The story of the loss of Stirling BK767 June 1943

The story of the loss of Stirling BK767 June 1943

An account of the loss of Stirling BK767 compiled by Peter Rhebergen. It includes interviews with one of the two survivors, correspondence with the widow of the other and discussions with other surviving Stirling aircrew. There are accounts of the crash from local residents of the area and correspondence with the night fighter pilot who is thought to have shot the aircraft down.

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“NOTHING WAS HEARD OF THIS AIRCRAFT, WHICH IS MISSING”

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No. 214 Squadron

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The story of a Stirling bomber crew

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[italics] Presented to my friend and former Stirling-pilot Geoff Shattock.

By Peter Rhebergen
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‘Former Stirling-pilots to me are hero’s’ [/italics]

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‘NOTHING WAS HEARD OF THIS AIRCRAFT, WHICH IS MISSING’

The story of a Stirling bomber crew

Saturday, June 26, 1993, will be the 50th anniversary of the death of five members of 214 (F.M.S.) Squadron, RAF Bomber Command, who were killed when their Stirling aircraft crashed near Aalten, in eastern Holland, while taking part in a night raid on Gelsenkirchen. This story of the airmen’s fate, and of how details of the loss of their aircraft were discovered, is based on the RAF career of the crew’s bomb aimer, Flying Officer John Frederick Tritton, whose selfless action during the last moments of the aircraft’s flight may have cost him his life.

JOHN FREDERICK TRITTON was the eldest child of Frederick James and Grace Emily (née Webb) Tritton. He was born on June 23, 1915 and lived with his parents, brother Frank and sister Freda at No. 5 Thurlestone Road, West Norwood, London SE27. Fred was a process etcher on the Daily Express in Fleet Street and, in 1925, president of ‘SLADE’ (the Society of Lithographic Artists, Designers, Engravers and Process Workers). In the 1930s John served an apprenticeship as a process artist on the Daily Sketch, but afterwards found it difficult to find work because of the effect the depression was having on the newspaper publishing industry. Any lingering hope John had of following his father into the printing trade was soon forgotten when he was called-up for service with the Royal Engineers on June 13, 1940, 10 days before his 25th birthday.

According to his military service records he was 5 ft 5 in. tall, with dark brown hair, hazel eyes and a fresh complexion. Enlistment in the Army must have been a disappointment, since he was a member of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and wanted to learn to fly, but two years later he was transferred to the RAF and posted to various aircrew training establishments, including a flying school in Canada.

Although, like most other recruits, John wanted to become a pilot, he was trained as a bomb aimer. He entered the RAF as a LAC (Leading Aircraftman) and was promoted to sergeant on November 6, 1942. A few days before Christmas he arrived back in the UK from Canada and went home on leave, bringing the news to his family that he had successfully completed his course and been given a temporary commission. He was ‘commissioned from the ranks,’ as they say in the service. A temporary commission was just that, intended to last only until the end of the war. Nevertheless, from the end of 1942 John was a probationary pilot officer – one of the RAF’s “underpaid, unwashed, unwanted,” to quote air force jargon. His pay was probably about 14 shillings and sixpence a day (72½p in today’s money).

Freda (now Mrs Hodgson), who was 18 at the time, told me: “I remember his return from Canada very clearly. He came laden with presents for all of us – Frank still has his, a superb leather sponge case with an oiled silk lining. I had real silk stockings – unheard of in wartime – and a gorgeous pair of pink satin pyjamas. He was a very home-loving chap. I cannot remember him losing his temper with anyone. He was nine years my senior so I was always regarded as the ‘little sister.’ I loved him dearly but didn’t know him that well. However, I know he had many friends – of both sexes. He was such an easy

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going sort of fellow. Always very well dressed; very fussy about clean shoes and tidiness. His unforms were always immaculate.”

Frank Tritton, who was 21 years old when he saw John for the last time, has similarly happy memories of him: “I can’t recall him ever being angry in spite of having to contend with two young siblings! He was a very good swimmer and on many weekends took me to Streatham baths and also quite regularly to the skating rink. He was quite proficient. He played tennis frequently and was treasurer of our local club for some years. Wireless was another of his hobbies. He built our first valve set and the cabinet for it; he did quite a bit of fretwork.”

Freda and Frank both remember John taking up another hobby, photography. “He converted our box room into a dark room,” said Frank. “He built a horizontal enlarger, and taught me all I knew about processing and enlarging – all now forgotten!”

On January 12, 1943, John was posted to No. 26 OUT, based at Wing, near Leighton Buzzard, in Buckinghamshire. This was one of the many operational training units to which pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, gunners and wireless operators were sent after finishing their individual training. At OTUs the ‘rookies’ formed themselves into crews – a somewhat haphazard and informal process usually organized by the pilots – and then spent several months flying together on cross-country training flights (called ‘bullseyes’) and mock ‘ops’ (bombing operations). John joined a crew formed by Sgt Bernard Henry Church (RAF serial no. 148123) from Crouch End, London, who selected Sgt Edwin. G. Taylor (1600154) as his navigator, Sgt W.C. Thomas as his wireless operator, and Sgt Frederick Mills (1048627) as his rear gunner. John, aged 27, was probably called ‘gran’dad’ by the rest of the crew, none of whom what older than 22.

Freda Hodgson told me: “Being the ‘old man’ on the ‘plane would not have worried him at all. He would have got on so well with all of them, I’m sure. He was a reliable, dependable sort of chap – great to have on your side.”

OTUs flew Wellingtons and other twin-engined aircraft; these had five-man crews and by 1943 had been replaced as front line bombers by four-engined ‘heavies’ – Stirlings, Halifaxes and Lancasters. Bernard Church and his crew were destined to fly Stirlings and before they were posted to an operational squadron they went to No. 1657 Conversion Unit at HQ No. 31 Base (RAF Stradishall) to be trained to operate Stirlings. At the CU, Bernard ‘collected’ a flight engineer (Sgt William Harris Thompson, service serial no, 1476771) and mid-upper gunner (Sgt William Thomas David, 1384993) to form the seven-men crew that four-engined bombers required.

On May 6, 1943, John was promoted to the rank of flying officer – subject to Air Ministry confirmation – and a few weeks later, on June 12, he and the other members of Bernard’s crew arrived at RAF Chedburgh, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, to join 214 (F.M.S.) Squadron, commanded by Wing Commander V.M. McClube. Many wartime squadrons were identified not only by a number but also by the name of one of the British Empire countries that was supporting Britain’s war effort and had ‘adopted’ an RAF unit; ‘F.M.S.’ stood for Federated Malay States.

In the summer of 1943 Bomber Command was engaged in ‘the Battle of the Ruhr,’ making nightly raids on Germany’s industrial heartland. Chedburgh, a

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BK767 AIRCREW

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Top picture: Flying Officer John Frederick Tritton, bomb aimer. (Photo by courtesy of Freda Hodgson)

Above left: Sgt Frederick Mills, rear gunner. (photo by courtesy of Peter Rhebergen)

Above right: Flying Officer Keith Neilson, 214 Squadron’s signals leader (right), who was BK767’s wireless operator on June 25/26, 1943, photographed with an unidentified fellow airman. (Photo by courtesy of Peter Rhebergen)

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new satellite airfield controlled by HQ No. 31 Base, was one of dozens of stations that were contributing to the offensive. John arrived a few hours after 214 Squadron returned from a raid on Dusseldorf. Although ‘Tritton’ is a rare surname (there are only a few hundred of us) another member of the family, Norman Ralph Tritton, was 214 Squadron’s senior meteorological officer at this time; he had been stationed at Chedburgh since October 1942, when the station opened and the squadron moved there from Stradishall. 214’s new home “seemed to me to consist of three long runways and a control tower amid a sea of mud,” Norman told me recently. “The living quarters were very basic. However, conditions rapidly improved and some grass started to grow! I sadly lost quite a few friends during my time with 214 but it was a happy squadron and there was laughter as well as sad times. I only wish I could have met John, who was just 11 months younger than me.”

Norman and John were distant cousins. John’s paternal 4 x great grandparents were John Tritton and his second wife, Jane (née Stokes), who lived at Stodmarsh, near Canterbury, in the early 18th century. Norman’s paternal 5 x great grandparents were the same John Tritton and his first wife, Elizabeth (née Rusford). John and Elizabeth were my paternal 7 x great grandparents. Our earliest known Tritton ancestor was Henry Tritton, who lived at Wickhambreaux, near Canterbury, in the early 17th century. At least three other members of our family served in the air force in WWII – my late uncle, Charles, an air gunner; H.P. Tritton (RAF Technical Branch); and G. L. Tritton (RAF Regiment). My own links with the RAF are very tenuous, but specially significant to me now. From 1960 to 1964 (long before I knew that two of my relatives had served with the squadron) I was editor of Flight Refuelling Ltd’s staff magazine and wrote many articles on 214’s operations as Bomber Command’s first in-flight refuelling tanker squadron. During a visit to their base at RAF Marham I interviewed their C.O. (Wing Commander P.G. Hill) and other officers, and cringed beside the runway as a Valiant tanker took off to take part in the first service refuelling trial with a Lightning. Thirty years ago this summer I went to RAF Waddington to cover the departure of three Vulcan bombers of 101 Squadron on a record-breaking non-stop flight to Perth, Australia, during which they were refuelled by 214’s Valiant tankers based in Libya, Aden and the Maldive Islands. My only other memorable close encounter with bombers (other than sheltering from German ones in WWII) came 13 years ago when I ‘wangled’ a flight in the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’s Lancaster and for an hour photographed the accompanying Spitfire and Hurricane from the mid upper gun turret.

