved by cattle truck to Oflag VC at Lübeck, a journey that took seven “not very pleasant” days. By the end of 1941 many RAF officers were moved to Oflag VIB at Warburg and it was there that the first mass escape was attempted. By April 1942 four escape tunnels were being worked on and Simmonds was involved in the tunnelling party on one of them. In May, just before the first tunnel was completed, the German guards discovered it. A large party of the PoWs, including Simmonds, were moved in September to a new camp at Oflag XXIB at Schubin in Poland, where he met up with others who had been on 77 Squadron.
Once Stalag Luft III at Sagan – the specially constructed camp run by the Luftwaffe for RAF prisoners and the scene of “the Great Escape” – had been completed, the majority of PoWs at Schubin were transferred to the East Camp. It was from there that Simmonds joined the team that assisted three PoWs to make a successful escape in October 1943 using a “Wooden Horse”, and which was immortalised by a film of the same name in 1950. Simmonds remained at Sagan until late January 1945, when the prisoners were given a few hours notice to leave the camp. As the Soviet Army advanced westwards, the long column of prisoners trekked into Germany in appalling weather conditions on what became known as “the Long March”. His column arrived at Luckenwalde, south of Berlin, where the Russians liberated them. Eventually the US Army arrived and he was flown home from Brussels. Jack Simmonds was born at Gillingham in Kent on December 8 1920. His father served in the RAF, and young Simmonds had his early education at Victoria College in Alexandria. He later attended Aylesbury Grammar School. He was 19 years old when he joined the RAF to train as a pilot. Simmonds was rushed through pilot training at a time of great shortage. He flew a few sorties with No 51 Squadron before being posted to No 77 Squadron based at Topcliffe in Yorkshire. Within three months he was a prisoner of war. He remained in the RAF, and in November 1945 joined the air headquarters in Cairo. He later became the camp adjutant at Lydda in Palestine before being seconded to the Army to be the adjutant of No 651 (AOP) Squadron flying Austers. He was off duty in the King David Hotel on the day it was blown up by the Irgun terrorist group with heavy loss of life. 
After converting to four-engine aircraft, Simmonds flew the Sunderland flying boat and was flight commander of No 201 Squadron at Pembroke Dock. In 1951, to commemorate Battle of Britain Week, he landed his Sunderland on the River Thames near Greenwich and taxied it to Tower Bridge, which was opened for him, and where his aircraft was moored for six days.
He spent two years as the chief ground instructor at the Maritime Operational Training Unit at St Mawgan in Cornwall before a two-year appointment with the Royal Navy at Portland, where he was the RAF member of a joint war-gaming team. He later specialised in signals, and after tours at HQ NEAF in Cyprus and at HQ Coastal Command, he returned to flying at RAF Lindholme before retiring in 1968. 
After leaving the RAF, Simmonds went into local government, took two degrees, one with the Open University, and became a prominent member, and president, of his local Rotary Club.
Jack Simmonds married Mary, who had served as a WAAF officer in the war, in 1949; she died in 2012. Their three sons survive him.
*Jack Simmonds, born December 8 1920, died April 2 2020 *

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## v2 (Jun 10, 2020)

Colonel Mieczyslaw Stachiewicz 

Colonel Mieczyslaw Stachiewicz, who has died aged 102, escaped from his native Poland following the German invasion, and after reaching England joined a Polish bomber squadron.

Stachiewicz was serving as a cadet with the 4th Air Regiment when the Germans launched their attack on Poland. Within days he joined a force to head east, and after the Soviet invasion two weeks later he crossed into Romania, where he was interned.
He escaped in January 1940 and finally reached France. Within weeks he had to escape again, this time to England.
He had completed his basic flying training in Poland and by April 1942 he had trained as a bomber pilot and joined No 301 (Pomeranian) Squadron equipped with the Wellington. He flew his first operation on May 5, when he attacked Stuttgart. At the end of the month he flew on the first “Thousand Bomber” raid when Cologne was the target.
Over the next few months he flew more than 20 operations and attacked industrial cities during the Battle of the Ruhr. These included the Krupps works at Essen and the ports of Emden, Wilhelmshaven and Bremen. He flew a number of sorties to drop mines in coastal waters in the Frisian Islands, off Brest and at St Nazaire; he also attacked Turin, a 10-hour round flight.
On the night of May 22/23 a squadron colleague and his crew failed to return having ditched in the North Sea. Two Wellingtons, one flown by Stachiewicz, took off to search. He and his crew located a dinghy 90 miles from Cromer and guided a rescue launch to the spot. In the event, it was the crew of a Wellington from another squadron; his Polish colleagues were lost.
On July 8, as he approached the target at Wilhelmshaven, one of the two engines failed and he headed back for England. The radio had been damaged and he was unable to gain contact with ground control. He made a crash landing on one of the numerous dummy airfields designed to confuse any enemy bombers.
After 33 operations he was rested in November 1942. He was awarded Poland’s highest award for gallantry, the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari, and he was awarded the Cross of Valour three times.
Mieczyslaw Jozef Stachiewicz was born on May 21 1917 in Warsaw. His father was the son of General Julian Stachiewicz, an officer of the Polish Legions and a close associate of Jozef Pilsudski.
After graduating from elementary school in 1931 Stachiewicz attended the High School Stefan Batory in Warsaw. From January 1938 he was a student of the Aviation Reserve Cadet School in Deblin, where he completed his basic training as a pilot. In parallel, he started studying at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology.
By the time war broke out he had completed his first year of study. On August 22 1939 he was called up for summer exercises at the 4th Air Regiment in Torun and assigned to a training squadron, and soon after he was mobilised.
When he completed his tour of operation with No 301 Squadron, Stachiewicz was given leave to study at the Polish School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool. He graduated in 1946 and he decided to remain in Britain.
On November 30 1949 he adopted British citizenship. Living in London, for 35 years he worked as an architect for many companies and for local government.
In retirement he worked for Polish organisations in Britain and was active in the Union of Lviv Cadets and the Polish Aviators Association. He was the longest-serving member of the Jozef Pilsudski Institute in London, becoming its vice-president in 1983 and a year later its president, serving until his death.
He was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Polish Cultural Foundation. He was awarded the Officer’s Cross and the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for his post-war social work.
In July 2017, during a ceremony at the Polish Embassy, Stachiewicz was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the highest state decoration in Poland.
Mieczyslaw Stachiewicz married Irena Goldstein; they had a son and two daughters.
Mieczyslaw Stachiewicz, born May 21 1917, died April 30 2020. He died of Coronavirus.

source: The Telegraph

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## rochie (Jun 10, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Jun 10, 2020)




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## Snautzer01 (Jun 10, 2020)




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## Airframes (Jun 10, 2020)




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## at6 (Jun 10, 2020)

What war couldn't do, a virus did. R. I. P.


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## Wurger (Jun 10, 2020)




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## Gnomey (Jun 10, 2020)




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## v2 (Jul 10, 2020)

*Dame Vera Lynn *is honoured with a flypast from two Spitfires as crowds line the streets of her Sussex village for her funeral - on the 80th anniversary of start of Battle of Britain...

Dame Vera Lynn: Crowds applaud flypast at star's funeral | Daily Mail Online


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## Gnomey (Jul 11, 2020)




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## pbehn (Jul 26, 2020)

Olivia de Havilland, last surviving member of Gone with the Wind died today aged 104. Sister of Joan Fontaine, daughter of Walter de Havilland the first foreigner to really understand the Japanese game "Go" and cousin of Geoffrey de Havilland. We dont have families like this anymore.

Olivia de Havilland - Wikipedia
Joan Fontaine - Wikipedia
Walter de Havilland - Wikipedia

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## Gnomey (Jul 28, 2020)




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## pbehn (Aug 3, 2020)

Group Captain Donaldson's medals just came up for sale at auction. Its quite a tale. WWII hero's medal haul and damaged helmet sells for £18,600 | Daily Mail Online


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## perry clifton (Aug 16, 2020)

v2 said:


> *Mary Wilkins Ellis*- ATA Association Commodore and First Officer 'Spitfire Girl'. :salutepilot:
> 
> The last of the Spitfire girls Mary Ellis, who flew 76 different aircraft during the Second World War, has died at her home on the Isle of Wight aged 101.
> The Oxfordshire native died in Sandown on Tuesday, and was one of the two last surviving UK female Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) pilots.
> ...


Hi everyone

I live on the Isle of Wight and am honoured to of met Mary who lived at the Sandown airfield of course, as per your excellent obituary. I volunteer at the Wight Aviation Museum on the Sandown airfield. I can tell you that we are in the process of building a display at our museum to Mary with many personal effects to display. Also we hope to have a gathering of Spitfires and vintage planes next year to honour Mary, many she would of flown .
She, as all these women were, were a tribute to their countries and should not be forgotten as all our veterans.
Regards
Perry Clifton.
Sandown Isle of Wight

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## v2 (Sep 9, 2020)

*James A. Cotten,* 
a member of the fabled Tuskegee Airmen, 332nd Fighter Group, died on August 14. He was 93.

Cotten spent 21 years in the U.S. Air Force before beginning a 45-year career as a contract administrator for the U.S. Department of Defense at Joint Base McGuire-Dix. He retired in 2012 at age 85.

“We were really doing something in the interest of the nation,” Cotton said in 2017 interview “We were considered to be elite personnel. We were taught every day that this was another day to excel.”

In 2012, Cotten was presented the Congressional Gold Medal for his service with the Tuskegee Airmen. The following year, he was one of six veterans present when President Barack Obama paid tribute to the famed unit.

Cotten joined the elite, all Black Air Force unit in 1945, after he turned 18. In 1949, he was assigned to the 334th Fighter Interceptor Squadron 4th Fighter Group as the Air Operations non-commissioned officer.

He spent more than 20 years on the Board of Directors of the New Jersey Credit Union League Board of Directors and served on the Veteran’s Advisory Committee. Cotten was a Willingboro resident.

Cotten is survived by his wife of 73 years, Oteria, 10 children, 15 grandchildren, 21 great-grandchildren, and 2 great-great-grandchildren.

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## rochie (Sep 9, 2020)




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## Gnomey (Sep 9, 2020)




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## at6 (Sep 9, 2020)

Another hero gone from that generation.


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## jetcal1 (Sep 9, 2020)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Sep 9, 2020)




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## Dash119 (Sep 10, 2020)




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## v2 (Sep 10, 2020)

*Kazimiera Mika dies at 93*

The girl whom Julien Bryan’s iconic photographs from German-besieged Warsaw turned into a symbol of war suffering, passed away on 28 August, having outlived her sister, a victim of German crimes, by 81 years.
In these images, the teenager is grieving over the dead body of 14-year-old Anna, murdered by a Luftwaffe pilot who targeted a group of women collecting potatoes on the outskirts of Warsaw. The scene was witnessed and recorded by American photojournalist Julien Bryan; he managed to capture Kazia’s disbelief, shock and pain, and then put the camera away.
"The child looked at us in bewilderment. I threw my arm about her and held her tightly, trying to comfort her. She cried. So did I and the two Polish officers who were with me. But what could we tell her? What could anyone tell that child?" he recalled. Kazia was beyond consolation, but the stranger nevertheless managed to gain a little bit of her trust.
As the only foreign journalist in bombed, shelled and burning Warsaw, he often won the trust of civilians because he stood for normality and represented a friendly foreign power, which gave them a glimmer of hope in their ordeal. The Poles wanted the world to know what was happening, and needed to believe that someone would come to their assistance.
Bryan wanted that too, and went beyond his role as a witness. Via Polish Radio he addressed President Roosevelt and his fellow Americans, speaking about German atrocities, describing the tragedy of the Polish capital, and calling on his countrymen to take action. The footage he made in Warsaw shocked Eleanor Roosevelt and became the first newsreel of WWII.
After the war, he returned to Poland a few times, and met with Kazia, who recovered from her tragedy but never forgot it. She recalled his light suit, his comforting hug, and, as something of an oddity, that relentless drive which forced him to walk into destruction - when everyone else wanted to be as far from it as possible - and record it, the way he recorded her tragedy.
Apart from Julien, Kazimiera Mika also met Sam, who accompanied his father on his last visit to Poland, who came again in 2019 for the opening of the IPN’s “Siege of Warsaw 1939. Photographs by Julien Bryan" exhibition – and who is participating online in the IPN's press conference on the release of "The Most Mysterious of Countries. The Soviet Union in the Photographs and Writings of Julien H. Bryan 1930–1959" on 22 September.

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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Sep 10, 2020)

No child should witness such pain and suffering.

