Salute to Super-Heroes

Salute to Super-Heroes

A certificate awarded to Ernest from the Confederation Europeenne des Anciens Combattants.
A newspaper article about tail-end charlies and a service held at St Clement's Dane church.

One printed sheet and one newspaper cutting

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[Certificate from Confederation Europeenne Des Anciens Combattants to Ernest Probyn dated 25-4-1984]

Daily Mail, Monday, October 4, 1976

TAIL-END CHARLIES REMEMBER LOST COMRADES

[black and white photograph of Ron Emeny wearing his war medals on his jacket lapels]

Ron Enemy . . . fought with the Maquis

Salute to super-heroes

By JUNE SOUTHWORTH

THE bells of London’s St Clement Dane’s Church rang out in tribute yesterday to the bravest men in Britain – the RAF’s ‘Tail-end Charlies’ who went on bombing missions night after night on a wing and a prayer.

Most of them were air gunners who had sat alone in Perspex turrets in the tail of their bombers, sitting targets in the most dangerous and isolated job in the war.

More than 77,000 British and Allied gunners were killed.

Yesterday the survivors filed into the church for a memorial service to their fallen comrades, a gesture to show relatives that it was not all in vain.

Proud, straight-backed men in their Sunday suits and gleaming medals, they saluted as Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who as head of Bomber Command launched a thousand planes over Germany, passed slowly to a seat in the front pew.

Now 84 and living in retirement in Oxfordshire, he came to sing ‘Oh God, our help in ages past’ with his men – among the luckiest in the land to be alive today.

Glory

They were supposed to go on until they were taken out of the war in the air after 90 operational flights. But the average lifespan of a ‘Tail-end Charlie’ was reckoned as ten ’ops.’

Many of the 800 guests yesterday were non-commissioned men who for a strange period of their lives had known the guts and glory of laying everything on the line for a cause.

Then they returned to ordinary jobs but they never forgot their nights as super-heroes.

After the memorial service they went to a reception at the Europa Hotel, where Anne Shelton, who broadcast to the Forces every Monday when she was only 18, sang the songs they whistled in their turrets in the sky.

You’ll Never Know, she sang, but they knew all right. They may not have known the face of the man with the medals, but they knew his story.

Men like Ron ‘Curly’ Emeny, who was shot down in France, landed in the arms of the Maquis and fought with them until he was captured and taken to the Gestapo HQ in Paris.

After a six-week interrogation, a party of officers came ‘to take him to Dachau.’ Safely out of sight, they revealed themselves as the Maquis and smuggled him back to England.

Four years ago he retired from the RAF as a flight-lieutenant, and is now an engineer in the Midlands.

Men like Walter Johnson-Biggs, DFC, now a London taxi-driver, who was found unconscious and half-frozen by his crew members after landing.

Novel

Flak had severed his oxygen pipes, but he had stayed with his guns rather than have the plane turn back.

Men like Norman Storey, 52, an antiquarian bookseller these days, who made 40 ops, mainly as a rear gunner, and was the reality of the fictional hero 18-year-old Sarah Patterson wrote about in her best-selling novel The Distant Summer.