THE DAY after Bernard Church and his crew arrived at Chedburgh, Bill Thompson flew with the crew of Stirling BF511 on a minelaying operation. Bernand Church saw action for the first time on June 19/20, on a night raid on Le Creusot, as ‘second dicky’ (co-pilot) in Flight Lieutenant ‘Stinky’ Miller’s crew in Stirling BK686. Two nights later Bernard took part in an attack on Krefeld. However, it was not until the night of Monday, June 22, that John and the other members of Bernard’s crew flew together on their first ‘op.’

That morning, Chedburgh’s station commander, Group Captain Kenneth Batchelor, and his operations room staff were told that 214 Squadron’s main target that night would be Mulheim, 7 km (about 4 1/2 miles) north-east of Cologne, and that two of its aircraft were to take part in a ‘gardening’ (aerial minelaying) operation in a seaway code-named ‘Nectarines II,’ off Germany’s East Frisian Islands and close to Heligoland Bay. Bernard’s crew was detailed to join the minelaying sortie, and in the afternoon they attended the

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meeting at which the 12 crews who would be flying that night were briefed by Gp. Capt. Batchelor and his Intelligence and Meteorological officers.

Ken Batchelor had been appointed station commander at Chedburgh on May 24, 1943, having previously been C.O. of 138 (Special Duties) Squadron, which parachuted agents, arms and supplies to resistance forces in occupied Europe. He had completed the RAF’s statutory 30 ‘ops’ as early as 1940, as a Wellington pilot, and taken part in several daring sorties with 138 Squadron. In June 1943 he was the RAF’s youngest station commander. Today he is a vice-president and past chairman of the Bomber Command Association and an active supporter of RAF charities and commemorative groups. He met John Tritton on or soon after June 12, 1943, and nearly 50 years later told me what Bernard’s crew would have experienced as they prepared for their first ‘op’.

“The station would have been a hive of activity all afternoon. The Intelligence officers had to find out the latest known dispositions of the enemy’s defences and the particularly dense flak areas. The other vital factors were the cloud and icing levels, and the wind speeds in the various areas and levels along the route. Unless they had called in at the ‘ops’ room during the afternoon to find out what was going on, the aircrews would not have known that they were flying that night until they were called to the briefing room about six hours before take-off – although by then then the ‘buzz’ might have got round.

“We had to be careful for security reasons, as chaps might ‘phone their girl friends and let-on that they were flying that night.”

“What was the Stirling like to fly?” I asked.

“The Stirring was the Queen of the Air once it got airborne but take-off could be a bit dicey. It wasn’t directionally stable until its tail was up. If you opened up the throttles to the engines on one side before opening up the opposite throttles, the aircraft would swing violently. If you got it swinging in the wrong direction the only thing to do was to cut the throttles and abandon all hope, because if you tried to correct a swing you would get it swinging in the opposite direction and go charging off across the countryside. The other big problem with the Stirling was that its operating height was very limited and it had to bomb from about 14,000 feet, whereas Lancasters bombed from 20,000 ft. But the Stirling was ideal for low-level aerial mining operations.”

I asked Sgt Robert Leadbeater, who was one of John Tritton’s fellow bomb aimers with 214 Squadron, for his impressions of the Stirling. He confirmed Ken Batchelor’s opinion: “It had a long fuselage and a high tail, and during take-off the wash from the engines would hit the tail before the aircraft was going fast enough for its rudder to control it properly. But none of us considered the Stirling to be more dangerous than any other four-engined bomber. You regarded whatever aircraft you flew as being the best. The Stirling was sturdy, comfortable and could take punishment. It couldn’t fly very high but we didn’t think that was such a bad thing – though we always had trouble with flak over the target.

“The Stirlings flew along with the bomber stream, but underneath it! We chose our own heights and tried to get as high as possible. ‘Ops’ were planned so that the high-flying bombers, like the Lancasters, would not be over the

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target at the same time as the low-flying ones, like the Stirlings. Otherwise we would get bombed!”

Norman Tritton recalls such an incident: “214 Squadron was soon in action over Germany, with the Stirlings in the bottom layer and Halifaxes and Lancasters in the layers above. After one of 214’s operations, one of our Stirlings returned with a ‘friendly’ unexploded British incendiary bomb embedded in its wing.”

At about 11 pm on the evening of June 22, the crews of the two ‘gardening’ Stirlings were driven to their aircraft at one of the dispersal areas and began carrying out pre-flight checks. John’s main task at this time was to help Bill Thompson ensure that their six ‘vegetables’ (mines) had been loaded correctly into their aircraft, EF407. If they had been hung in the wrong positions in the bomb bay the aeroplane would have become tail-heavy or nose-heavy after take-off and then stalled, almost certainly with fatal consequences. As midnight approached the Stirlings taxied to the end of Chedburgh’s main runway and turned into the wind. Bernard locked the brakes, slightly increased the engine revs, and on seeing the green flash of the Aldis lamp from the astrodrome [sic] on the control van near the edge of the airfield, began his take-off run.

There were a few anxious moments when the Stirling that should have accompanied EF407 failed to get airborne because its starboard outer engine failed, but Bernard took off safely at five minutes past midnight DBST (Double British Summer Time), flashes of red and yellow flames spurting from the bomber’s exhausts. It was now June 23 – John’s 28th birthday. Bob Leadbeater, who flew that night with Ray Hartwell’s crew in BF562, part of the main bomber force, told me what John’s duties would have been at take-off and during the flight to the target.

“When they first went into service Stirlings had a crew of eight, including a co-pilot,” he said, “but by 1943 the crew had been reduced to seven and the bomb aimer helped the pilot, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat (on the pilot’s right) during the first minutes of the flight. We weren’t trained to take off or land, but we were given about 10 hours tuition in a Link trainer to learn how to handle the aircraft on instruments in level flight. The official drill was that if anything happened to the pilot, the bomb aimer would take over, engage ‘George’ (the autopilot), fly home, tell the crew to bale out, and then bale out himself – though there were occasions when the bomb aimer decided to stay on board, and managed to make a safe landing.”

MY INTERVIEWS with ex-Stirling aircrew brought forth conflicting recollections of the bomb aimer’s take-off duties. What follows is what one former bomb aimer told me, although two of his contemporaries said that the duties described would have been carried out by the flight engineer:

“Immediately before take-off John would have monitored all Bernard Church’s vital actions, checked that the undercarriage was locked in the down position, and on Church’s instructions set the flaps to ‘one-third down,’ the fuel/air mixture to ‘rich,’ the engine revs to ‘maximum’ and the propellors to ‘fine pitch.’ At take-off Church would have kept the aircraft on the ground as long as possible, to enable him to build up a reserve of speed, raise the tail high in the air and establish positive control of the rudder and prevent any

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tendency to swing whilst getting airborne. John would have helped control the throttles at this time and, on hearing the command ‘undercarriage up,’ lifted the undercarriage’s switches and applied the brakes to stop the wheels spinning before the undercarriage folded into its nacelles. Because the cockpit had originally been designed for two pilots, many of its switches and levers were easier to reach from the co-pilot’s seat. In accordance with proper procedures, John would have stayed in the cockpit and set the engine revs and propellor pitches while EF407 climbed to its cruising altitude, and then clambered into the Frazer Nash FN5 nose fun turret to look out for enemy fighters and landmarks.”

EF407 was equipped with GEE, a radio system which enabled navigators to pinpoint their positions with much greater accuracy than ‘dead reckoning’ (which relied on being able to see landmarks) and astronavigation (which depended on viewing the stars through a sextant). Few stars were visible that night – there was haze and 9/10ths cloud. The squadron’s operations record book shows that EF407 accompanied the main bombing force for part of its flight; Sgt Taylor then took a GEE ‘fix’ and told Church to turn left and fly on a heading of 360 deg. M. This was the beginning of a timed or ‘dead reckoning’ run to their target during which, to quote one ex-RAF airman, Sgt Taylor and John “would have been working like dingbats, eyeballs on stalks, the former ‘milking’ his GEE box for fixes and the latter seeking every pinpoint possible over Holland trying to establish the coasting-out point before heading for the ‘drop.’”

The target was nothing more exciting that a dot on Taylor’s map at 54.00N 07.30E. During the final minutes of the run, John lay prone on his couch in the bomb aimer’s compartment immediately below the nose gun turret, while Bernard maintained a steady groundspeed of 180 mph at a height of only 800 ft above the waves, and opened the bomb bay doors. Edwin Taylor counted off the final seconds over the intercom and, at 02.12 hrs, John flicked a switch on the control panel to the right of his couch to release the first of his ‘vegetables,’ the others following at eight second intervals.