RIP

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## Peter Gunn (Sep 10, 2020)

So much for the Knights of the Air myth.

I believe that if you were a young fellow here in the States and started seeing these images in the news/newsreels, it would be hard to have much empathy for the Germans you'd be fighting once the U.S. got in the war. I remember seeing Don Blakeslee in an interview where he said something to the effect of him hating the German sons a bitch's. You certainly cannot condemn an entire people on the actions of a few but you see this and you can understand his point.

One wonders what motivated the Luftwaffe pilot to strafe women picking potatoes in a field, I find it hard to believe it was a case of mistaken identity.

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## Gnomey (Sep 11, 2020)




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## jetcal1 (Sep 12, 2020)

RIP


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## fubar57 (Sep 15, 2020)

One of the last Tuskegee Airmen passes away...Remembering Malcolm Nettingham, Scotch Plains' Tuskegee Airman


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## Gnomey (Sep 15, 2020)




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## Dash119 (Sep 15, 2020)




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## rochie (Sep 15, 2020)

to all


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## at6 (Sep 15, 2020)




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## jetcal1 (Sep 15, 2020)




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## MiTasol (Sep 20, 2020)

WWII veteran Brien Wygle, an unassuming icon among Boeing test pilots, dies

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## Dash119 (Sep 20, 2020)




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## Gnomey (Sep 22, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Sep 23, 2020)




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## vikingBerserker (Sep 23, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Sep 23, 2020)

Tuskegee Airman who flew in 3 wars dies at 95
Tuskegee Airman who flew in 3 wars dies at 95

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## Dash119 (Sep 23, 2020)




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## v2 (Sep 30, 2020)

*Squadron Leader Allan Scott *

One of the last Spitfire aces of the Second World War, Shropshire's Squadron Leader Allan Scott DFM, has died at the age of 99. 
Mr Scott recently moved to assisted accommodation in Oxfordshire, but had lived for many years in Wem. His exploits as a Spitfire pilot were charted in a book, Born to Survive and he also featured in a film about the aircraft he loved. He won the Distinguished Flying Medal for his operations as a fighter pilot but, friends said, he always remained humble about his role in the Second World War. His combat roles included taking part in the seige of Malta. Mr Scott was posted to the Battle of Britain airfield of Biggin Hill in 1941 with 124 Squadron, before being sent to Malta, which was under siege with continual raids by the Luftwaffe. He served with 603 Squadron, and then when that disbanded with 1435 Squadron at Luqa airfield, before returning to Britain and flying a third tour of operations, switching from his beloved Spitfire to a long-range Mustang fighter. Speaking about he aircraft he loved a few years ago Mr Scott said: "Flying a Spitfire to me was wonderful – it was a wonderful aircraft. When you fly it, it becomes part of you. It becomes an overcoat, you fly it instinctively. 
"You don't think about flying. You turn your head to go left and the aircraft follows you. It becomes part of you and, especially in combat, that is very useful."
Mr Scott went on to become a test pilot, which saw him fly more than 80 different aircraft and brought him to 27 Maintenance Unit at RAF Shawbury. 
Ironically, having survived everything the war could throw at him, his luck finally ran out while giving an aerobatic display in a Tiger Moth biplane in Scotland in 1953 when a structural failure caused the plane to crash. He suffered serious injuries and needed many operations to rebuild his shattered face. Mr Perkins said Mr Scott never lost his love of flying or his expertise. "It had been organised that he would fly a Spitfire on his 100th birthday next year and he was so looking forward to it," he said. 
"We met at Sleap airfield and instantly became friends He would go there every Saturday morning for his breakfast. He loved being around aircraft and also around people. And he loved giving talks about his experiences as a pilot." 
"Despite his age and the fact that he walked with a stick, as soon as he put his foot on the wing of a Spitfire, the clock turned back and he was a young man again," Mr Perkins said.
"He was in total control of he aircraft and was able to do all the combat manoeuvres he did in the war. Everything came back to him.
"When he flew out of Biggin Hill a couple of years ago he still remembered that flight path that he took. "He was so capable and so alert." "He was such a gentlemen - and a good man," Andy Perkins said. "He always said that he acted to shoot down the enemy plane not its occupants. He enriched the lives of everyone he met."
Mr Scott, who leaves a son Murray and several grandchildren, retained his love of speed in his passion for cars. "He was an incredible driver. He had a Mercedes sports car and could certainly beat me hands down at driving," Mr Perkins said. 
"He was so much fun to be with, we had come incredible laughs. As well as our breakfasts at Sleap on Saturdays we could always have fish and chips together on Friday nights."
"He was a damn fine bloke."


source: Shropshire Star

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## fubar57 (Oct 7, 2020)

*Rudolph “Val” Archer (1929 – 2020), Tuskegee Airman who served in three wars*

Rudolph “Val” Archer obituary: Tuskegee Airman dies at 91 – Legacy.com


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## Dash119 (Oct 7, 2020)

fubar57 said:


> *Rudolph “Val” Archer (1929 – 2020), Tuskegee Airman who served in three wars*
> 
> Rudolph “Val” Archer obituary: Tuskegee Airman dies at 91 – Legacy.com


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## at6 (Oct 7, 2020)




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## jetcal1 (Oct 8, 2020)

fubar57 said:


> *Rudolph “Val” Archer (1929 – 2020), Tuskegee Airman who served in three wars*
> 
> Rudolph “Val” Archer obituary: Tuskegee Airman dies at 91 – Legacy.com


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## Gnomey (Oct 8, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Oct 8, 2020)

*Alexander Horanzy (1922 – 2020), U.S. Army veteran who survived Pearl Harbor*
Alexander Horanzy obituary: Pearl Harbor vet dies at 98 – Legacy.com


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## at6 (Oct 8, 2020)




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## Gnomey (Oct 9, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Oct 9, 2020)

Clarence Lux Obituary: Pearl Harbor survivor, dies at 99 - Legacy.com


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## Gnomey (Oct 18, 2020)




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## Dash119 (Oct 18, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Oct 19, 2020)

Jim Feezel obituary: WWII hero dies at 95 – Legacy.com


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## rochie (Oct 19, 2020)




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## at6 (Oct 19, 2020)

The heroes of that time are passing way too quickly. R. I. P.


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## Gnomey (Oct 19, 2020)




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## MiTasol (Oct 24, 2020)

Ed Benguiat. A young man who joined the AAF while underage and went on to become the top in his craft
Ed Benguiat - Honorary Unsubscribe


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## fubar57 (Oct 24, 2020)




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## Wayne Little (Oct 25, 2020)




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## fubar57 (Oct 28, 2020)

Tuskegee Airman Reginald Brewster Dies at 103


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## MiTasol (Nov 6, 2020)

Some famous Spitfire related obituaries with no date on the most recent.

The Spitfire Society - Obituaries - News & Events | The Spitfire Society


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## Gnomey (Nov 7, 2020)




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## v2 (Nov 23, 2020)

René Billotet, last survivor of No 342 (Free French) Squadron. 

Sergent-chef René Billotet, born on 18 April 1925 in Dôle (France) and last survivor of the Royal Air Force’s No 342 (Free French) Squadron passed away at his home aged 95. 
Better known in France as the Groupe de Bombardement Lorraine, the squadron played an essential and unusual role during the D-Day landings. On the morning of 6 June 1944, six of the squadron’s aircraft were deployed to lay smoke screens between German coastal defences and the advancing Allied ships. 
It was a particularly dangerous mission, as the aircraft had to fly a low, fast and predictable course very close to enemy defenses, making new passes regularly to maintain the smoke screens. One of the aircraft didn’t return to base : Boston BZ213 crashed into the sea during the mission, killing its crew of three. 
René Billotet was not selected to fly this mission but contributed to it by installing the smoke generators on the squadron’s Boston bombers during the previous night.
At the young age of 17, he had joined the French Resistance after Germany invaded the southern part of France on 11 November 1942. In June 1943 he managed to cross the Channel and joined the Free French Air Force where he was assigned to No 342 Squadron. He flew about ten wartime missions as an engineer.
After the war’s end, he continued serving in the French air force until 1963 and was always very active, visiting the Lyon-Mont Verdun airbase on a regular basis.

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## ODonovan (Dec 26, 2020)

Robert Thacker, 102, Dies; Survived Pearl Harbor to Fly in 3 Wars



R.I.P. Bob Thacker.



-Irish

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## rochie (Jan 10, 2021)




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## rochie (Jan 10, 2021)

Another ATA dies.

R.I.P Eloeanor Worth 

WW2's 'Spitfire Women': Eleanor Wadsworth, one of last female pilots, dies

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## v2 (Jan 14, 2021)

Mr Arthur Bird dies aged 100. 

Former RAF pilot Arthur “Dicky” Bird, who was one of the very few people to fly fighter planes and other aircraft throughout the Second World War, has died at his home at Birdby, Cliburn, aged 100. Brought up on the family farm at Birdby, he learned to fly biplanes with the RAF Volunteer Reserve at Kingston, Carlisle, in 1937. He was already mobilised when war was declared, and was one of only seven to survive from the group of more than 30 who left Carlisle with him. He was selected for the RAF College Cranwell, Lincolnshire, going on to be commissioned and posted to 23 Squadron in 1940. In 1944 he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross while serving with 605 (City of Warwick) Squadron. He was a night fighter pilot sent on intruder missions over Germany. He did the longest intruder flight of the war, to Griefsweld on the Baltic. Those manning his home control tower went to bed assuming he was lost, but he returned with enough fuel left for just over a minute of flying. The book Boston At War describes how he was sent as a lone aircraft to deal with more than 30 enemy planes over their own airfield on a particularly filthy night. He engaged seven of them. Mr Bird also features briefly in The Nuremburg Raid, which is an account of the night of the greatest losses the RAF has ever suffered, and with which he was involved. He was fortunate to survive three tours of duty when so many did not survive one. He always maintained that the intruder pilots, with their experience of low flying at night and knowledge of the ground-based defences, could have saved the lives of some of the bomber pilots involved in the Dambusters raid over Germany had they been allowed to escort them. During a period of instructing, he was able to teach pupils to fly 14 different types of aircraft — everything from a Spitfire fighter to a Lancaster bomber. He flew many types of aircraft, but his favourite was always the De Havilland Mosquito — a highly versatile plane known as the “Wooden Wonder”.
General George Paton, an American famous for his flamboyant style and aggressive military tactics, requested a flight with him and he took him for a roof top level joyride along England’s South Coast in his Mosquito, viewing the troops being assembled for D-Day. On such occasions Allied planes frequently suffered friendly fire from ground forces who assumed they were German.
After the war he returned to work on the family farm at Birdby but continued to fly, instructing at gliding clubs and flying for a parachute club in order to get the hours required to keep his pilot’s licence.
In 1963, he married Hazel Lightburn, at one time music mistress at Tynefield School, Penrith, and they spent all their married lives at Birdby, celebrating their golden wedding in 2013.
They had two children, Roger and Heather.
Mr Bird celebrated his 100th birthday in August, when he gave a speech without notes. He continued to do his daily crossword and take a keen interest in national affairs.
He is survived by his wife Hazel and son Roger, both of Birdby, and daughter Heather, of Appleby.

source: C& W Herald


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## v2 (Feb 2, 2021)

Rupert Noye 

Rupert Noye, the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and France's highest distinction the Legion d'Honneur for his actions during World War II, has died aged 97.
The husband, father of two, grandfather of five and great grandfather of seven was a truly remarkable man, loved and respected by everyone who knew him.
He had lived in Southampton since 1957 and was well known for his successful civilian career with British Gas.
Born in Yorkshire, his family moved to Bournemouth when he was four. Rupert volunteered for the Air Force when he was 18 and served until 1949. The rear gunner was one of few remaining veterans. Soon after reaching his 20th birthday, he climbed into a gun turret for the first of 72 operational flights to defend his crew against enemy fighters. Rupert had already survived a crash landing in the Scilly Isles. On his last operation, his aircraft was attacked by a German Jet fighter. Rupert faced a barrage of cannon fire which destroyed half his turret but incredibly, he was unscathed.
Rupert met his wife Nesta through his brother, who was married to one of her friends. They wed in 1953 and were married for 67 years until his death from Covid last month.
The couple moved to Southampton when Rupert was offered a promotion and he retired from British Gas in 1988. He also leaves his daughters Paula and Liz, grandchildren Hannah, Jess, Jake, Kristian and Tyler and great grandchildren Jasper, Esme, Eva, Darcy, Mila, Riva and Buddy.