EF407 then turned and headed back to Chedburgh. As the bomber approached the airfield, Bill Thomas called up the airfield’s control tower (code name ‘Roughedge’) so that Bernard could ask for permission to ‘pancake’ (land); at about this time John would have gone into the cockpit to sit beside Bernard and lower the wheels, advance the throttles and let down the flaps. They landed at 04.40 after what had been an uneventful ‘op’. Bernard’s crew was not on the next night’s order of battle, so that evening they all probably went to the ‘Marquis of Cornwallis’ pub opposite the airfield, to celebrate John’s birthday.

The Wuppertal – Elberfeld raid

THE TARGET for the night of Wednesday, June 24 was the Elberfeld district of Wuppertal. Bernard Church’s crew was one of eleven from 214 Squadron detailed to form part of a force of 630 bombers despatched to attack one of the most difficult targets in the Ruhr – a long, narrow, built-up area that was almost impossible to locate visually at night. There was an anti-cyclone over Chedburgh, producing little cloud and good visibility. The weather forecast for the flight to and from the target was ‘little cloud at all levels,’ and at 22.30 Bernard and his crew took off in EF407, carrying 1080 4lb incendiaries, 88 30lb incendiaries and a G.34 ‘Nickel’. The ‘four pounders’ were hexagonal, fin-less, ‘stick’ bombs, hollow at one end and filled with

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magnesium at the other (to make them nose-heavy) and were packed in 36 boxes. The ‘thirty pounders’ were filled with petrol, phosphorous and rubber. The ‘Nickel’ was nothing more lethal than a container full of bundles of propaganda leaflets, wrapped in brown paper.

Bob Leadbeater remembers them well: “The leaflets were stuffed down the flare chute, a bundle at a time, usually by the flight engineer, when the navigator said ‘Start chucking out now.’ I heard it said that some crews thought it more effective to chuck out the whole brown paper parcel as it might fall on an enemy’s head and have much more effect that propaganda!”

By June 1943, the RAF had adopted the ploy of putting up ‘bomber streams.’ These were formed by hundreds of aircraft which came from stations all over eastern England, assembled over the North Sea, then flew to their target in a concentrated formation. Once over the sea, John Tritton interrupted his watch-keeping routine in the nose gun turret to climb into the bomb aimer’s compartment and, from his control panel, set the fuses on his bomb load. Bob Leadbeater, who followed a similar routine in BF562 (which took off five minutes after EF407) told me how a typical ‘op’ to the Ruhr began:

“We were marshalled together and took off one behind the other, as fast as we could go. We climbed over the base, circled at 10,000 ft, and then set course at a pre-arranged time. All the aircraft would be circling around and climbing – little dots in the afterglow – then suddenly they would set off, to meet up with bombers from other local stations over Cromer or Southwold. The idea behind the bomber stream was that it made it more difficult for the enemy to pick off individual aircraft. It was a sort of herd instinct. While the enemy was shooting down one or two aircraft, the majority were getting through. If anyone was too slow or too fast they wouldn’t be in the stream and would be at more risk of being shot down. That happened sometimes. But the policy was to concentrate the aircraft into one place and time.”

Even with today’s air traffic control systems, assembling hundreds of aircraft in this way and, a few hours later, streaming them across a small target area within a few minutes of one another, would be potentially hazardous. Fifty years ago the risks were even greater but there were surprisingly few collisions. Said Ken Batchelor: “We thought nothing of putting as many as one thousand bombers through one aiming point in 20 minutes, but the dangers of collision were considerably reduced because everyone was going at virtually the same speed, and in the same direction.”

Any collisions that did occur were often caused by pilots taking ’short cuts’ across the stream as they approached the target. After one of the RAF’s big raids, a pilot told Reuters news agency: “The traffic was something you had to go through to believe. It literally was like rush hour in a three-dimensional circus.”

The 214 Squadron bombers joined more than 70 other Stirlings forming the third of five waves of bombers that followed nine Mosquitoes from the RAF’s Pathfinder Force (PFF). This had been created in August 1942 under the command of Air Commodore (later Air Vice-Marshall) Don Bennett to develop better ways of finding and identifying targets, and guiding the main bomber force to them. On night raids the PFF dropped ‘landmark’ flares en route to the target, illuminated the aiming point with flares (usually white), and marked the aiming point with coloured pyrotechnical Target Indicators (‘T.I.s’) –

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‘groundmarkers’ in clear weather, ‘skymarkers’ if cloud, haze or smoke obscured the target.

“Skymarkers were little flares on parachutes,” recalled Bob Leadbeater. “They couldn’t be seen from very far away, unlike the groundmarkers. These used to burst in the air – a real firework display! – and they could be seen from a long way away.”

The Wuppertal – Eldberfeld raid was guided by a flight of PFF Mosquitoes equipped with ‘Oboe,’ a navigation system in which two ground stations in England tracked the aircraft and then instructed them to release their T.I.s so that they would fall within 100 yards of the selected target. Of the 11 Stirlings from Chedburgh detailed for the raid, one failed to take off, two had to jettison their bombs and turn back before reaching the target, and one was reported missing. The bombers had to fly through heavy defences between Cologne and Dusseldorf, a few minutes’ flying time from their target. EF407 was hit by flak, which damaged the hydraulic supply line to the rear gun turret, rendering the turret unserviceable, but no injuries to the crew were reported. EF407 and the six other 214 Squadron Stirlings attacked the target between 01.18 and 01.27 1/2 hours on June 25, John Tritton releasing EF407’s bombs at 01.22 from a height of 13,200 ft. Bernard and John had no difficulty in identifying the target – it was a bright, clear, night, and although visibility was affected by haze and smoke, John could see the town beneath him lit-up by flares, and the target identified by red groundmarker T.I.s. dropped by the Mosquitoes, and by green T.I.s dropped by back-up Pathfinders.

Bob Leadbeater arrived over the target in Stirling BF562 a few minutes before EF407. I asked him about the procedure that John would have followed as his aircraft’s ETA (estimated time of arrival) over the target drew near.

“He would have been calling up the pilot on the intercom the moment he saw the T.I.s bursting in the air and going down,” said Bob. “The German civilians called the T.I.s ‘Christmas trees.’ We could see them from a long way off, burning on the ground and making a lot of smoke. The pilot would have been navigating visually or to his navigator’s instructions – weaving all the time, never flying straight and level – until the target disappeared from his view, under the nose of the aircraft. He would then have instructed John to climb down into the bomb aimer’s compartment and guide him in. By June 1943 our Stirlings were equipped with the Mk XIV bombsight, which superseded the old ‘course setting’ bombsight which had been designed for daylight bombing and which required us to fly straight and level to the target in order to bomb accurately. The Mk XIV, which was practically automatic, had a ground glass screen on which a white cross indicated the point on the ground where the bombs would land if released at that moment, regardless of any manoeuvres the aircraft was making. So, if necessary, the pilot could weave until the last few seconds of the bombing run, without spoiling our aim.

“When John gave the word, the bomb bay doors would have been opened and he would then have called out minor course corrections to the pilot – ‘steady; steady; left-left; ri-i-ight’, and so on – to get the aircraft in the correct position. From the moment he started calling ‘steady’ the pilot would fly straight and level, until John had pressed the switch that released the bombs, and operated the jettison bars that made sure that no bombs remained in the bomb bay. He would then have called out ‘all bombs gone’ and ‘close bomb bay doors.’”

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John had aimed his bombs at a red T.I. in his bombsight, but ‘all bombs gone’ was note quite the end of the matter. As Edwin Taylor set a new course, John called out ‘steady for the photograph’ to the pilot, watched the lights on his control panel flicker as the camera shutter opened and closed, and then shouted ‘photograph taken – get weaving!’

Ron James, a mid upper gunner with 214 Squadron in WWII and more recently the author of the official history of the Squadron, ‘Avenging in the Shadows’ (after its motto, Ultor in Umbris), told me: “Those few moments over the target seemed like hours! But once the bombs were away the aircraft would make an upward lurch and we would breathe a sigh of relief.”

As Bernard put EF407 into a shallow dive and turned for home, John wound the bombing camera’s film forward a few frames to make sure that the exposed frames were secure in the magazine, and then made his way back to the nose gun turret to keep watch during the flight home.

Photographing the target was an essential part of the bombing routine, to enable the results of the attack to be assessed immediately after the ‘op’, before photo-reconnaissance flights and more detailed assessments could be made. The bomb aimer’s photograph also told the crew, within a few hours of returning to base, whether they had found and hit their target; it also helped Intelligence to plot the extent and location of the fires caused by incendiaries dropped during the ‘op’. Every operational bomber was fitted with a camera controlled by a timer, and a free-falling 200 million candlepower photoflash, set off by a time fuse. The photographic sequence began automatically, when the bomb release switch was pressed. As a keen amateur photographer, John Tritton would have been especially interested in, and conversant with, the technical details of his aircraft’s camera. Operation records show that John, Bob Leadbeater and the five other 214 Squadron bomb aimers on duty that night all succeeded in photographing their target.

As 214 Squadron approached, bombed and turned away from the target, its crews saw fires concentrated around the red T.I.s, and large columns of smoke. In his book ‘The Bomber Command War Diaries,’ Martin Middlebrooke describes the extensive destruction caused by the raid and also refers to a dramatic incident at Gelsenkirchen, 20 miles north of Wuppertal, where an RAF bomber crashed into a building that had been taken over by the Wehrmacht. Gelsenkirchen was to be the target for the following night’s ‘op.’

The glow of the fires over Elberfeld was still visible to Bernard’s crew after they had crossed the Belgian coast on their way home. EF407 landed safely at 04.15 hrs.

The Gelsenkirchen raid

AFTER DEBRIEFING and a few hours’ sleep, Bernard Church’s crew learned that they were ‘on ops’ again the following night (June 25/26), for a raid on synthetic oil plants in Gelsenkirchen, in the middle of the Ruhr region. Stirling EF407 was out of service, probably due to the damage sustained the previous night, so the crew was allocated an almost brand-new aircraft, BK767, call sign ‘L’ Leather, which had flown on only three ‘ops’. Bill Thomas reported sick shortly before take-off and the squadron’s signals leader, Flying Officer Keith Neilson, a 23 year old New Zealander, volunteered to take his place.

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Writing from her home in Cambridge, N.Z, Keith’s widow, Frances, told me: “For five years I was a WAAF in the engineering section at RAF Stradishall, where 214 Squadron was originally stationed. Neither Keith nor I knew any of Bernard’s crew. Keith’s crew had completed their 30 ‘ops’ but he was one short to complete his tour, as he joined them on their second ‘op,’ so he was still with 214 Squadron. On the night in question he was duty signals officer. As he had no spare wireless operators he decided to go himself, as the crew being young and new to the job were all keyed up to go. I suppose he thought it was a chance to finish his tour. New Zealanders have this ‘do it yourself’ attitude to life . . . and he was so keen to finish his tour as he had, unbeknown to me, volunteered for the Dam Busters [617] Squadron. Also, he didn’t want to stand down a while crew because one bloke reported sick.”

On May 16, 1943, 617 Squadron, led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, had made their daring attacks on the Ruhr dams. Keith Neilson was obviously looking forward to joining the squadron, and had only recently completed the penultimate ‘op’ of his first tour as Flt Lt. Miller’s wireless operator on the Le Creusot raid – Bernard Church’s first sortie. All Bomber Command aircrew were volunteers but, on joining am operational squadron, were obliged to fly on 30 ‘ops’ – though in 1943 the odds on surviving long enough to complete a ‘tour’ of this many raids over Germany were slim indeed. Keith Neilson had been fortunate, and evidently was looking forward to completing his tour, working on non-operational duties for a while, and then embarking on a second tour with the RAF’s most famous bombing squadron. So, due to his quick decision to fly with BK767, 214 Squadron was able to commit 11 Stirlings to that night’s ‘ops’ as planned. Ten of them carrying their usual loads of incendiaries, were under orders to join a 473-strong bomber force for the raid on Gelsenkirchen, the eleventh carried out a ‘gardening’ operation in a sea area code-named ‘Deodars,’ off the Bordeaux coast.

One of the aircraft failed to take off due to engine failure; another experienced compass failure, jettisoned its incendiaries in the North Sea, and returned to base. But for the rest the ‘op’ began uneventfully. Sunset that night was at 22.22 – one hour later than on June 25, 1993, since in 1943 Double British Summer Time provided an extra hour of daylight in the evening. As it was less than a week after Midsummer’s Day it was one of the lightest evenings of the year, so there was still a faint glow in the western sky when the aircraft took off between 23.35 and 23.50 hrs and climbed into the 7/10ths to 10/10ths cloud that covered the route to Gelsenkirchen. BK767 took off at 23.48. The report written in the 214 Squadron Operation Records Book immediately after the raid merely states: ‘Nothing was heard of this aircraft, which is missing.’ The RAF Chedburgh Station Operations Book is similarly terse: ‘L/214 Sqn (Sgt B.H. Bernard) is missing, nothing being heard since take off.’ However, eye-witness accounts obtained after the war, and research conducted in Britain and by WWII air historians in Holland, who have examined British, Dutch and German records, enable the aircraft’s last moments, and the fate of its crew, to be reported in detail.

214 Squadron followed the standard routine of climbing from base, rendezvousing with other squadrons over the east coast, joining the bomber stream over the North Sea. The bombers first headed for 52.46N 04.40E, a position on the coast of northern Holland, near the village of Petten. Here they turned and headed south-east, across the Markerwaard inland sea, over Flevoland and the towns of Deventer and Eibergen, to 52.00N 07.05E, where they changed course and flew almost due south. They were now on their bombing run to Gelsenkirchen, about 10 minutes’ flying time away. Zero hour for the start

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of the attack, which went on for 34 minutes, was 01.20 hrs on June 26, and the 214 Squadron Stirlings dropped their bombs between 01.23 and 01.44. Bob Leadbeater, flying in BF562, released his bombs at 01.35, and as his aircraft had taken off two minutes after BK767, John Tritton should have been doing likewise at about the same time – if everything had gone according to plan.

The first answers to my enquiries about what happened to BK767 came from the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) records at Aalten. This is a small Dutch town near the German border and is about 20 km (12 miles) south of the route designated to the bombers on the Gelsenkirchen raid as they headed across Holland to the position east of Stadtloh where they turned on to their bombing run. Although obviously not a target for the RAF’s air raids, Aalten was constantly overflown by British and American bombers; air raid precautions were enforced in case of accidental attack or danger from stray bombs or crashing aircraft.

At 01.10 Midden Europese Zomertijd (Central European Time) – which, like DBST, was tow hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time – the ARP Department’s command post at Aalten sounded a warning after hearing a ‘great number’ of aircraft overhead. Gelsenkirchen is about 51 km (31 miles) south-east of Aalten – a distance that a Stirling flying at its normal cruising speed of 180 mph would have covered in about 10 minutes. The ARP wardens would have been unable to identify the aircraft because of clouds and darkness but they were obviously either German nightfigthers, or (far more likely) bombers on their way to Gelsenkirchen, which was due to be attacked ten minutes later – ‘Zero hour’ for the start of the raid was 01.20.

Assuming that the aircraft were bombers, they were clearly several miles south of their track. Significantly, the RAF’s Night Raid Report for June 25/26 says that the attack on Gelsenkirchen ‘appears to have been scattered . . . due to the lateness of the first [PFF] Mosquito and the unserviceability of the Oboe equipment in five of the 12 PFF aircraft . . . there were also many reports that the forecast winds were inaccurate,’ Some of the bombers were so far off track that they raided Solingen, nearly 30 miles south of Gelsenkirchen, by mistake.

At 01.23 hrs the ARP crew saw ‘a burning aeroplane crashing in the south west direction.’ At 01.25 a report was received from IJzerlo, a hamlet 5.5 km (about 3 1/2 miles) south-west of Aalten, that the ‘plane had crashed nearby. At 01.28 a second air raid warning was sounded to call ARP personnel to their posts. In a report to the Mayor of Aalten, dated June 26, 1943, Jacob Tilbusscher of the ARP Department wrote: “It appeared that the ‘plane came down on a piece of farmland belonging to Gerrit H. Jan ter Horst, agricultural farmer, living at Lintelo No. 20, causing damage to crops, the extent of which cannot yet be given by the owner. Wreckage of the ‘plane, amongst which engines, wheels, etc. were scattered, also caused damage to the farmland of Herman Doornink, living at No. 26. A propeller coming down caused damage to a barn on the farm of Gerrit van Lochem, living at IJzerlo No. 27. Five occupants of the airplane died in the crash. There were no casualties among the civilian population . . . the aircraft was carrying a great number of six-sided firebombs, part of which went off. Burnt and unburnt phosphorus-rubber bombs were also found.”

The aircraft was later identified as BK767. Edwin Taylor and Keith Neilson had parachuted to safety, only to be captured at Hemden by German customs officers and imprisoned by the Germans for the rest of the war. Hemden is

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[photograph] Ludwig Meister

[photograph]

Top picture: A WWII portrait of Ludwig Meister.

Above: Ludwig Meister in his Messerschmitt Me 110, photographed by his rear gunner and wireless operator. The instruments in the foreground are (left to right) a clock showing that the picture was taken either 7.20 or 4.35; left/right direction indicator; altimeter (reading approx. 3,000 metres); speed indicator (registering about 300 km/hr); and probably the landing gear indicator

(Photo by courtesy of Ludwig Meister)

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[two log book pages]

Above: from Ludwig Meister’s log book. The entry dated ’26.6’ records his air battle with BK767. In the log book, these pages are bound side by side (with the top sheet on the left). Overleaf: map of Euregio, showing (near bottom of map, left of centre) Aalten and Bocholt, on opposite sides of the Dutch/German border. The asterisk marks IJzerlo, where BK767 crashed. Next page: the aircraft loss card for BK767, showing (obverse) entries made in 1943 and 1945 and (reverse) Sgt Taylor’s debriefing notes.

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HUNDREDS TENS UNIT.