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## fubar57 (Feb 2, 2021)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/captain-tom-moore-obit-1.5897602


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## Gnomey (Feb 7, 2021)




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## michaelmaltby (Mar 1, 2021)

Son Tay Raid commander Leroy Manor dies at 100


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## vikingBerserker (Apr 9, 2021)

Prince Phillip, WW2 Veteran

https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...dee766-c5dc-11df-94e1-c5afa35a9e59_story.html

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## michaelmaltby (Apr 9, 2021)



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## pbehn (Apr 9, 2021)

michaelmaltby said:


> View attachment 619068


I have met lots of people who met him. Both my father and brother did. My father met him in a different world just after the war ended in the Pacific. He was a Greek and Danish prince at the time, no one knew he was friendly with Elizabeth but they did know he was related to the supreme commander of Commonwealth forces in the far east. By the time my brother met him doing VIP protection duties in North Yorkshire he was Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburg. A nice guy and by all accounts a very good officer.

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## Glider (Apr 9, 2021)

About 20 years ago Prince Phillip came to open the new hanger for our gliding club. There were a small but vocal number of people protesting about the noise. (yes I know, from a gliding club) who wanted to speak to him. 
He agreed to meet three of them and they came over. Just before they said anything he motioned them to just stop and listen, which they did and he commented 'can't you hear the skylarks, aren't they wonderful' they nodded in agreement, so he turned to them and said, 'now what did you want to say'

A priceless moment

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## at6 (Apr 9, 2021)

My condolences to the Royal Family and to British people at this time of loss.

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## Wayne Little (Apr 10, 2021)




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## Shinpachi (Apr 10, 2021)

My sincere condolences, His Highness, to his family and the British people 






Photo source: エリザベス女王が天皇陛下と握手する際に、自ら一歩踏み出す理由

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## Ascent (Apr 10, 2021)

During the RAF 75th anniversery celebrations at RAF Marham I was a member of the gaurd of honour as a fresh faced 19yr old. Due to the wonderfiul British weather I ended holding the brolly for Prince Philip as he and the Queen inspected something, although I forget what they were inspecting. My very brief claim to fame.
RIP.

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## v2 (Apr 23, 2021)

F/Lt Jan Tadeusz Zablocki (Jan Baxter) 

Flight Lieutenant Jan Baxter, who has died aged 100, was one of the last surviving Polish pilots who flew with the RAF during the Second World War.
After flying the Wellington bomber, Baxter converted to the four-engine Halifax and was posted in February 1944 to No 1586 (Special Duties) Flight at Brindisi in Italy. To join the unit, he and his crew delivered a Halifax via Rabat, Algiers and Tunis. The role of the Flight was to airdrop supplies to the partisans. He began operations in March and over the next three months completed 27 operational flights, all conducted at night. These included 11 to his native Poland and others to Yugoslavia, Greece and northern Italy. In addition to the threat from German night fighters, Baxter and his crew had to battle with the weather. They had to cross the Carpathian Mountains, and on other occasions the Tatra Mountains, before descending to lower levels to identify the signals of reception parties waiting on the ground. Flying at heights below 500 feet at night, the crews sometimes had to make several runs before the full load of supplies – and sometimes personnel – had been dropped. He described one drop to the Polish Home Army: “Flying low over the DZ during the drop, I opened the side window and felt a rush of clear Polish air. The flights to Poland were exhilarating and, if the missions were accomplished, they gave a lot of satisfaction to the crew and myself. More than once I had the moving experience of seeing the lights of my home town, Krakow, in the distance.” Baxter’s last flight to Poland was on May 30 1944. By that time of the year, the nights were short; take off for the 10-hour flights was in daylight, and the return over Hungary and Yugoslavia at dawn carried the risk of meeting German fighters. He completed a few more drops over Yugoslavia before returning to England to become an instructor.
He was born Jan Tadeusz Zablocki on April 3 1920 at Krakow. He was selected for pilot training in Poland in 1939 but, after the German invasion he escaped through Hungary and Central Europe to France, where he enlisted in the Polish Air Force under French command and began pilot training at Lyon. He arrived in England in March 1940. On the formation of the Polish Air Force under British command in September he was sent to 300 Squadron in a ground trade. Eventually, he commenced his training as a pilot, which he completed in Canada.
After completing his operational training at a bomber unit based near Doncaster, he returned to 300 Squadron in October 1943. By this time the Wellington was coming to the end of its time as a bomber and was used almost exclusively to drop sea mines in the approaches to enemy-held ports and in main sea transit areas. 
Baxter flew his first operation at the end of October when he dropped mines off the German port of Emden. During his time on 300 Squadron, most of his missions were against the U-boat bases at the French ports of Brest, St Nazaire, and La Pallice, when two large mines were dropped by parachute from 1,500 feet. After 12 operations, Baxter left to convert to the Halifax. On his return from Italy in June 1944 he became an instructor on the Halifax. At the end of the war he spent a few months on 304 Polish Bomber Squadron before going to the HQ of Transport Command. On the dissolution of the Polish Air Force under British command he elected to remain in Britain and enlisted in the Polish Resettlement Corps in December 1946. After two years he was discharged. 
For his wartime service he was twice awarded the Polish Cross for Valour as well as the Air Force Medal and two Bars.
In the late 1940s, Baxter started operating commercial aircraft. For a year he flew converted Halifax bombers on the Berlin Airlift, completing 242 re-supply flights, mostly with Eagle Aviation. In July 1951 he rejoined the RAF and held a number of flying appointments in Britain and overseas. From 1958 to 1960 he was with 84 Squadron based in Aden flying the Valetta on supply missions to troops patrolling in the Protectorate, in addition to transport flights throughout the Middle East. In 1963 he left for Butterworth, near Penang, to join 52 Squadron, which also operated the Valetta transport aircraft, flying in support of security forces in the jungle. After two years he returned to the UK and finally left the RAF in August 1967 to spend 10 years working in the MoD as a linguist and translator. Modest and unassuming, he retired to Devon for 10 years of beekeeping and skiing holidays in Europe. In 1990 he started flying the Tiger Moth again and took up sailing. 
In 1966 he was able to bring his mother to Britain from Poland. In 1998 he visited his homeland for the first time to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Polish Air Force and to visit his childhood haunts.
Jan Baxter’s second wife and two sons from his first marriage survive him.
*Jan Baxter, born April 3 1920, died March 12 2021 *

*source: The Telegraph*

*



*

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## v2 (May 30, 2021)

Wing Commander Jock Heatherill OBE 

Wing Commander John “Jock” Adams Heatherill OBE, Bomber Command veteran. Born: 27 November, 1922 in Edinburgh. Died: 27 March, 2021 in Rutland, aged 98.
Jock Heatherill was such a tiny baby there were doubts over whether he would survive infancy. Born almost a century ago weighing just 3lbs 8ozs, the fragile infant resembled a drowned baby rabbit, according to his father. But cocooned in an empty drawer and lavished with loving care, he slowly began to thrive and was baptised in Edinburgh’s Tron Kirk at the age of eight weeks. That he pulled through was something of a miracle in the 1920s. That he beat the odds of another life and death contest, as a member of Bomber Command 20 years later, was equally extraordinary. Half the aircrew were killed on operations, 12 per cent died or were wounded in accidents and a similar number became Prisoners of War. Only a quarter escaped unscathed. Heatherill was a Second World War bomb aimer who trained on open-cockpit Tiger Moth bi-planes and co-piloted Halifax heavy bombers. In peacetime, as part of Transport Command, he took part in the Berlin Airlift and enjoyed a long and distinguished RAF career, including as assistant air attache in Canberra and commanding officer of RAF Machrihanish. 
Educated at schools in Parsons Green and Portobello before moving to Broughton Grammar, he was a rebellious youngster and a truant, prompting his father’s decision that he should leave school at 14 and join him at Allan & Sons, granite and marble works. His father had been involved in installing the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle and his son followed in his footsteps, serving an apprenticeship as a granite polisher and helping on various projects, including the Ensign Ewart Memorial on Edinburgh Castle Esplanade.
In 1941 he became a Boy Scout messenger, delivering despatches from the Royal Navy office to ships at Leith Docks. Around that time he witnessed a Spitfire shooting down a German bomber over the Firth of Forth and joined the Air Training Corps. Visiting RAF Turnhouse and seeing a Spitfire up close inspired him to join the RAF.
However, he had no useful academic qualifications and knew they were needed to apply for aircrew. He did a correspondence course, went to night school, became a member of the Home Guard and a fire watcher. In August 1941 he volunteered for the RAF and subsequently trained as a bomb aimer in Canada. After returning to Britain he joined 158 Squadron based at RAF Lissett near Bridlington as a pilot officer and air bomber.
He took part in 17 operations with Bomber Command, flying in four-engined Halifaxes, acting as co-pilot until reaching operational height, then navigating to the target zone before crawling into the bomb aimer’s position in the nose, directing the pilot to the target and finally dropping the explosives. His first mission was to Essen in November 1944 and his last to Mainz on February 1945. More than 70 years later, at a Buckingham Palace celebration of the RAF’s centenary, while reflecting on those who did not come home, he recalled: “There was such a sense of purpose. We were fighting for king and country. There was adrenaline and you wanted to do a good job.” 
Post-war, flying Dakotas as part of RAF Transport Command, he was involved in the Berlin Airlift, a massive operation delivering supplies to the besieged population of West Berlin in Germany’s Soviet zone, and made sure he did another good job, proud of keeping all his sorties on time.
Flying from North Luffenham to Fassberg, he ferried coal to Berlin’s Gatow airfield, working a rota of four days flying followed by a rest day at the nearby shooting lodge of Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering. He later completed more than 500 hours delivering engineering supplies.
Describing the mission in his memoirs he said: “Operating the airlift could be a little tricky as we had to be spot on with our timings to Gatow, as aircraft were scheduled to land and take off every minute and, if you missed your allotted time you were required to overshoot and face the embarrassment of returning to Fassberg with a full load of coal: luckily we were spared that ordeal. The problems on navigating were that we operated at all weathers at 1,500 feet and along a restricted corridor and sometimes our aids were jammed by the Russians, and also occasionally harassed by ‘buzzing’ from Russian fighters.”
He had a number of tours of duty to the Middle East in the 1950s and took command of the desert station RAF Riyan, where the personnel consisted of “myself the only officer, one SNCO, two corporals, 14 airmen, 50 Askaris (armed local tribesmen) 20 civilians and a camel”.
In the late 1960s he went on attachment to the Royal Australian Air Force and became the Assistant Air Attaché at the British High Commission in Canberra. Returning home he was Deputy CO at RAF Lyneham and organised a 1973 royal visit to the base for The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The following year he was responsible for the successful repatriation of 3,000 service personnel and their families from Cyprus during the Turkish invasion of the island, service for which he was made an OBE.
During the Cold War he mapped potential flight plans for future operations and remarked during the Falklands War that Vulcan bombers were using his flight plan. His last posting was back in Scotland at RAF Machrihanish, a strategically important base during the Cold War. After retiring in 1977 he moved to Rutland, becoming regional director of appeals for the British Heart Foundation, a keen golfer and president of Rutland Rotary Club. Passionate about community involvement, he chaired his local village hall committee for 25 years – only giving up aged 95, citing his “ageing bones”.
Jock Heatherill is survived by his wife Mary, children Nicola, Claire and Richard and four grandchildren. 


source: The Scotsman

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## ARTESH (May 30, 2021)

May your soul rests in Eternal peace, Sir.


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## Dash119 (May 31, 2021)




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## cherry blossom (Jun 30, 2021)

The Telegraph recently published an obituary of Group Captain Harold Walmsley Group Captain Harold Walmsley, Spitfire ace who destroyed at least 11 enemy aircraft – obituary who was one of the last surviving Spitfire aces, credited with destroying 11 enemy aircraft. He actually died on 2nd April aged 98. I found that one his combat reports was mentioned on this site in discussing the superiority of the Spitfire XIV over contemporary Bf 109s in late 1944.