YEAR MONTH DAY SQUADRON TYPE OF A/C CAUSE

DATE
25.6.43

TYPE
STIR III

SERIAL No.
BK.767

GP.
3

SQ.
214

L.

TIME OFF
2348

BASE
CHEDBURGH

TARGET
GELSENKIRCHEN

E.T.A. TARGET

FUEL

A.U.W.

REF.
171/66
330A

MODS.
30/9

SPEC. EQUIP.

TIME OF FIXES

ROUTE
5246N 0440E – 5200N 0705E –
– GELSENKIRCHEN –
HARDERWIJK – EGMOND.

BOMB LOAD

CREW – NAME RANK NO.

PILOT SGT CHURCH. B. 1385826
ready to go [indecipherable word] 3rd [indecipherable word]
Believed killed.

NAV. SGT TAYLOR. E.G 1600154
3rd [indecipherable word] PW 330A

W.OP. F/O Neilson K A. N2. 411092
1st [indecipherable word] PW

F.E. SGT THOMPSON. W.H 1476771
2nd [two indecipherable words] 171/66
Bailed out [deleted] and [\deleted] killed & buried in Holland

B.A. P/O TRITTON. J. 133803
ready to go [indecipherable words]
Believed killed

A.G. SGT DAVIS. W 1384993
–
Believed killed in a/craft.

A.G. SGT MILLS. F. 1048627
–

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about 3.2 km (two miles) south-east of IJzerlo and close to the Dutch/German frontier. The five members of the crew who were killed in the crash were buried in Berkenhove Cemetery, Aalten, at 10 am on June 29.

So what caused BK767 to crash? The target and approaches to it were heavily defended; the Night Raid Report refers to ‘intense heavy flak’ at Gelsenkirchen. Sixty-five ‘planes were damaged by anti-aircraft fire concentrated around the skymarker T.I.s dropped by the Pathfinders above the 7/10ths to 10/10ths cloud obscuring the target. The tops of the cloud extended from 8,000 ft to 12,000 ft. Many crews reported that they were unable to aim their bombs at the flares because they had ignited at between 18,000 and 20,000 ft instead of at 14,000 ft as planned; the flares also drifted rapidly in the strong winds, which had a force of 60 – 70 mph at 20,000 ft and 45 – 55 mph at 15,000 ft. There was also ‘considerable night fighter activity’ which resulted in the loss of at least 20 bombers.

What happened to Bernard Church and his crew over IJzerlo, and how their aircraft came to be there, was not known until after the war, when Holland was liberated, Keith Neilson and Edwin Taylor were repatriated, and the survivors and eye witnesses to the incident were able to tell their stories. Indeed, it is only as a result of research completed during the past few years that we now have an almost complete understanding of the events that occurred during those fateful minutes in the early hours of June 26, 1943.

Keith and Edwin landed some distance apart when they parachuted from the aircraft, but were reunited soon after they were captured. Two weeks after the crash, Keith’s future wife, Frances, received a letter from him, date-stamped July 3, 1943 and posted from the Dalug Luft prisoner of war transit camp. He said that he had met up with Sgt Taylor but none of the other members of the crew (obviously, being in captivity, he was unaware of their fate). Keith Neilson and Frances were married at Paddington register office, London, in June 1945. Keith returned home to New Zealand, Frances followed three months later, and they ran a farm at Waverley until Keith died in 1972, shortly after his 50th birthday.

In 1976 Peter Monasso of Winterswijk, Holland, a member of Achterhoekse Vliegtuigwark Opgravers Groep (‘AVOG’), a research group based near Arnhem, obtained, from Herbert Scholl, a German air war historian, details of a Luftwaffe combat report stating that at 01.23 on June 26, 1943, Oberleutnant Ludwig Meister, a 24-year-old staff captain with night fighter unit I/NJG 4, claimed to have shot down a Stirling bomber at a position 3 km south-west of Aalten and 10 km (just over six miles) north of Bocholt, a German town close to the Dutch border. IJzerlo is 10 km north west of Bocholt and very close to Meister’s estimated distance from Aalten; six Stirlings were lost that night but no other aircraft crashed in that area on June 26 and, as will be explained later, there is no doubt that the aircraft that Meister shot down was BK767.

In 1978 Frances Neilson corresponded with Peter Rhebergen of Winterswijk, Holland, who is a member of the Studie-Groep Luchtoorlog 1939 – 1945. Mrs Neilson repeated what her husband had told her about his experiences on June 26, 1943: “Everything apparently went wrong on that trip. The navigator got them lost, the flak was heavy, and Keith was the only experienced person on board. When the aircraft really caught fire and even the floor was ablaze, he told them [the other members of the crew] to bale out, and did so himself, smartly. When he arrived in a field, minus one boot, he was surrounded by farmers and

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pitchforks, so went very quietly. He was taken to the local police station and was surprised that all the villagers arrived dressed in their best clothes, as it was the middle of the night. They all filed by and inspected him, and one girl interrogated him. He pretended that he didn’t understand her English, although he felt sorry for her as her English was very good and she no doubt lost prestige in the eyes of the other villagers. They rounded up one other member of the crew [Edwin Taylor] . . . they were taken on to cattle trucks, where they were shunted around for three days, being given only water to drink and a piece of black bread.” From Dalug Luft, Keith was taken to Stalag Luft III.

Neilson’s account confirms that the aircraft was flying through formidable ‘ack ack’ fire. The ARP report states that BK767 ‘came from the east direction and was flying in the south-east direction,’ although this is not quite correct. AVOG has found that it was heading north-west when it crashed (that is to say, flying from the south-east). Bertus Lammers, a photographer who lives in Aalten, was an eye-witness and recently told Peter Rhebergen: “I could see the glow of the burning bomber being the thin clouds. It was flying in a north-westerly direction.” The fact that Keith Neilson and Edwin Taylor were captured near the Dutch/German border, which is a short distance to the south-east of IJzerlo, is further evidence that BK767 was heading north-west – that is to say, away from Germany – when it crashed. But whatever BK767’s precise flight path may have been during its final moments, it is significant that all of the eight 214 Squadron Stirlings still airborne at that time had taken off from Chedburgh within 15 minutes of one another, and that the seven that reached their target (or at least the skymarkers that were supposed to identify it) dropped their bombs in the 20 minute period between 01.24 and 01.44; Bob Leadbeater, in Stirling BF562, released his bombs into the centre of a cluster of skymarker T.I.s at 01.35.

However, moments before the first 214 Squadron aircraft arrived over the skymarkers, BK767 was in a position a long way west of the bombing run. It appeared to me, when I began my investigation, that there are many possible explanations for this, including (1) that Church had turned off the designated track across Holland too early – i.e., before reaching 52.00N 07.05E – and was heading towards Bocholt instead of Gelsenkirchen; (2) that he turned at the correct position but during the bombing run was forced (by flak damage, instrument failure or a navigating error) to abandon his run and head west, towards the Dutch/German border where Meister was patrolling; and (3) that because of the inaccurate placing of the flares, and their inherent invisibility from long distances, Church was searching for the target – but in the wrong place. Instances of bombers becoming lost solely because of instrument failure were rare; even when electrical supplies to the instruments failed, the aircraft’s compass could usually still be relied on.

“They always blamed the navigator,” another former Stirling airman told me ruefully, “even though it could have been a case of the pilot not flying the course he was given. There were sometimes fearful rows between the navigator and pilot.”

While I was puzzling over BK767’s possible flightpath and ex-RAF navigator, Norman Ling of the Bomber Command Association, gave me his interpretation of BK767’s fate, as suggested by the details then available to use: “. . . the aircraft was halfway between the final turning point (on the border between Holland and Germany) and the target when it was hit by flak, on the periphery of the notorious flak defended area of the Ruhr, and set on fire. Rather than

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continue on in this state over such a known concentration of predicted anti-aircraft artillery, the captain turned the bomber on a reciprocal heading in order to give his crew a fighting chance of survival, with the added bonus of getting the stricken Stirling back to base, provided that the flames could be extinguished . . . the incendiaries still on board point to the fact that the aircraft turned back before the target was reached. As the aircraft proceeded on its north-westerly heading, ablaze, it was picked up and despatched by the nightfighter.”

The Ruhr region was certainly well defended, its flak and searchlight batteries, radar network and fighter bases having been considerably reinforced following the RAF’s succession of raids on Cologne, which began with the ‘Thousand Bomber’ assault of May 30, 1942. The radar defences were based on long range detectors, called Freyas, which had a range of more than 150 km (nearly 100 miles), and highly sensitive detectors called Giant Wurzburgs, with a range of 40 km (about 25 miles). The Freyas alerted the German defences as soon as the RAF’s bombers started circling above their bases before setting course for the Ruhr, while the Giant Wurzburgs told the German nightfighter, flak and searchlight controllers how many bombers were heading towards them, their course and altitude. The radars were part of the ‘Kammhüber Line’ (organized by General Joseph Kammhüber) of ground-controlled interception systems that ran from Jutland to Brest.

During the summer of 1943 the Luftwaffe was in the final phases of increasing the number of night fighter bases on the Kammhüber Line from the original 27 to more than 200; by October, the night fighter force on the Western Front would number nearly 700 ‘planes, compared with only 180 in May 1942. It is not surprising that BK767, and so many other bombers, were lost during the Battle of the Ruhr, which was fought before the RAF introduced ‘Window.’ This was the code name for the radar-deflecting strips of metal foil that bombers dropped on their way to their targets, disabling the German defences and saving the lives of hundreds of British airman from the time it was first used, on the Hamburg night raid of July 24/25, 1943.

In February 1993 Peter Monasso corresponded with Ludwig Meister, now 74 years old and living in France. He recalled his air battle with BK767: “I started with Me 110, fuselage registration number 3C-MB, at 00.59 on 26.6.43 at Venlo [about 35 km, or 21 miles, from Gelsenkirchen] for my 37th nightfighter raid. At 01.23 I shot down a Stirling. She went down, being set on fire, and came down south-west of Aalten. I still have this raid very clear in my mind. During the fight, immediately after I shot at the bomber, my left engine exploded and was one big fire. After I had closed the fuel supply the fire went out and I was able to make a forced landing at Venlo. My unit, the first group of Nightfighter Squadron 4, of which I was the staffelkapitän, was stationed at the time at Florennes in Belgium. Together with my kommandeur, Major Herget, I was transferred [in May 1942] . . . to Venlo, to the nightfighter unit that was stationed there under the leadership of Major Streib, because we were expecting extensive bomber raids on the Ruhr area. That expectation turned out to be true!”

Meister’s account prompted Peter Monasso to consult the RAF’s interceptions and tactics reports for the Gelsenkirchen raid, issued on July 6, 1943. Among the summaries of observations made by aircrew of No. 3 Group Bomber Command – the group to which 214 Squadron belonged – he noticed one that reads as follows: ‘MOUSTER. 01.20 hrs. 15,000 ft. Fighter flare seen below cloud, 3/400 ft below tail. Stirling corkscrewed as Me 110 came up and opened fire. R/G

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[rear gunner] replied and scored hits on E/A [enemy aircraft] nost [typing error for ‘nose’?] also set port engine alight. E/A peeled off and went into clouds.’

This is the only report of an air battle between a Messerschmitt Me 110 and a Stirling at about the time that BK767 was lost. Peter Monasso and I have been unable to find a place named Mouster anywhere in the Dutch/German border region. Münster, 152 km (95 miles) to the north east of Bocholt, is the nearest most similar placename but too far from the border to be considered. However there is a village called Mussum, 4 km (2 1/2 miles) south west of Bocholt. It is virtually certain that the RAF report is of Meister’s air battle with BK767 – especially as it refers to the nighfighter’s port (left) engine being set alight – and that ‘Mouster’ was a clerical error for ‘Mussum.’

In March I wrote to Herr Meister, seeking more details of his air battle with BK767. I put several specific questions to him, and also asked if he could supply a copy of the page in his flying log book in which recorded the incident, and a photograph of himself in his Luftwaffe uniform. In my letter, I explained that I was interested in the loss of the bomber because one of my relatives was among those killed. I wondered whether, knowing this, Herr Meister would reply – or, if he did, whether after all this time he would remember anything worth adding to my story. I had read in a book on German WWII fighter pilots that he flew 120 sorties and claimed 41 night victories; would he recall any significant details of one victory among so many?

A week before Easter, Herr Meister replied, enclosing a photocopy of his log book entry for June 26, 1943 and two wartime photographs. These are the questions I asked him, and his answers:

Q: “Do you know whether the bomber had already been damaged by flak before you intercepted it?”

A: “It’s impossible to say. During the night you only recognize an aircraft as a shadow . . . I think it’s unlikely that the aircraft had already been damaged by flak because the bomber flew at high speed, with extreme corkscrewing movements in the direction of England. I suppose the rear gunner intercepted me with his radar.”

Q: “How did you intercept the bomber?”

A: “I was led to the bomber by ground control until my on-board radar intercepted it. My wireless operator led me to the bomber until I had sight-contact. The bomber was flying at a height of about 6,000 metres [almost 20,000 ft.]. I tried to fly under the radar radius of the bomber and that’s why I attacked him from the right side below at a distance of about 150 metres. While pulling up I shot with my 2 cm machine guns between both right engines, to enable the crew to bale out. You may believe me that the great majority of German nightfighters did act like this whenever this was possible.

“After the attack I pulled my aircraft downwards in a steep curve. After this manoeuvre I saw the bomber burning while the rear gunner was still firing in the direction in which he presumed I was still flying. Immediately after I had my aircraft under control I heard an explosion and suddenly recognized that my left engine was burning. At first I thought that the rear gunner had hit me. I succeeded in stopping the burning engine and landed at Venlo. I

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couldn’t follow the crash of the bomber because I was busy with my own trouble. After my landing it turned out that a broken piston rod had caused the engine damage. The rod had pierced the cylinder casing and leaking fuel had changed the engine into a torch. I flew for a distance of about 70 kilometres while this air battle lasted.”

Herr Meister’s recollection of the height – nearly 20,000 ft – at which BK767 was flying at the time of the attack is incorrect, since this was way above the altitude that a Stirling loaded with bombs could reach. Peter Monasso, who translated Meister’s letter to me from German into English, commented that if the bomber had already been hit by flak – which Meister said was unlikely – the damage was probably slight, since it was apparently still in 100% flying condition at the time it was intercepted. “I spoke to other German nightfighter pilots, who also told me that they shot bombers between the engines because some of the fuel tanks were located there,” Peter added.

Inboard tanks nos. 2 and 4, with a total capacity of 585 Imperial gallons, were located between the starboard engines; on the other side of the starboard outer engine there were two more tanks, with a combined capacity of 245 gallons. This was obviously a very vulnerable part of the aircraft.

In his log book, Meister claimed that his sortie on June 26, 1943, resulted in his tenth ‘Abschusz’ (‘kill’) and culminated in his making a belly landing with a left engine failure (‘Bauchlandung mit Motorschade links’). Later records state that this kill was actually his thirteenth; the discrepancy probably arose because, by June 26, Meister was still waiting for some ‘probables’ to be confirmed as victories.

‘Broken wings, immortal glory’

IJZERLO, where the bomber crashed, lies in typical east Netherlands countryside. A stream called the ‘Keizersbeek’ runs through the crash site, and to the north of the stream are the van Lochem family’s farmhouse, a lane (Huisstededijk) and some stables. A bridge over the stream leads to land belonging to the ter Horsts. Mr H.J. ter Horst recalled the night of the crash for me: “We were woken up by an air battle at around 1 am. It was a little cloudy but we could see the ‘plane coming down, burning, about 150 metres from the farm and barn, which were not damaged. Because of the great shock (it came straight towards us) we lay down behind a pile of straw close to the house. Fortunately the ‘plane carried only phosphor and carbide bombs. The body and several engines came down in a beetroot, potato and turnip field. Here also lay the bodies of the crew members. As we were of the ‘wanted’ age (26 years old) only my mother and father went to the funeral. The wreck remained there for several weeks, guarded by German soldiers who were billeted there.”

The point of impact was a few metres from the bridge. As Jacob Tilbusscher said in his report to the Mayor, parts of the aircraft were scattered over the fields and farms. G.H. van Lochem told me his memories of the crash: “It all happened so dreadfully quickly. I saw [the aircraft] come down and a moment later burning wreckage and incendiary bombs were everywhere . . . I thought that the crew hardly had any time to jump. One lay near the stream between the aircraft and our farm. A doctor saw him but he was already dead. The others were scattered over a big area. The Germans picked them up and put them into coffins in our barn. My father and our neighbour [Mr van Lochem] were allowed to see them but we were not. The neighbour and my father went to the funeral, where a brief ceremony was held and a priest sad the Lord’s Prayer.”

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Next day [June 30] a wreath was secretly laid on the grave, bearing the words ‘Broken wings, immortal glory. From the Dutch people’. Soon afterwards it was removed by the German authorities.

Freda Hodgson remembers how news of the crash was received at John Tritton’s home: “When we had news that he was missing we hoped that he had been sent to another camp for officers, as news had filtered through that the rear gunner [sic] and other members were PoWs. My mother lived in hopes, which were dashed of course in time, when he was presumed killed. We were sent ‘effects’ which weren’t his – shoes of the wrong size and everything filthy. Worse was to follow at the end of the war. We had a visit from one of his fellow crewmen who was the last to see John alive. He and Bernard, the pilot, told everyone to bale out, which they did, and he [the crewman] was taken prisoner. A letter arrived from one of the Dutch villagers to say he arrived to find that John’s parachute hadn’t opened. The Germans stripped the bodies of watches, rings, etc. – John was wearing our father’s signet ring – and they were then allowed to bury them. After the war John’s medals were sent to us – four in all – the 1939/45 Star, the Air Crew Europe Star, the Defence Medal and the 1939-45 War Medal.”