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## Gnomey (Jun 30, 2021)




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## v2 (Jul 21, 2021)

Group Captain Harold Walmsley - Spitfire ace who destroyed at least 11 enemy aircraft *(December 14 1922- April 2 2021)*​Group Captain Harold Walmsley, who has died aged 98, was one of the last surviving Spitfire “aces” of the Second World War.
He joined 130 Squadron as a flight commander in October 1944 when it was based in Normandy flying the latest mark of Spitfire, the XIV, on ground-attack sorties in support of the advancing Allied armies.
On December 8, having moved to an airfield in Belgium, he was leading his section on an armed reconnaissance near Munster when Walmsley saw a locomotive. He turned to attack it with his cannons and as he pulled away, eight Messerschmitt Bf 109s appeared. In the ensuing fight, he shot one down.
In his combat report after the operation, Walmsley commented that the Spitfire XIV “is definitely better than the Bf 109, as I could do a better climbing turn even with my external fuel tank on and this prevented him from getting a deflection shot on me.”
During the Ardennes offensive later in the month, he was assisting US forces when he was shot down by friendly fire. He baled out, landed in a tree and was rescued by Belgian forestry workers who helped him to reach US lines.
He was wearing khaki battle dress (RAF blue was too similar to the field grey uniforms of the Germans) and initially the Americans treated him with suspicion, but he eventually managed to convince them of his identity, and returned to his squadron.
The bitter winter of 1944-45 cut down the squadron’s activities, but from March onwards it was involved in fierce dogfights with Focke-Wulf 190s. Flying from airfields in the Netherlands, on March 13 Walmsley shot down one of the single-seat fighters near Hamm. The German flew at very low level, but after chasing him for 10 miles Walmsley scored several hits and the enemy pilot baled out. On the 18th, 12 Fw 190s attacked Walmsley’s formation head-on before breaking away into cloud. He and his pilots pursued them in and out of cloud before he got on the tail of one and shot it down. In two weeks of April, he destroyed seven more enemy aircraft in the air and two on the ground. On the 17th he shot down a Junkers 52 transport aircraft and destroyed two planes under camouflage netting in a field. On the 20th, his section intercepted four Fw 190s; Walmsley shot one down.
Three days later he attacked a Messerschmitt Bf 108, and as he began firing the two occupants baled out. Shortly afterwards, he attacked a second which crash-landed in a field.
Walmsley was appointed to command 350 (Belgian) Squadron, and within days he had accounted for two more Fw 190s; on April 26 he shared in the destruction of another. This was his 11th and final success, though he had probably destroyed one other and damaged a further four. On the day the war in Europe ended, his squadron was at Fassberg, north of Hanover. On that day, Walmsley wrote in his flying logbook: “Four Huns, bless ’em, landed in their 262s [the Luftwaffe’s jet fighter] on the drome in the evening having taken off from Prague, bombed the Russians and then come here to surrender. Nice types!” He was awarded a Bar to an earlier DFC, and the Belgian Government awarded him the Croix de Guerre. The citation for the award of his second DFC recorded his “fine example of determination and devotion to duty”.
Harold Edward Walmsley was born on December 14 1922 in Preston, Lancashire, but when the war broke out he was living in Uxbridge, where he was working as a metallurgical laboratory assistant. He joined the RAF in December 1940 and was one of the first pilots to be trained in Rhodesia.
He returned to Britain as a sergeant pilot and in September 1942 joined 611 (West Lancashire) Squadron to fly the Spitfire from Biggin Hill. The squadron provided escort for bomber squadrons attacking targets in northern France. On January 9 1943 Walmsley probably destroyed an FW 190, and over the next few weeks he claimed to have damaged at least three more. On July 25, while escorting bombers to Amsterdam, he shot down a Bf 109. In August he moved to 132 Squadron as a flight commander, also equipped with the Spitfire, flying sweeps and escort over France. On January 7 1944 he shot down a FW 190 over Abbeville. After 20 months of continuous operational flying he was rested in April and awarded the DFC. He spent time as a fighter instructor before returning to operations with 130 Squadron in October.
After the war, Walmsley took command of 80 Squadron in Germany, flying the Tempest fighter. In November 1947 he became a flying instructor and in May the following year was posted back to his first squadron, 611, as the adjutant and flying instructor. Now part of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, flying Spitfires from Woodvale, near Southport, he was one of three regular officers on the squadron. A return to the Central Flying School as an instructor was soon followed by his appointment as the chief flying instructor at 4 FTS based in Rhodesia. After attending Staff College he converted to the Sabre, and in April 1955 assumed command of 67 Squadron at Wildenrath in Germany, remaining as the CO for two years.
His next appointments were in the fighter role, first in charge of flying operations at Tangmere, near Chichester, and then, as a group captain, he commanded the radar unit at Boulmer in Northumberland, a key station in the chain of fighter control units that provided for the air defence of the UK. In 1965 he left for Singapore, with responsibility for plans during the Indonesian Confrontation campaign, before going on to serve in the MoD on the Defence Policy Staff. He was the RAF parliamentary adviser to Denis Healey, a man he held in high regard, although on the whole he had little time for the Labour politicians. After a period as the senior RAF instructor on the Senior Officers’ War Course at Greenwich, he retired from the Air Force in 1971 and moved to the village of Waldringfield in east Suffolk. On leaving the RAF, Walmsley was immediately offered a two-year contract as deputy director of the British Defence Consortium being set up in Saudi Arabia. He spent a further two years as the general manager of Airwork in Oman, providing maintenance and technical support to the expanding Sultanate of Oman Air Force, which was being equipped with the Strikemaster light attack aircraft.
After his second retirement he was able to focus on his passion for sailing. He owned a Deben Four Tonner, a small wooden cabin cruiser which he sailed to Channel ports.
He visited the Baltic, and joining a friend and his Moody 336, he sailed to the Channel Islands and the Frisian Islands. His other great love was his garden.
Harold Walmsley married Jean, a wartime nurse, in 1945; she died in 2017. Their son and daughter survive him.





source: The Telegraph

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## Wurger (Jul 21, 2021)




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## v2 (Jul 21, 2021)

Wing Commander Peter Bailey (March 28 1922- April 14 2021)​Wing Commander Peter Bailey, who has died aged 99, towed a glider to Normandy on D-Day and flew a similar operation on the first assault during the ill-fated Arnhem operation. Post-war he commanded VIP transport squadrons in Britain and in Australia. Just before midnight on June 5 1944, Bailey took off from Blakehill Farm near Swindon in a Dakota of 233 Squadron. He was piloting one of six aircraft towing Horsa gliders loaded with jeeps, trailers and motorcycles for the men of the 3rd Airborne Brigade who were parachuted on to a dropping zone near Touffréville. His school friend Bryan Hebblethwaite was flying the glider. The following day, Bailey dropped supplies to the ground forces near Ranville, east of Caen, when he met intense light flak from “friendly forces”. Two of the squadron aircraft failed to return. Over the next few weeks he flew into hastily prepared airstrips in Normandy carrying supplies and returning with casualties. At the end of August he flew on three consecutive days to an airfield near Paris carrying food for the local population. By September he was taking ammunition to airfields near Brussels. On September 17, the first day of Operation Market Garden, Bailey towed a Horsa carrying men of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers to a landing zone west of Arnhem. Again Hebblethwaite was the glider pilot, but he was killed in the ground fighting a few days later. During the next few days, Bailey flew re-supply missions to the 1st Airborne Division when he met intense anti-aircraft fire. Over the next few weeks, he took supplies for the advancing Allied armies into airfields in France and Belgium. For his service during the airborne operations, he was awarded the American DFC. The son of a severely wounded First World War veteran of the Leicestershire Yeomanry, George Peter Brett Bailey was born on March 28 1922 and educated at Framlingham College, Suffolk, where he was a member of the Officer Training Corps and where he excelled at sport, being a key member of the shooting VIII. He joined the RAF in 1941 and trained as a pilot in Canada. After gaining his wings, and being assessed as above average, he remained in Canada as a flying instructor until the end of 1943, when he returned to Britain and converted to the Dakota. After a brief spell with 512 Squadron flying supplies to Gibraltar and North Africa, he joined the recently formed 233 Squadron and began training for operations with the airborne forces.
In December 1944, Bailey was transferred to a new Dakota squadron, No 243. The crews sailed for Canada to collect Dakotas built there, which they flew across America and the Pacific Ocean, landing at Camden in New South Wales. From there, the squadron provided support for British forces operating in the south-west Pacific area; this included sorties into Papua New Guinea and Borneo. After the Japanese surrender he flew to Hong Kong to repatriate PoWs. When the squadron disbanded in April 1946, he remained in Australia on the staff of the British Mission.
Bailey returned to Britain in late 1947 and became an instructor on Dakotas. He was detached to Lübeck in Germany and from there he flew some 250 re-supply sorties into Berlin during the emergency airlift. In 1950 he returned to Australia to serve with the Royal Australian Air Force VIP transport squadron, No 34, based near Sydney. On one occasion he flew the Prime Minister Robert Menzies to London, a five-day flight with numerous stops en route. In 1953 he served on the intelligence staff in the Air Ministry before becoming a flight commander on 80 Squadron flying the photo-reconnaissance variant of the Canberra from RAF Laarbruch on the Dutch/German border. During his time on the squadron he was deployed to Malta to conduct an aerial survey of Italy. He was awarded a Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air.
After further service in the Air Ministry responsible for aircrew training policy, Bailey returned to flying, in command of the Metropolitan Communications Squadron at Northolt. This was the RAF’s VIP transport squadron, and his many passengers included Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Mountbatten, and the Queen when the Queen’s Flight needed support.
In June 1964 Bailey served in Germany on the staff of the Second Allied Tactical Air Force as a reconnaissance specialist. On return to Britain two years later he became the wing commander responsible for operations at RAF Wyton, the home of the RAF’s strategic reconnaissance force of Victors, Comets and Canberras.
Bailey retired from the RAF in 1970 and went to Karoo in South Africa to manage the production side of a game farm. While there, he became friends with Dr CHristiaan Barnard, the first heart-transplant surgeon.
Back in England, Bailey ran the government’s Youth Training Scheme until 1986, when he emigrated to Queensland, where he took on a major role with the Red Cross as disaster officer for the Sunshine Coast. In 2000 he was president of the local Probus club.
He was a strong supporter of squadron reunions and the Society of Old Framlinghamians. On a brief visit to Britain to celebrate his 90th birthday he was able to meet the son of his friend killed at Arnhem, Bryan Hebblethwaite, and to attend the annual reunion of 80 Squadron.
Peter Bailey married his first wife Shirley in 1946. In 1997 he married Joy Mason after a long friendship. She died in 2011 and he is survived by his two children and a stepchild.




source: The Telegraph

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## v2 (Jul 21, 2021)