The airman who visited John’s family after the war was Edwin Taylor, who lived in Stockport, England. My enquiries led me to believe that he died in 1965 but in RAF records I found an account of the crash that he wrote after he was repatriated. This was written on the foolscap ‘aircraft loss card’ for BK767 which had been filed, incomplete, in Bomber Command’s records in 1943. Edwin told his debriefing officer that when the aircraft was hit, Keith Neilson and Bill Thompson were the first to bale out. Edwin was the third to go and as he made his way to the forward ventral escape hatch (in the floor of the aircraft, immediately behind the bomb aimer’s compartment) Bernard Church jumped out of his seat in the cockpit and followed him to the hatch. When Edwin jumped, John Tritton was holding the hatch cover open and Bernard was behind Edwin.

“As regards the gunners,” reported Edwin, “they hadn’t much chance of getting out. We were badly on fire and I doubt if they’d get to the hatch at the back.”

I found the loss card ambiguous on one vital point. Under the heading ‘narrative,’ Taylor reportedly said: ‘FE [Flight Engineer Thompson] and W/op [Wireless Operator Neilson] jumped first.’ I interpreted this as saying that the two men jumped in that order – Thompson, then Neilson. However, on the other side of the card, against the names of the individual crew members, I saw Neilson listed as ‘first out,’ Thompson as ‘second out,’ Taylor as ‘third out,’ and Church and Tritton as ‘ready to go when third [Taylor] left.’ These scribbled entries were obviously made in 1945, after Taylor had given his story. I also read entries in neater handwriting, probably made in 1943, listing Church and Tritton as ‘believed killed’ and Davis as ‘believed killed in aircraft.’ Did Bernard and John manage to bale out just before BK767 hit the ground, only to fall with the aircraft on unopened parachutes and become caught up in the ‘plane as it disintegrated? Or were they (as seems more likely) still in the aircraft, with the gunners, at the moment of impact? Perhaps, when or after Taylor jumped, they were wearing their parachute packs but for some reason were not able to escape – killed, maybe, by the fire in the ‘plane or exploding debris; or unable to move when g-forces increased as the aircraft fell faster and faster? I had to accept that these questions were unanswerable. The card also contains another enigmatic entry, against

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Thompson’s name: ‘Baled out . . . killed and buried in Holland.’ My best guess is that the entries against the names of Church, Tritton and Davis were written soon after the loss of BK767. If so, how did the RAF know at that time, with evident certainty, that Bill Thompson had been killed and buried, yet only ‘believe’ the fate of the other three men – and know nothing at all about Taylor, Neilson and Davis?

Bob Leadbeater has personal experience of bailing out of a Stirling. He returned unharmed from the Gelsenkirchen raid – his 13th ‘op’ – and took part in several more until one night in August 1943, when his aircraft was shot down during an ‘op’ in which 214 Squadron attacked Berlin. The entire crew baled out and survived, though Bob broke his leg. His description of what happened to him gave me a vivid impression of what Edwin Taylor and Keith Neilson must have experienced (though unlike Bob they escaped uninjured): “We had been ordered to stand-by to abandon the aircraft. The rear turret was on fire and some of the fellows were having a go at putting the fire out. The fighters attacked again and set the wing on fire. The skipper said, ‘It’s no good . . . the wing’s on fire . . . abandon aircraft.’ I was on the edge of the open hatch, going through the drill, which included taking your helmet off – don’t bother to unplug your oxygen and intercom lines, just take your helmet right off and go! I was squatting on the edge of the open hatch and suddenly there were bells ringing in my ears and red and white lights flashing. I had been peppered in the head with shell splinters. I didn’t feel anything but I knew I had been hit. I didn’t see anything either. I gave up the idea of taking my helmet off; I just put my hand on the ripcord and went. I remember hitting the slipstream and lifting my legs up – it was like going down a big slide. I pulled the ripcord right away – much too soon – before I passed out.”

The entire crew baled out and survived. Every year, at the weekend closest to the anniversary of their escape, they have a reunion at Chedburgh. Their pilot, Ray Hartwell, remembers meeting Keith Neilson in Stalag Luft III, the famous ‘Wooden Horse’ PoW camp.

I asked Bob Leadbeater to read Edwin Taylor’s report and offer his interpretation of events. “There were two escape hatches in the Stirling,” he explained. “One in the nose, the other towards the rear of the fuselage, forward of the entry door. When the order to bale out was given, the bomb aimer was supposed to open the nose hatch and jump first, but the hatch was hinged and there was nothing to hold it open. It appears that John Tritton got to the hatch first, but instead of jumping first he held the hatch open to allow the others to go before him.” [The entry door, which was on the port side of the fuselage, near the rear of the ‘plane, could also be used for baling out. There were also two escape hatches in the roof – one above the pilot’s seat, the other forward of the mid upper gun turret].

IN A Stirling bomber, the navigator’s position was the one which offered the quickest route to the forward escape hatch, but the navigator was not necessarily the one who would get there first. Before attempted to reach it he would have to collect his parachute from where it was stowed under his chart table, and then step down into the nose. The flight engineer, who sat behind the pilot’s armour-plated seat back, had virtually the same chance as the navigator of being first at the hatch. The wireless operator’s position was behind the navigator’s table (and concealed from it by a large water tank), so the ‘W/op’ was further from the hatch than anyone else in the forward section of the fuselage. I surmised that, in BK767, Keith Neilson –

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who had more operational experience that the others, and perhaps became aware of the hopelessness of the situation fractionally faster – may have managed to be the first or second at the hatch. Bernard Church inevitably was the last to attempt to escape. He probably stayed at the controls until the last possible moment, trying to regain control of the aircraft; he would also have had to retrieve his parachute from under his seat, and put it on, before making his way forward.

John Tritton, although closer to the hatch that anyone else, was probably in the forward gun turret when the order to abandon the aircraft was given. The turret was free to swivel in combat, but did so rather slowly, so John would have had to turn it to its central position and lock it to prevent further movement, before he could open the bulkhead doors behind his seat, and either remove his helmet or unplug his oxygen supply and intercom cable. All this would have taken time, giving others the chance to queue at the hatch first. Clearly, neither the gunners (who were closest to it) nor perhaps anyone else in the crew had much chance of using the rear hatch because of the extent of the fire; nor could the gunners have reached the front hatch.

So, after reading the ‘aircraft loss card’ and obtaining eye-witness reports of the crash, I concluded that BK767 was rapidly losing height as it flew towards Aalten; the fire was becoming more intense; Neilson, Thompson, Taylor and Church were all queuing to get out of the front hatch; and John Tritton was still holding the hatch open when Taylor jumped. John, it seemed, intended to let Church bale out before attempting his own escape.

Bill Thompson’s body was found close to the north side of the bridge over the Keizersbeek, near a propeller and tyre from the aircraft but not, apparently, among the main wreckage. As there is no doubt that he did bale out it may have been his body, not John Tritton’s that was found, with an unopened parachute, by the Dutch villager who wrote to John’s family after the war. It is unlikely that the villager would have found out the name of the casualty; airmen were not allowed to carry any personal identification when they flew on ‘ops.’ The identification discs (‘dog tags’) that they wore gave only their service serial number (in John’s case, 133803), which would have enabled only the German authorities to discover the names of the victims, via the International Red Cross. Also, it is doubtful that any of the local people entered the blazing wreckage to search for survivors; they probably confined their search to the surrounding area.

I could only assume that, by staying on board to hold the hatch open, John probably lost any chance he may have had of saving his life. If he had jumped first, he may have survived, but in doing so might have denied someone behind him the precious few seconds needed to get clear of the stricken plane and open his parachute. A theory, admittedly, but the only one plausible one [sic] I could develop from the information then available to me.

Why Bill Thompson died even though he jumped out of the aircraft at more or less the same time as Kieth Neilson (and before Edwin Taylor, who survived his jump) will always be a mystery. Having baled out at a height that was obviously sufficient to allow them to open their parachutes and land uninjured, Keith and Edwin would have come to earth some distance from the crash site. It is puzzling that Thompson, having jumped before Taylor, was found so close to the wreckage, instead of on the ground beneath the flight path the aircraft had followed in the moments after it was attacked by the

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nightfighter. Thompson jumped when he still had enough height in which to open his parachute. Did it fail to open properly? Was he injured and rendered unconscious by debris from the ‘plane as he fell from the escape hatch, and therefore unable to pull his ripcord? Did he pull the cord too late (or too soon)? Did his parachute somehow become entangled in the aircraft? Was he carried along with the ‘plane by a freak airstream? Bob Leadbeater’s success in bailing out safely, even though luckily he pulled his ripcord too soon (that is to say, while he was still too close to the aircraft) suggests that it would be unusual for a parachute to become snagged up in a Stirling. The aircraft had a smooth ‘belly’ and the most likely obstruction to tangle with a parachute would have been the tailwheel, if for some reason it had failed to retract after take-off.