Flight-Lieutenant Freddie Nicoll (*November 5 1920- May 14 2021)*​Flight Lieutenant Freddie Nicoll, who has died aged 100, flew Hurricanes during the desert war in North Africa and from bases in Italy against targets in the Adriatic and Yugoslavia.
He joined 6 Squadron in late 1943. It was equipped with a later model of the Hurricane modified to carry rockets in place of two of its cannons. The squadron had gained fame during the desert campaign as a “tank-busting” squadron but its new role was to be anti-shipping operations. Early in 1944 it moved to southern Italy. Nicoll flew his first operation with 6 Squadron on April 5 1944, when he attacked targets in Corfu harbour. Over the next few weeks he attacked armed schooners, barges and ferries carrying supplies to coastal areas. On May 3, his leader’s aircraft was hit by flak during an attack on a schooner. He was eventually forced to bale out and Nicoll, who had escorted him, searched the sea area for him, but in vain.
Desperately short of fuel, Nicoll made a forced landing on the rudimentary forward airstrip on the island of Vis off the Croatian coast. Refuelling from jerry cans, he returned to his squadron the following day. Targets in Albania and along the Dalmatian coast were attacked with rockets but the primary objective was to destroy the enemy’s re-supply vessels. Nicoll attacked patrol boats, and on May 23 his rockets blew a hole in the side of a 5,000-ton cargo ship, which caught fire. 
By the end of May, Nicoll was flying many of his sorties from Vis, which allowed the Hurricanes and their Spitfire escorts to cover most of the Adriatic. Many vessels were hit so the enemy shipping started to sail at night. Nicoll led attacks against them flying at very low level and firing his rockets in level flight.
In August, the squadron’s commanding officer was shot down, resulting in Nicoll’s promotion to flight commander. He led many sorties from Vis and others from Brindisi. By early October he had completed 55 operations, many against fierce anti-aircraft fire, and he had witnessed the loss of several pilots flying in his formations. He was awarded the DFC for his “courage and devotion to duty”. In later years he modestly commented: “Whilst with 6 Squadron, a number of small ships, and a few bigger ones, got in the way of my rockets, which happened to be carrying 60lb high-explosive heads. In appreciation of this, I was issued with a piece of blue and white ribbon!”
The son of a bricklayer, John Frederick Nicoll was born in Walthamstow on November 5 1920 and educated at the local Sir George Monoux Grammar School. He enlisted in the RAF in November 1940 and six months later started his flying training. 
He sailed for South Africa before travelling to Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he spent the next eight months completing his pilot training. He was commissioned and left for Egypt, and on to Syria to train on Hurricanes in the tactical reconnaissance role. In September 1942 he joined 208 Squadron at Burg-el-Arab, 40 miles behind the front line in the Western Desert. The Eighth Army was established at El Alamein and the squadron flew reconnaissance sorties to identify enemy positions and ground movements. Nicoll flew his first sortie on October 3, when he acted as the “weaver” (escort) to a colleague who concentrated on taking photographs and making visual observations. Over the next few days, Nicoll flew further sorties when large concentrations of enemy vehicles and tanks were noted. On the 12th, on a sortie to the edge of the Qattara Depression, he reported over 600 motor transports dispersed and heavy movements of road traffic in the region. On later sorties he photographed the enemy’s forward defence positions. When the Battle of Alamein commenced, Nicoll’s flight had been withdrawn to the Canal Zone, with the squadron’s other two flights seeing most of the action. 
At the beginning of 1943 the squadron moved to Kirkuk in Iraq for intensive training and to provide support for the Army’s 21 Corps and the Polish Brigade Group. After six months it moved to Rayak in Syria, and in October Nicoll was posted to 6 Squadron. On his return to England after three and a half years, Nicoll joined a ferry flight delivering aircraft throughout the United Kingdom. His final posting was to 631 Squadron based in West Wales, equipped with the Griffon-engined Spitfire and the Vengeance, towing target drogues for visiting squadrons to practice air-to-air firing. He was finally demobilised in May 1946.
Taking advantage of a government training scheme, Nicoll attended Brixton School of Building and became a quantity surveyor before working in Wrexham, and Stevenage, where he later established his own company. A man with a keen sense of humour and fun, he was an enthusiastic actor with the Lytton Players in Stevenage. He was also a self-taught musician, playing the piano, clarinet and accordion to a high standard. During his time in the desert he had found an abandoned accordion, which he kept. Many years later when he had it serviced, one pound of North African sand was recovered from its workings. 
During his time in Stevenage he became a justice of the peace and was president of the local Rotary Club. When he retired in the early 1990s he moved to Cumbria, where he played the organ in the Eden churches, and he was active on the golf course into his nineties. 
He made several visits to the island of Vis, where the locals treated him as a hero. His last visit was in May 2011, when he joined other veterans and laid a wreath on the RAF memorial.
Nicoll was a devoted member of the 6 and 208 Squadron Associations and rarely missed an annual reunion, travelling from Carlisle to London to attend until a few years ago. On his 100th birthday he was given an honour guard by members of the current 6 Squadron as a Spitfire and a Mustang flew over his home. 
Freddie Nicoll married Beryl, a WAAF flight mechanic, in 1944; she died in 1997. Their son and two daughters, and Ruth, his companion of 21 years, survive him.




Source: The Telegraph

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## v2 (Jul 21, 2021)

Wing Commander Jock Heatherill (*November 27,1922- March 27,2021)*​Wing Commander Jock Heatherill, who has died aged 98, was a bomb-aimer during the final months of the war and later flew 48 re-supply missions during the Berlin Air Lift.
In November 1944, Heatherill joined 158 Squadron at Lissett in East Yorkshire, where the squadron was equipped with the four-engine Halifax bomber. He flew his first operation on November 29 1944, the target Essen; on a return visit to the industrial city on December 24, 10 Halifaxes of his Squadron were damaged by flak, including Heatherill’s.
During the German advance in the Ardennes, bad weather hampered air support for the Allied ground forces. On December 26, however, conditions improved and Heatherill and his crew joined 300 other Bomber Command aircraft to attack German troop concentrations at St Vith. During the final days of 1944, marshalling yards became the priority target and Heatherill flew four operations in a few days. In the New Year, with the situation in the Ardennes stabilising, attacks against oil targets resumed and Heatherill bombed the benzyl synthetic oil plant at Dortmund. On a daylight raid to Hanover on January 5, his crew saw jet fighters attack the bomber formation. By the end of February Heatherill had completed 17 operations before attending a bombing leader’s course. John Adams Heatherill, always known as Jock, was born in Edinburgh on November 27 1922. He left Broughton Grammar School aged 14 without qualifications and became an apprentice stonemason and granite polisher. He was a King’s Scout, joined the Air Training Corps and served in the Home Guard.
Determined to join the RAF to fly, he studied hard to gain the necessary educational qualifications and succeeded. He trained in Canada as a bomb-aimer.
After the war he specialised in the air transport role and in August 1948 he began operations on the Berlin Airlift. Flying in Dakotas from the RAF airfield at Fassberg in western Germany, he delivered coal to the RAF airfield at Gatow. “Operating the airlift could be a little tricky as we had to be spot on with our timings to Gatow, as aircraft were scheduled to land and take off every minute,” he recalled. “If you missed your allocated time you were told to overshoot and face the embarrassment of returning to Fassberg with a full load of coal; luckily we were spared that ordeal.”
Heatherill flew 48 re-supply missions into Berlin before spending a year flying engineering supplies from the UK to the RAF airfields in Germany being used to support the Berlin airlift. 
In April 1950 he joined 114 Squadron in the Middle East, flying transport support throughout the region. He later specialised in navigator training, serving at Lyneham, the home of the Comet and Britannia fleets, before becoming the senior navigation officer at HQ Transport Command.
In May 1968 he left for Australia, initially to command the RAF detachment at Edinburgh Field before becoming Assistant Air Adviser to the British High Commission in Canberra.
In August 1972 he returned to Lyneham, by now the base of four squadrons of Hercules, where he was responsible for administration. He organised a Royal visit by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in 1973. Following the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus a year later, a major operation to repatriate service personnel and families was activated. Heatherill was responsible for the reception arrangements and care of the large number of returning families. He was appointed OBE. His final appointment was as commander of RAF Machrihanish in western Scotland, a Nato-funded airfield used during major exercises; it was also used by the Nimrod force and by detachments of Vulcan aircraft. Heatherill retired in 1978.
He worked for the British Heart Foundation, first as regional officer for the East Midlands before becoming director for the Midlands. He retired after 12 years’ service.
In July 2018 he attended the RAF 100 celebrations at Buckingham Palace, where he met Prince William. Heatherill was very impressed with the Prince and commented: “I always thought he would be a good chap because he was in the RAF. It was a tremendous day.”
He was a keen member of the Rotary and was president of Rutland Rotary Club. He was also the chairman of the village hall for 25 years, retiring at 95 because of his “ageing bones”.
Jock Heatherill is survived by his wife Mary and by a son and two daughters.




Source: The Telegraph

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## Wurger (Jul 21, 2021)




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## fubar57 (Jul 21, 2021)




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## ARTESH (Jul 21, 2021)

Rest in peace, Sir!


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## Wayne Little (Jul 21, 2021)




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## Airframes (Jul 21, 2021)




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## Dash119 (Jul 21, 2021)




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## v2 (Jul 21, 2021)

Squadron Leader ‘Benny’ Goodman (September 24 1920- July 18 2021)​
Squadron Leader Lawrence “Benny” Goodman, who has died aged 100, was one of the last two surviving Lancaster pilots of 617 (Dambuster) Squadron who were involved in attacking the German battleship Tirpitz in late 1944. And in the final weeks of the war he dropped the 22,000 lb “Grand Slam”, the biggest bomb dropped by the RAF. 
Goodman had completed his training as a bomber pilot in the summer of 1944 when he was posted to 617 Squadron, based at Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire. With its unique reputation as a special-duties squadron manned by highly experienced crews, it was unusual for a novice crew to be sent to 617.
To gain experience, he flew his first raid on August 18 – an attack on the U-boat pens at La Pallice in the port of La Rochelle – with an experienced captain before he took his crew to Brest a few days later. On their fourth operation they deployed to Scotland attacked the massive Tirpitz. 
The possibility that the German battleship might cause havoc among the convoys carrying vital supplies across the Atlantic, and the crucial war materials for Russia, had dominated naval plans. RAF and Fleet Air Arm bombers had made several attempts to disable “The Beast”, as Churchill dubbed the battleship, but they had failed, as had the gallant efforts of mini-submarines. In September 1944, Lancasters dropping the 12,000 lb “Tallboy” bomb had penetrated the steel armour of Tirpitz, forcing it to move south to Tromso, inside the Arctic circle, for repairs. This brought it in range of bombers taking off from northern Scotland. 
Drawn from Nos 9 and 617 (Dambuster) Squadrons, 37 Lancasters, led by Wing Commander “Willie” Tait, took off on October 29 1944. Cloud appeared as the bombers approached and the battleship put up a smoke screen. Goodman dropped his Tallboy into the smoke before turning for Lossiemouth. 
Lawrence Seymour Goodman, always known as “Benny”, was born on September 24 1920 in West London and educated at Herne Bay College in Kent where he was a member of the Officer Training Corps. He completed an electrical engineering course prior to joining his father’s film and advertising business in London. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1940 and began training as a pilot in June 1941. He trained in Canada and during an eventful passage back to Britain an escorting destroyer was sunk and Goodman’s ship was damaged.
Back in Britain he trained as a bomber pilot before arriving at 617 Squadron in August 1944. 
After the raid on Tirpitz, Goodman flew on many notable operations; the majority involved dropping Barnes Wallis’s Tallboy deep-penetration bomb using a precision bombsight. The bomb had an 11-second delay fuse to allow maximum penetration before exploding to create an “earthquake” effect. In December Goodman attacked the synthetic oil refinery at Politz near Stettin on the Baltic coast, which had been marked by flares dropped by the Pathfinder Force. On return, after a flight of more than nine hours, fog had appeared over Lincolnshire and Goodman’s Lancaster was the only one to land at Woodhall Spa, the remainder having been diverted to other airfields. At the end of December he attacked the E-Boat pens at Rotterdam and at Ijmiuden. 
After bombing the U-boat pens at Bergen in Norway on January 12 1945, and a return to the E-Boat pens in the Netherlands, the squadron turned its attention to destroying the crucial viaducts that carried the railways being used by the Germans to bring reinforcements to the front line in the west. On February 22 Goodman dropped his Tallboy on the Bielefeld viaduct, a particularly difficult target to hit from high level. In March the squadron began receiving Barnes Wallis’s 22,000 lb “Grand Slam”, the biggest non-nuclear air-dropped conventional weapon of the war. To carry this huge bomb the Lancasters had to be modified, with the fitting of a stronger undercarriage, as well as removal of the front and mid-upper gun turrets, some of the armour plating, and the bomb doors. As the specially modified bombers took off, observers on the ground saw the straight wings of the Lancaster flex with the weight. 
On March 19 the target was the Arnsberg viaduct. Goodman was flying one of the six Lancasters carrying the Grand Slam. He was the third to drop his bomb and, as the raid departed, the viaduct was in ruins. 
Over the final weeks of the war, Goodman dropped more Tallboys, including one on the U-Boat construction yards at Hamburg. On April 25 he took off on his last operation, the attack on Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria. Despite being hit by anti-aircraft fire, he dropped his Tallboy. Later, he commented that “we certainly made a mess of the Waffen SS barracks.” 
Goodman was vigorous in praise of his ground crew. He wrote: “Working out in all weathers, often on wind, snow and rain swept dispersals, they were always there to ensure the serviceability of our aircraft and to see us depart. They waited in uncertainty eager to witness our return. For 365 days and nights they made it possible for us to do our job. All of us who flew knew their worth.” He remained in the RAF and transferred to Transport Command, flying the Stirling. He left the RAF in the summer of 1946 and immediately joined the Auxiliary Air Force flying the latest mark of Spitfire with 604 (County of Middlesex) Squadron. He re-joined the RAF in September 1949 and over the next few years flew the Hastings transport aircraft. He later converted to the Canberra and was a flight commander on 80 Squadron based in Germany. After a tour in the Air Ministry he left the RAF in 1964 to re-join the family firm. He obtained his British and American civil pilot’s licenses and flew a Piper Comanche, of which he was part owner, until he was 93.
He was an active member of the 617 Squadron Association and was in demand as a speaker raising funds for charitable causes, including the RAF Benevolent Fund.
In 1990 he was introduced to the local Heimatbund (Local History Society) in Arnsberg and became a minor celebrity attending official receptions when he was invited to sign the town’s official guest book. On one occasion he was invited to the local Schützenfest, and he attended in the full uniform of an honorary member. In 2017 the French Government appointed him to the Légion d’honneur.
Benny Goodman’s marriage was dissolved and his son survives him.





source: The Telegraph

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## ARTESH (Jul 21, 2021)

Rest in peace, Sir!


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## Gnomey (Jul 21, 2021)




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## rochie (Jul 21, 2021)

may they all find the peace they fought bravely for

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## fubar57 (Jul 29, 2021)

Dead at 98: The decorated rescue pilot and Bomber Command veteran who brought safety to Canadian air travel

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## Dash119 (Jul 29, 2021)




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## ARTESH (Jul 30, 2021)

Rest in Peace, Sir!


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## Airframes (Jul 30, 2021)




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## Gnomey (Jul 30, 2021)




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## at6 (Aug 4, 2021)

Pearl Harbor Survivor Chief Petty Officer Stuart Hedley has passed away. While I never got to meet him, my friend in Sylmar had a close friendship with him. Rest in peace sir. 
Born October 29 1921. Died August 4 2021.

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## fubar57 (Aug 4, 2021)




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## N4521U (Aug 5, 2021)

Well, sometimes it is disappointing when you look up the name of someone you looked up to.
Stu Eberhardt Clyde Stuart Eberhardt — Clipper Pioneers
I knew him as the owner flyer of Merlins Magic, Race 22.
Treated everyone with respect and courtesy.



I had the pleasure of doing the nose art onner.
His yeelow rudder comes from loosing his trim tab mid flight and managing to get her back to the runway.
Bob Hoover was at Reno doing a demo in the Rockwell Mustang, yellow. Bob loaned his rudder to Stu as it was the weekend Bob taxied into a pickup truck and cut it up like a loaf of bread. He was labeled the Hoovermatic that weekend. Never have seen a picture of the truck published and I never managed to get one as I was there. So Stu flew around with a partially lettered Bob Hoover rudder. When he had a replacement fitted, he left the trim tab off and painted it yellow in honor of Mr. Hoover!

He will be missed by family and everyone who met him.

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## at6 (Aug 5, 2021)




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## FLYBOYJ (Aug 5, 2021)




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## Thumpalumpacus (Aug 5, 2021)




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## ARTESH (Aug 5, 2021)

May their souls rest in Eternal peace.

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## Dash119 (Aug 5, 2021)




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## rochie (Aug 5, 2021)




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## vikingBerserker (Aug 5, 2021)




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## Gnomey (Aug 5, 2021)




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## michaelmaltby (Aug 23, 2021)

Tom T Hall - 'the storyteller'








Tom T. Hall - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org

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## Gnomey (Aug 24, 2021)




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## Thumpalumpacus (Aug 24, 2021)

I was never a big fan of the Rolling Stones, but their drummer, Charlie Watts, died today at the age of 80; the cause of death was not announced.

You can really hear his jazz roots on the outro to this, my favorite Stones song:

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## v2 (Nov 29, 2021)

Captain William (Bill) Leckie (AEM, KW) 

Captain William (Bill) Leckie, who died peacefully at home in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, in his 101st year, had a remarkable life which included dramatic, high-risk missions with the Royal Air Force in World War II, followed by 25 years as a pilot with Aer Lingus. One of his wartime operations became the subject of a film starring George Clooney and Matt Damon. 
William Thomas Leckie was born in Glasgow on June 23, 1921, but the family moved to the countryside when he was seven, because of his father's bronchitis. Having worked initially as a cinema projectionist, he joined the RAF in June 1941, starting off as a trainee pilot at Stoke Orchard, near Cheltenham, before being sent to Canada and the US for further training.
Returning to the UK, he expected to be piloting Catalina seaplanes but was assigned instead to Bomber Command where one of his missions involved an attack on a flying-bomb factory in Germany. In August 1944, he was transferred to a Special Duties squadron based at Brindisi in Italy, bringing his Bomber Command crew with him, and took part in dropping guns, ammunition and food to Polish activists in the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupation. For his role in that mission, during which many aircraft were lost, Leckie was awarded the Polish Cross of Valour. His work at Brindisi also involved providing supplies to anti-Nazi guerrilla fighters in the Balkans. Sometimes special agents, known as "Joes", were dropped off as well, usually at discreet locations surrounded by hills. 
He was also the pilot in a dramatic operation on April 8, 1945, in which four special agents were dropped near the Altaussee salt mine in the Austrian Alps. Their mission was to recover 6,755 of the world's greatest works of art by Michelangelo, Vermeer and others which the Nazis had confiscated. Adolf Hitler had intended to display them at a Fuhrer-Museum in his Austrian hometown of Linz, if he had won the war. The German plan at this stage was to blow up the entire collection to keep it out of the hands of the Allies. However, the rescue mission was a success and the treasure trove of art was taken into safe keeping as the Nazi war effort collapsed. The operation was the subject of _The Monuments Men_, a 2007 book by Robert M Edsel and Bret Witter which was made into a film of the same title, directed by George Clooney who also starred along with Matt Damon, Bill Murray and Cate Blanchett.
Leckie was always modest about his wartime service and some of the detail only became known to his family in recent times. After leaving the RAF in September 1946, he returned to his job as a cinema projectionist and later joined the home appliance company Hoover. He then worked for a number of years in civilian pilot training with Airwork Ltd at Scone aerodrome near Perth in Scotland. Subsequently he moved to Ireland, where he was a pilot with Aer Lingus from 1954 to 1979. People who worked with him have paid tribute to the support and guidance he gave to cadets and other colleagues. 
After his retirement, he moved to Troon on the west coast of Scotland but returned to Ireland two years ago and lived in Enniskerry with his son Allan. Having celebrated his 100th birthday last June, he passed away on October 4 surrounded by his family. 
Representatives of the Royal British Legion of UK veterans in the Republic of Ireland attended the funeral service, which took place at St Patrick's Church, Enniskerry, and was followed by committal at Mount Jerome Crematorium, Harold's Cross. 
His wife Ina died in 2012. His surviving relatives include his son Allan, daughters Irene and Fiona, daughter-in-law Jacinta, sons-in-law Steven and Giovanni, seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

source: Independent

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## Airframes (Nov 29, 2021)




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## Dash119 (Nov 29, 2021)




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## Snautzer01 (Nov 29, 2021)

Sweet skies.


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## Gnomey (Nov 29, 2021)




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## rochie (Nov 29, 2021)




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## at6 (Nov 29, 2021)




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## fubar57 (Nov 29, 2021)




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## Wildcat (Nov 30, 2021)




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## Wayne Little (Nov 30, 2021)




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## XBe02Drvr (Nov 30, 2021)




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## GrauGeist (Dec 1, 2021)




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## ARTESH (Dec 2, 2021)




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## Totalize (Dec 2, 2021)




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## michaelmaltby (Dec 3, 2021)

Ace Japanese fighter pilot Minoru Honda. Photo: YouTube








The daredevilry of Japan pilot Minoru Honda who survived Hiroshima bombing


The veteran airman was the only Japanese fighter in the air above Hiroshima when the B-29 bomber dropped an atomic weapon over the city.




www.scmp.com

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## at6 (Dec 3, 2021)




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## vikingBerserker (Dec 3, 2021)

Wow, their last living ace.


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## Dash119 (Dec 3, 2021)




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## Gnomey (Dec 3, 2021)




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## ARTESH (Dec 3, 2021)




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## rochie (Dec 4, 2021)




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## le_steph40 (Dec 4, 2021)




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## XBe02Drvr (Dec 5, 2021)




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## Wayne Little (Dec 5, 2021)




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## Snautzer01 (Dec 5, 2021)

Colonel Edward David Shames June 13, 1922 – December 3, 2021 Edward Shames - Wikipedia

506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Easy Company. Band of Brothers


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## ARTESH (Dec 5, 2021)




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## fubar57 (Dec 5, 2021)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/bob-dole-obituary-1.6274314

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## Airframes (Dec 5, 2021)




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## rochie (Dec 5, 2021)




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## Gnomey (Dec 5, 2021)




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## at6 (Dec 5, 2021)




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## Totalize (Dec 6, 2021)




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## Dash119 (Dec 6, 2021)




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## AMCKen (Dec 13, 2021)

Peter Spoden - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org

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## at6 (Dec 14, 2021)




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## AMCKen (Dec 14, 2021)

Thomas W. Horton (RAF officer) - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org

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## Snautzer01 (Dec 14, 2021)

AMCKen said:


> Peter Spoden - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> 
> ...








The Aircraft of Hptm. Peter Spoden I./ NJG 6


I'm sure there's more than a few of you who know of this man. I've been fortunate enough to have been corresponding through email with this gentleman for the past year or so, or more correctly he's been putting up with my stupid questions for a year or so! Peter was Gruppenkommandeur of I./...



ww2aircraft.net


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## Airframes (Dec 14, 2021)




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## Wurger (Dec 15, 2021)




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## rochie (Dec 15, 2021)




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## Gnomey (Dec 15, 2021)




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## MiTasol (Jan 9, 2022)

Lawrence N. Brooks, 112, Oldest American World War II Veteran, Dies


He served in the largely African American 91st engineering unit at a time of segregation in the Army.




www.nytimes.com





... Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed their home in 2005. He was in his late 90s at the time, and had to be rescued from his roof by helicopter. His daughter Vanessa described him as "resilient."

"He's real tough, and that's one thing I learned from him," she told The Associated Press. "If nothing else, he instilled in me, 'Do your best, and whatever you can't do, it don't make no sense to worry about it.' I think that's why he has lived as long as he has."

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## Dash119 (Jan 10, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Jan 11, 2022)




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## MiTasol (Jan 17, 2022)

And another unfortunately. 102 is not a bad run tho. Link was sent to me or I would not have known









Pioneering US military pilot Charles McGee dies at 102


A member of the first all-black aviation unit, the Tuskegee Airmen, he flew more than 400 missions.



www.bbc.com

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## Airframes (Jan 17, 2022)




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## fubar57 (Jan 17, 2022)




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## Wurger (Jan 17, 2022)




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## Thumpalumpacus (Jan 17, 2022)

MiTasol said:


> And another unfortunately. 102 is not a bad run tho. Link was sent to me or I would not have known
> 
> 
> 
> ...





AMCKen said:


> Peter Spoden - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> 
> ...





AMCKen said:


> Thomas W. Horton (RAF officer) - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> 
> ...





MiTasol said:


> Lawrence N. Brooks, 112, Oldest American World War II Veteran, Dies
> 
> 
> He served in the largely African American 91st engineering unit at a time of segregation in the Army.
> ...


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## Gnomey (Jan 17, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Jan 18, 2022)




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## AMCKen (Jan 20, 2022)

MiTasol said:


> And another unfortunately. 102 is not a bad run tho. Link was sent to me or I would not have known
> 
> 
> 
> ...











Charles McGee (pilot) - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org

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## MiTasol (Feb 18, 2022)

And another








Berlin Airlift 'Candy Bomber' pilot dies aged 101


Beloved in Germany, US military pilot Gail S Halvorsen became known as the Candy Bomber due to him dropping sweets for children during the Berlin Airlift after World War II.




www.abc.net.au





Proof that mankind has some very good people.

Fun fact
The politicians and press etc made a big fuss over the tonnage of cargo carried into Berlin during the airlift.
In PNG at the same time there were MORE tons of cargo flying from Lae and Madang into the Highlands.

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## Dash119 (Feb 18, 2022)




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## vikingBerserker (Feb 18, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Feb 18, 2022)




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## Thumpalumpacus (Feb 18, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (Feb 18, 2022)




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## MiTasol (Feb 25, 2022)

An interesting short write up and song about Halvorsen - post 2,104 above









Gail Halvorsen - Honorary Unsubscribe


Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Halvorsen wanted to fly, and earned his pilot’s license in 1941, and joined the Civil Air Patrol. With World War II raging, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942, a




www.honoraryunsubscribe.com


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## fubar57 (Feb 25, 2022)




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## Wurger (Feb 26, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Feb 26, 2022)




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## AMCKen (Mar 3, 2022)

Deanie Parrish - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org

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## CATCH 22 (Mar 3, 2022)

AMCKen said:


> Deanie Parrish - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> 
> ...








Here is the official obituary.
God works in mysterious ways: she passed away one day short of her 100th birthday (Febr. 25.)!

Photo copied from here.


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## fubar57 (Mar 3, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Mar 3, 2022)




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## Wurger (Mar 4, 2022)




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## Airframes (Mar 4, 2022)




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## rochie (Mar 4, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (Mar 4, 2022)




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## AMCKen (Mar 4, 2022)

Harold Simon - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org


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## Dash119 (Mar 4, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Mar 5, 2022)




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## MiTasol (Mar 13, 2022)

This gentleman died November 1, 2020 but I am putting this in anyway as I think it is worth reading. The article is, to me, badly written with far too much repetition but I feel it is still worth reading the full story.









DONALD LAMBIE’S WAR - Episode One — Vintage Wings of Canada


Don Lambie died before he even knew that his album was found. What right did we have to even have it in our possession, let alone pore over it with the intent of publishing it. It was, after all, his personal story not ours. What compelled us to tell his story, the story of a man we never met?




www.vintagewings.ca

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## Thumpalumpacus (Mar 13, 2022)




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## Airframes (Mar 14, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Mar 14, 2022)




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## MiTasol (Mar 16, 2022)

A friend in NZ sent me this -- he died in the war but now being recognised in the Netherlands for his actions. Mods please move if there is a more appropriate thread.



Hero Christchurch war pilot Raymond Cammock to be honoured in Netherlands after remnants of his plane discovered

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## Gnomey (Mar 18, 2022)




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## at6 (Mar 19, 2022)

Soon there will be no one left from that time. So many stories left untold among many that were at last recounted. All heroes regardless of which side they were on. I've always been an admirer of Luftwaffe pilots to a certain of extent because like RAF pilots they served to the end..

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## AMCKen (Mar 21, 2022)

Arnold W. Braswell - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org


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## AMCKen (Mar 21, 2022)

Robert Cardenas - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org


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## Gnomey (Mar 21, 2022)




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## MiTasol (Mar 21, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Mar 21, 2022)




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## at6 (Mar 21, 2022)

So many fallen heroes. RIP.

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## fubar57 (Apr 11, 2022)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obit-reinhard-schindler-holocaust-1.6415815


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## MiTasol (Apr 11, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Apr 11, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Apr 12, 2022)




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## MiTasol (May 8, 2022)

Not in aviation but still a great man

*Johnnie Jones​*
Growing up in Laurel Hill, Louisiana, Jones went to Southern University in Baton Rouge and, shortly after graduating, was drafted into the U.S. Army. It was 1943: World War II was in full swing, and Jones was assigned to the 494th Port Battalion, attached to the 6th Engineer Special Brigade that took part in Operation Overlord, the code name for the invasion of Normandy, France on D-Day, at Omaha Beach. As a warrant officer, Jones was in the third wave of the invasion, responsible for leading a unit unloading equipment and supplies onto Omaha Beach. He was the first African American warrant officer (Junior Grade) in U.S. Army history. He was wounded several times during the operation: his ship hit a mine, he received shrapnel wounds to the neck, and was hit by sniper rounds, but continued his service, going on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge.





Jones during his service (source: U.S. Army)

"Because of racial inequalities," the U.S. Army said in a statement, "Jones had [his] war stories overlooked for decades, despite rightfully earning" a Purple Heart; he had earlier received the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre with Palm from France. After the war, Jones was on his way to New Orleans to have a piece of shrapnel surgically removed from his neck. He was pulled over by a sheriff's deputy and beaten. Jones returned to Southern University and, in 1953, received his law degree, and was the first Black member of the Baton Rouge Bar Association. Jones was almost immediately recruited to represent people arrested in the Baton Rouge bus boycott, a precursor to the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Later, Jones jumped out of his car just before a Ku Klux Klan car bomb exploded. During his legal career, Jones successfully fought for pay equity for teachers; sued to desegregate local parks, pools, amusement centers, schools, and courtrooms; represented Southern University student protesters during the Civil Rights movement; guarded the constitutional rights of indigent defendants; and challenged voter discrimination practices. He continued to practice law until he was 93 years old.




U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy presenting the Purple Heart to Jones on Saturday, June 26, 2021, finally righting an intentional oversight. (U.S. Army)

In June 2021, 77 years after being wounded in battle on D-Day, the U.S. Army finally awarded Jones a Purple Heart. For the ceremony, Jones requested a dress uniform. "Wanting to be dressed appropriately that many years later [shows] he is still thinking like a Soldier," said Lt. Col. Scott Johnson, the Army Human Resources Command's chief of awards and decorations, who made sure Jones got it. U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana pinned the medal on Jones' jacket. "Here's a man who could be bitter," Cassidy said, "but he speaks only of affection and he speaks not of himself, but his love of our state and of our nation and his desire that everyone have the same opportunity to enjoy the blessings of the state in nation." Jones was 101 years old.

The ceremony was just in time: Jones died April 23 at a veteran's home in Jackson, La. He was 102.

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## Wurger (May 8, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (May 8, 2022)




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## Wayne Little (May 8, 2022)




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## Airframes (May 8, 2022)




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## fubar57 (May 8, 2022)




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## Gnomey (May 8, 2022)




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## Dash119 (May 9, 2022)




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## Crimea_River (May 16, 2022)

On Saturday, May 14, 2022, Canadian fighter pilot legend Wing Commander James Francis "Stocky" Edwards of Nakomis, Saskatchewan passed away a month short of his 101st birthday. In the argot of aircrew from the Second World War, Stocky has "gone west."









h










GONE WEST — Stocky Edwards, dies at nearly 101 — Vintage Wings of Canada


On Saturday, May 14, 2022, Canadian fighter pilot legend Wing Commander James Francis Edwards of Nakomis, Saskatchewan passed away a month short of his 101st birthday. In the argot of aircrew from the Second World War, Stocky has “gone west.”




www.vintagewings.ca

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## Dash119 (May 16, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (May 16, 2022)




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## ARTESH (May 16, 2022)

Rest in peace, Sir!


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## Wurger (May 16, 2022)




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## MiTasol (May 16, 2022)




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## fubar57 (May 16, 2022)




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## AMCKen (May 17, 2022)

Crimea_River said:


> On Saturday, May 14, 2022, Canadian fighter pilot legend Wing Commander James Francis "Stocky" Edwards of Nakomis, Saskatchewan passed away a month short of his 101st birthday. In the argot of aircrew from the Second World War, Stocky has "gone west."
> 
> View attachment 669035
> 
> ...











James Francis Edwards - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org

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## v2 (May 17, 2022)




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## Peter Gunn (May 17, 2022)




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## Airframes (May 17, 2022)




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## Gnomey (May 17, 2022)




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## v2 (Jun 3, 2022)

* Sydney Grimes* - last RAF hero who sank Adolf Hitler's Tirpitz battleship 
The last of the RAF heroes who sank Adolf Hitler's fearsome warship, the Tirpitz, has died at the age of 100. Sydney Grimes was a wireless operator on a Lancaster bomber on the final two of the three daring raids 617 Squadron made on the ship, dubbed 'The Beast' by Winston Churchill. Mr Grimes' family yesterday confirmed he died on May 27, three weeks after celebrating his 100th birthday. 
The largest German warship ever built, the Tirpitz – sister ship to the Bismarck – posed a constant threat to the Allies' Arctic convoy supply runs. It had 120 guns, it was faster than any British warship and bombs bounced off its 12-inch steel armour. 
Born in the Essex village of Great Wakering near Southend, Mr Grimes was 17 when war broke out. He had left school at 14 to work as a clerk in E K Cole's radio factory, later renamed EKCO. It was there he met Iris, whom he would go on to marry shortly before the Tirpitz raids. He served first with 106 Squadron then joined 617 Squadron, by then famous as the 'Dambusters' from the 'bouncing bomb' raids on dams in 1943. For the Tirpitz mission off the coast of Norway, Mr Grimes had a personal motivation. 'My brother was in the Navy on HMS London escorting Arctic convoys,' he said. 'He'd told me about the Tirpitz and I knew it worried him.' On the third raid on November 12, 1944, he and his comrades finally obliterated the warship Hitler had called 'the pride of the German Navy'. On receiving the news the Tirpitz had been destroyed, Mr Grimes recalled: 'There was a cheer but the biggest emotion was a great sense of relief that we wouldn't have to go back again!' Mr Grimes completed 43 operations and finished the war as a flight lieutenant. He and Iris, who died more than two years ago, had three children.


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## Wurger (Jun 3, 2022)




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## Airframes (Jun 3, 2022)




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## Crimea_River (Jun 3, 2022)




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## fubar57 (Jun 3, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Jun 3, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (Jun 3, 2022)




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## rochie (Jun 3, 2022)




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## Snautzer01 (Jun 3, 2022)




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## at6 (Jun 3, 2022)




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## MiTasol (Jun 3, 2022)




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## ARTESH (Jun 4, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Jun 4, 2022)




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## cvairwerks (Jun 6, 2022)

Got word last night that Maj. Jack Hallett passed away on 15 May 22. Jack was a P-38 and P-47 pilot, flying 104 missions, despite being shot down twice. Jack was still actively flying at 100 years old. Steve Wolf has been working on a scale version of Jack's P-47., and I believe that some photos of the project have been posted here before. From everything I've seen and heard, Jack was a character and the type of guy you'd want to have as a friend.

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## Dash119 (Jun 6, 2022)




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## vikingBerserker (Jun 6, 2022)

It is sad that in my lifetime I could see the last WW2 vet pass away.


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## Airframes (Jun 6, 2022)




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## rochie (Jun 6, 2022)




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## Snautzer01 (Jun 6, 2022)

vikingBerserker said:


> It is sad that in my lifetime I could see the last WW2 vet pass away.


No that means they did the job right. Otherwise we would perhaps be thanking ww3 vets. I only hope that the lads after service had a good life. I realley do.

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## fubar57 (Jun 6, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Jun 6, 2022)




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## special ed (Jun 6, 2022)

I also saw of the last WW1 vet pass away. I think when I was born in 1940, there were still a very few Civil War vets alive.

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## at6 (Jun 6, 2022)




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## Crimea_River (Jun 13, 2022)

Jerry Crandall, founder of Eagle Editions and author of many outstanding WW2 titles, passed yesterday at age 87. RIP Jerry.

RIP Jerry Crandall

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## Wurger (Jun 13, 2022)

Oh ! 

R.I.P


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## Snautzer01 (Jun 13, 2022)

that is bad news for all book lovers like me


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## Airframes (Jun 13, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Jun 13, 2022)




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## fubar57 (Jun 14, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Jun 14, 2022)




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## Wayne Little (Jun 14, 2022)

R.I.P Jerry.


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## Thumpalumpacus (Jun 26, 2022)

_Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson, a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, World War II prisoner of war and lifelong Detroiter, died Wednesday.

He was 100 years old.

The Tuskegee Airmen were the nation's first African American military pilots, and Jefferson was among the first to escort bombers in WWII.

Jefferson was honored on his 100th birthday in November as Detroit officials awarded him a key to the city, shared plans to construct Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson Plaza and rededicated Jefferson Field in Rouge Park, where he played as a child and flew model airplanes.

A Detroit native, Jefferson attended Craft Elementary School, Condon Intermediate School and Chadsey High School. He earned a bachelor's degree from Clark College in Atlanta, did graduate work in chemistry at Howard University and received a master's degree in education from Wayne State University.

He graduated from Tuskegee Army Air Field's pilot training in 1944, followed by combat training at Selfridge airfield in Harrison Township. 

He served in World War II as a P-51 fighter pilot with the 332nd Fighter Group-301st Fighter Squadron in Ramitelli, Italy, later called the "Red Tails."

Jefferson flew 18 missions before being shot down and held as a prisoner in Poland for eight months in 1944-45.

He was honorably discharged from active duty in 1947 and retired from the reserves in 1969 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. _









Tuskegee Airman, lifelong Detroiter Alexander Jefferson dies at 100


Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson, a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, World War II prisoner of war and lifelong Detroiter, died Wednesday, June 22.



www.freep.com

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## Wurger (Jun 26, 2022)

R.I.P


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## Snautzer01 (Jun 26, 2022)




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## fubar57 (Jun 26, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (Jun 26, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Jun 26, 2022)




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## at6 (Jun 26, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Jun 27, 2022)




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## ARTESH (Jun 29, 2022)

Rest in Peace, Sir!


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## Airframes (Jun 29, 2022)




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## vikingBerserker (Jun 29, 2022)




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## Thumpalumpacus (Jul 4, 2022)

_WASHINGTON (AP) — Hershel W. "Woody" Williams, the last remaining Medal of Honor recipient from World War II, will lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday.

A date and other details will be announced later, Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement.

"Woody Williams embodied the best of America: living a life of duty, honor and courage," Pelosi said. Schumer said: "Woody Williams was an American hero who embodied the best of our country and the greatest generation."

Williams, who died on Wednesday at 98, was a legend in his native West Virginia for his heroics under fire over several crucial hours at the battle for Iwo Jima. As a young Marine corporal, Williams went ahead of his unit in February 1945 and eliminated a series of Japanese machine gun positions. Facing small-arms fire, Williams fought for four hours, repeatedly returning to prepare demolition charges and obtain flamethrowers.

Williams remained in the Marines after the war, serving a total of 20 years, before working for the Veterans Administration for 33 years as a veterans service representative. In 2018, the Huntington VA medical center was renamed in his honor, and the Navy commissioned a mobile base sea vessel in his name in 2020._



https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-u-s-news/wwii-medal-of-honor-recipient-to-lie-in-state-at-us-capitol/

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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Jul 4, 2022)

RIP Hershel, and thank you for your service.

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## fubar57 (Jul 4, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (Jul 4, 2022)




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## ARTESH (Jul 4, 2022)

Rest in Peace, Sir!


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## N4521U (Jul 4, 2022)

Right hand salute.......................... Two, Marine!

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## ARTESH (Jul 4, 2022)

DerAdlerIstGelandet
, Chris, my apologies for wrong reaction. I didn't notice that at first. Have changed it the 'Friendly'.


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## Gnomey (Jul 10, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Jul 12, 2022)




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## AMCKen (Jul 25, 2022)

Saw him quite a few times at various shows.








Tom Poberezny - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org


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## Gnomey (Jul 25, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (Jul 25, 2022)

Got to meet him at Oshkosh in 2011. How ironic that he passed away the first day of air adventure!


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## ARTESH (Jul 26, 2022)

RIP!


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## vikingBerserker (Jul 26, 2022)




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## MiTasol (Aug 19, 2022)

Goodbye to WWII pilot Dean "Diz" Laird, the only U.S. Navy ace to have air combat victories in both the Pacific and European theaters, flying 138 fighter missions during that war. The recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross (and the 2015 Congressional Gold Medal), Laird also served in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and was the lead stunt pilot for the 1969 film _Tora! Tora! Tora!_ He retired from the Navy in 1971 as a Commander, and _still_ holds the record for the most arrested landings on a straight-deck aircraft carrier. He died August 10 at 101.









An Ace in the Hole: "Diz" Laird


U.S. Navy Commander Dean “Diz” Laird went from shooting down Japanese airplanes to flying replicas of them over Pearl Harbor




www.historynet.com













The Diz Laird Collection - USS Hornet Museum






uss-hornet.org










Dean S. Laird - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org

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## GrauGeist (Aug 19, 2022)




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## GrauGeist (Aug 20, 2022)

I just found out that an acquaintance of mine passed away on Christmas day, 2016.
Jack Goad was 95 years young at the time of his passing and some may recall my mentioning him in a few threads regarding D-Day, as he was with the 82nd Airborn.
He was also attached to General Eisenhower's security detail as well as being tasked with standing guard over General Patton during the preperations for his funeral.

He was easy to talk to and one of his recollections about D-Day and the weeks following, was that any German armored vehicle they encountered was assumed to be a Tiger - it's reputation was that great.
He also mentioned that of all the Allied aircraft he observed attacking German positions, the Typhoon and P-47 were the ones that impressed him the most.

It's a shame, that in this age of instant information, we still get left in the dark.

Rest easy, Jack (and you still owe me a beer for fixing your truck's radio!)

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## buffnut453 (Aug 20, 2022)

Fair winds and following seas brave aviator!

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## fubar57 (Aug 20, 2022)




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## Airframes (Aug 20, 2022)




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## Snautzer01 (Aug 20, 2022)




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## Thumpalumpacus (Aug 20, 2022)

GrauGeist said:


> I just found out that an acquaintance of mine passed away on Christmas day, 2016.
> Jack Goad was 95 years young at the time of his passing and some may recall my mentioning him in a few threads regarding D-Day, as he was with the 82nd Airborn.
> He was also attached to General Eisenhower's security detail as well as being tasked with standing guard over General Patton during the preperations for his funeral.
> 
> ...












MiTasol said:


> Goodbye to WWII pilot Dean "Diz" Laird, the only U.S. Navy ace to have air combat victories in both the Pacific and European theaters, flying 138 fighter missions during that war. The recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross (and the 2015 Congressional Gold Medal), Laird also served in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and was the lead stunt pilot for the 1969 film _Tora! Tora! Tora!_ He retired from the Navy in 1971 as a Commander, and _still_ holds the record for the most arrested landings on a straight-deck aircraft carrier. He died August 10 at 101.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## ARTESH (Aug 22, 2022)

May their souls rest in Peace!

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## buffnut453 (Aug 30, 2022)

Mikhail Gorbachev, last Premier of the Soviet Union, has died aged 91. Seen in the West as the architect of the end of the Cold War, and of Russia joining the rest of the world through his policy of Glasnost, he was, unsurprisingly, viewed rather differently in Russia as the instigator of the chaos that came after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Regardless of your viewpoint, he was a brave man who acted on his principles. Oh, that we had a few more like him in Russia today.

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## FLYBOYJ (Aug 30, 2022)




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## Admiral Beez (Aug 30, 2022)

Many of Russia's best combat aircraft arrived under Gorbachev's watch.

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## Dash119 (Aug 30, 2022)




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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Aug 30, 2022)

This is such a weird feeling today. As a kid living in Germany in the 80s and 90s, experiencing the end of the Cold War first hand, and the fall of the Berlin Wall left a permanent impact on my life. I may have been young, but I remember it clearly. I remember the "Tear Down This Wall" Speech, and I remember watching the Berlin Wall fall. Maybe it is because up until that point I lived on the front lines of potential WW3. The Soviet Army was only several hundred kilometers away. At the time there were two level headed leaders leading the United States and the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Despite their differences they found a way to seek peace and to meet common ground (something our leaders today, and their blind cult like followers are incapable of). 

With Gorbachev's passing today, the two leaders who probably impacted my life the most are gone. Its just a litteral surreal feeling I cannot explain.

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## buffnut453 (Sep 8, 2022)

Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II died today after a lifetime of service. She counts as a WW2 veteran since she wore uniform during that conflict:






Despite her oft-dysfunctional offspring (who wouldn't be a little warped being raised in that pressure-cooker environment), she embodied service before self, and was a bedrock of stability through her many tumultuous decades. 

Farewell Auntie Betty....may your successors continue in the mould you created.

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## fubar57 (Sep 8, 2022)




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## Wurger (Sep 8, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (Sep 8, 2022)




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## vikingBerserker (Sep 8, 2022)




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## Thumpalumpacus (Sep 8, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Sep 8, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Sep 8, 2022)




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## Vic Balshaw (Sep 8, 2022)

I was in the dentist chair when she came to the thrown back in Feb 52, a day I will forever remember. RIP Liz.


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## at6 (Sep 8, 2022)

She embodied all of the qualities that make for a great queen. There will never be an equal to her. My condolences to all of the subjects of her throne.

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## ARTESH (Sep 9, 2022)




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## buffnut453 (Sep 20, 2022)

Great Escaper Vyvyan Howard has passed away aged 102. Heck of a man!









Great Escape prisoner Vyvyan Howard, dies aged 102


Former pilot, Vyvyan Howard, helped others escape by distracting guards as the tunnels were dug.



www.bbc.com

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## Dash119 (Sep 20, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Sep 20, 2022)




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## at6 (Sep 21, 2022)




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## fubar57 (Sep 22, 2022)




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## Wurger (Sep 22, 2022)




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## Snautzer01 (Sep 22, 2022)




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## Barrett (Nov 15, 2022)

Got looking at members of our forum who have departed the pattern. Reminded me of the compilation I shared with other aero historians semi-recently, going back many years.

Jeff Ethell 1997
John W.R. Taylor 1999
Pete Bowers 2003
Peter Grosz 2006
Al (Alwyn) Lloyd 2007
Warren Bodie 2009
Rick Duiven 2009
William Green 2010
Dan-San Abbott 2011
Gordon Swanborough 2012
Ray Wagner 2012
Joe Mizrahi 2015
Robin Higham 2015
Bob Dorr 2016
Rene' Francillon 2018
Rosario "Zip" Rausa 2018
Henry Sakaida 2018
Bill Hess 2019
Walt Boyne 2020
Larry Hickey 2021
Bill Larkins 2021
Bob Mikesh 2022
Eric Hammel 2022
Frank Olynyk 2022

I knew many of 'em and was acquainted with others. Most notably Jeff Ethell, Pete Bowers, Ray Wagner, Robin Higham, Bob Dorr, Zip Rausa, Henry Sakaida, Bill Hess, Walt Boyne, Eric Hammel and Frank Olynyk. Some of the remaining old-timers wonder where the next generation's coming from!

Sign me
"The kid" at 73 creak.

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## AMCKen (Dec 6, 2022)

Kenneth O. Chilstrom - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org

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## fubar57 (Dec 6, 2022)




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## FLYBOYJ (Dec 6, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Dec 6, 2022)




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## Dash119 (Dec 6, 2022)




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## Wurger (Dec 6, 2022)




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## Snautzer01 (Dec 6, 2022)




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## special ed (Dec 6, 2022)

Although I'll never find it now, Lt. Col Chilstrom broke the speed of sound in the XP-86 just before Yeager was to make his flight. Yeager and others were at the "Happy Bottom Riding Club" when, late in the evening, Chilstrom took the 86 past Mach in a shallow dive over the club breaking two windows. He was required to fly the 86 gear extended until Yeager made his official flight a week later.

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## rochie (Dec 8, 2022)

Dambuster Johnny Johnson dies









Dambuster Johnny Johnson dies aged 101


Sq Ldr George 'Johnny' Johnson was part of the World War Two operation involving bouncing bombs.



www.bbc.co.uk


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## Vic Balshaw (Dec 8, 2022)




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## Snautzer01 (Dec 8, 2022)




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## Wurger (Dec 8, 2022)




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## Airframes (Dec 8, 2022)




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## buffnut453 (Dec 8, 2022)

Late to the party...nothing to see, move along.


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## cvairwerks (Dec 10, 2022)

Col. Joe Kittinger passed on 9 Dec 22.

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## Airframes (Dec 10, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Dec 10, 2022)




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## Thumpalumpacus (Dec 11, 2022)

_
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Retired Air Force Col. Joseph Kittinger, whose 1960 parachute jump from almost 20 miles above the Earth stood as a world record for more than 50 years, died Friday in Florida. He was 94.

His death was announced by former U.S. Rep. John Mica and other friends. The cause was lung cancer.

Kittinger, then an Air Force captain and pilot, gained worldwide fame when he completed three jumps over 10 months from a gondola that was hoisted into the stratosphere by large helium balloons. Project Excelsior was aimed at helping design ejection systems for military pilots flying high-altitude missions.

Wearing a pressure suit and 60 pounds of equipment, Kittinger almost died during the project's first jump in November 1959 when his gear malfunctioned after he jumped from 14.5 miles. He lost consciousness as he went into a spin that was 22 times the force of gravity. He was saved when his automatic chute opened.

Four weeks later, Kittinger made his second jump from just over 14 miles above the surface. This time, there were no problems.

Kittinger's record jump came on Aug. 16, 1960, in the New Mexico desert. His pressure suit malfunctioned as he rose, failing to seal off his right hand, which swelled to twice normal size before he jumped from 102,800 feet — more than 19 miles above the surface.

Free falling in the thin atmosphere, the Tampa native exceeded 600 mph before the gradually thickening air slowed his fall to about 150 mph. His parachute deployed at 18,000 feet._









Air Force Col. (ret.) Joseph Kittinger, who set parachute record, dies


Kittinger, a Vietnam War fighter pilot and former POW, parachuted from 19 miles high, a record that stood for more than 50 years.




www.airforcetimes.com

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## ARTESH (Dec 11, 2022)




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## DBII (Dec 11, 2022)

Thumpalumpacus said:


> _FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Retired Air Force Col. Joseph Kittinger, whose 1960 parachute jump from almost 20 miles above the Earth stood as a world record for more than 50 years, died Friday in Florida. He was 94.
> 
> His death was announced by former U.S. Rep. John Mica and other friends. The cause was lung cancer.
> 
> ...


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## Mugwump58 (Dec 12, 2022)

It was announced yesterday that ’Johnnie‘ Johnson, the last surviving dambuster died yesterday aged 101

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## Wurger (Dec 12, 2022)




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## ARTESH (Dec 12, 2022)




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## MiTasol (Dec 17, 2022)

Joseph Kittinger is an almost unknown aviator who deserves a strong mention on this site









Joseph Kittinger - Honorary Unsubscribe


“There’s no way you can visualize the speed,” Kittinger said later. “I could only hear myself breathing in the helmet.”




www.honoraryunsubscribe.com





EDIT - my apologies for repeating your post Thumpa

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## Thumpalumpacus (Dec 17, 2022)




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## Gnomey (Dec 28, 2022)




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