Still searching for an explanation, I read an article by Ken Rimell in Bomber Command News No. 9, published in the spring of 1993, concerning the loss on February 18, 1943, of another 214 Squadron Stirling, R9163. The aircraft made an almost perfect belly landing, unmanned, in the grounds of Rotherfield House, near Four Marks in Hampshire, after running out of fuel while returning from a minelaying ‘op’ over the Bay of Biscay. Most members of the crew parachuted from the rear door. Len Wright, the bomb aimer, helped Jack Rundle, the pilot, bale out from the front hatch and followed him after making sure that there was no one else left on board. Everyone except Rundle landed safely – Harold Claridge, the flight engineer, coming to earth almost at the front door of Rotherfield House. Rundle’s body was found only a few feet from where Claridge landed. It was thought that, after he jumped, his parachute became entangled in one of the bomber’s propellers. The circumstances in which R9163 and BK767 were lost were entirely different: the former was flying on autopilot, undamaged, during its last moment; BK767 was on fire and out of control. But there were similarities in the fatalities. Rundle and Thompson jumped from their aircraft from the forward hatch, and were killed even though the next man to jump survived. Did Bill Thompson suffer a similar accident to the one suffered by Rundle?

Aalten, IJzerlo and Chedburgh today

THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the loss of five of the crew of BK767 was their funeral at Berkenhove Cemetery, three days after their deaths. Sgt Thompson was buried in grave number 589/1, Sgt Mills in 589/2, Sgt Davis in 590/1, F/O Tritton in 590/2, and Sgt Church in 591/1. The typed entries on the cemetery registration forms name only one of the victims (Sgt Thompson); the others were described as ‘Engelesch onderoff RAF,’ ‘Engels vliegar RAF,’ or’ Engles vliegar-off RAF.’ Their names were pencilled-in afterwards, which suggests that for some unknown reason Bill Thompson was identified before the funeral but the names of the others were not found out until afterwards (probably as a result of enquiries via the Red Cross).

The cemetery is about half a mile due north of Aalten, on the northern side of the by-road from Doetinchem through Aalten to Winterswijk. The British plot, managed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, also contains the graves of 12 British soldiers, and is in a prominent position immediately to the south of the cemetery’s main entrance. The graves are impeccably cared for by Oorlogsgraven-stichting and every year, on Dutch Liberation Day (May 4), the people of Aalten place flowers on them. My request for a photograph of John’s grave for his relatives brought a prompt response; before taking it, the photograph even went to the trouble of putting a posy of flowers on his grave. Ironically, on July 23, 1943, by which time news of the deaths of the

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Top picture: the graves of the five airmen of BK767, photographed soon after the funeral on June 29, 1943. Centre: ‘Broken wings, immortal glory.’ The wreath from ‘the Dutch people.’ Above: the graves today. Bernard Church’s grave is nearest the camera; beyond it are those of John Tritton, William Davis, Frederick Mills and William Thompson. In the background are the graves of some of the British soldiers who are also buried in this cemetery. (Photos by courtesy of Peter Rhebergen)

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airmen had probably filtered back to England, John’s promotion to the rank of flying officer, which took effect on May 6, was published in the London Gazette. Bernard Church’s promotion to pilot officer was also being processed through Air Ministry ‘channels’ at the time of his death: in 214 Squadron’s operations record book, and on the ‘aircraft loss card,’ he is listed as a sergeant, but his gravestone gives his rank as pilot officer. It is almost as if he was an NCO when he took off on June 25 but an officer when he died on June 26; the explanation is probably that his promotion had not been confirmed at the time the first reports of the raid were written.

At IJzerlo, no evidence of the crash is visible but older residents can point out where it happened – the Keizersbeek stream, the van Lochem family’s farmhouse, a wood from which one of the engines was recovered. For many years after the war, when the water level in the stream dropped during dry summers, some of the incendiary bombs that John Tritton had checked before taking off on June 25, 1943, but had been unable to deliver to their target, would be exposed to the air and spontaneously ignite, as phosphor does when it dries out. Around the site there were also rounds of 0.303 ammunition from the belts that fed the Browning machine guns in BK767’s gun turrets. Most of the rounds were recovered by the Germans who cleared the wreckage; they ground the rims of the cartridges to make them fit their rifles, and then used the ammunition to short birds and rats in the stream.

H.J. ter Horst has a very special souvenir. As ARP warden Jacob Tilbusscher reported, pieces of BK767 were scattered over a wide area. Eventually the wreckage was taken away, but the clearing party missed one object – a folding ladder which had been flung into some bramble bushes. The ladder had served a dual purpose. Soon after 11 pm on June 25, 1943, Bernard Church and his crew had climbed up it into BK767 via the entry door. Once everyone was on board the ladder was hauled into the aircraft and placed under the mid upper turret, to enable Sgt Davis to climb into his battle station. It was then folded up and stowed. After the Germans had left the scene of the crash the ladder was discovered and taken to the ter Horst family’s farmhouse, where it was used by fugitives who hid there during the German occupation of the Netherlands.

Until recently the ladder was thought to be the only relic of BK767 that had survived until the present day. The rest of the wreckage was presumed to have been turned into scrap metal long ago – probably melted down in a German foundry back in 1943 and then made into weapons, or even components for a Luftwaffe aeroplane. However, on March 17, 1993, Peter Rhebergen went to IJzerlo and asked Mr ter Horst to take him to the field where the bomber crashed, and show him the exact place where the main part of the fuselage hit the ground. Then, using a metal detector, Peter paced patiently along the furrows and eventually about 50 cm below the surface, he discovered several fragments of metal and, among them, scraps of Perspex and a piece of compressed fibreboard, 10 cm long, 6 cm wide and 4 mm thick. Some of the metal parts contain rivets or rivet holes; they resemble components recovered from other WWII aircraft and there is little doubt that they are from BK767. The Perspex was surely part of one of the ‘plane’s canopies or windscreens. The fibreboard, which has a countersunk screwhole, may have been part of an internal fitting or instrument.

Peter was convinced that the remnants were part of the ‘plane that had been buried by the force of the crash, and had remained hidden from sight ever since. For identification, he sent most of them to Short Bros. and Harland of Belfast, successors to Short Brothers Ltd, and the company that designed and built

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Stirlings. During WWII, bombers were assembled not only by the companies that designed them, but also by dozens of other firms that placed contracts for components and sub-assemblies with hundreds of small factories and workshops. BK767was in fact built by Austin Motors under contract number 96939/39 and had a very brief service history; it was delivered to 214 Squadron on May 31, 1943 and had flown only 44.25 hours before it was shot down. Peter also sent some of his ‘finds’ to me. This was a totally unexpected consequence of my efforts to discover all that I could about the fate of BK767 and of my cousin and the other members of Bernard Church’s crew; a few weeks later, I was to have an even bigger surprise.

As I sifted through the contents of Peter’s ‘jiffy bag’ of scraps of their aeroplane I thought of Church’s crew and also remembered its ‘forgotten’ member – Sgt Bill Thomas, whose place in BK767 had been taken by Keith Neilson. Did Thomas owe his life to the illness that prevented him from flying on June 25/26, 1943. Where was he now? Did he join another crew at Chedburgh and complete his ‘tour’ of bombing operations? Had life been kind to him since the war? I thought I would probably never know the answers to these questions.

ONE DAY last autumn I drove from my home in Kent, up the M25 and M11 and into the middle of Suffolk, to visit Chedburgh airfield. There was deep low pressure over East Anglia, bringing ceaseless torrential rain all day – so different to the anti-cyclone that had settled over Suffolk’s air bases in late June 1943, brining fine sunny weather. I chose this particular day to go to Chedburgh because I wanted to see an exhibition arranged by the RAF Chedburgh Aviation Group in one of the former crew briefing rooms – perhaps the very one in which Church’s crew and the other airmen of 214 Squadron had been given details of their ‘target for tonight’ on June 25, 1943. The airfield was closed in 1946 and is now an industrial site owned by Hydro Chafer, but the control tower, some Nissen huts and a few other military buildings remain. At the exhibition I met former members of 214 Squadron, watched wartime films in a temporary cinema that had been set up next door to the briefing room, and inspected relics of WWII bombers that had evidently come to grief within or close to the airfield perimeter. I also saw maps, log books and other memorabilia of bombing ‘ops’ carried out from Chedburgh by 214 Squadron, 620 Squadron (formed in June 1943 from the ‘C’ flights of 214 and 149 Squadrons) and 218 Squadron. The exhibition also featured reminders of the humanitarian operations in which RAF Chedburgh was involved at the end of the war – Operations Manna in May 1945, which flew food supplies to the starving Dutch people; Operation Exodus, which brought home countless Allied ex-prisoners of war; and the flights by the RAF’s Polish airmen who delivered clothing and comforts to their fellow countrymen who had suffered terrible deprivations in occupied Europe.

After enjoying a ‘ploughman’s lunch’ at the ‘Marquis of Cornwallis’ I met the farmer who now owns much of the airfield. During a bumpy ride in his Land Rover I visited the bomber dispersal areas, the remains of bomb dumps behind earth banks, and the runways. Still recognisable after 50 years, they are now poignant reminders to my family, and the families of Church, Davis, Mills and Thompson, of the place from which dearly loved relatives set off on their last journeys, which ended 95 minutes later in another field, 290 miles away.

The five airmen of BK767 were among 398 who were killed while flying on ‘ops’ from Chedburgh; their names are written in a Book of Remembrance in All

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Saints, the parish church on the edge of the airfield. A memorial to Chedburgh’s fallen has been erected on the village green by the RAF Chedburgh Aviation Group Memorial Trust. On Sunday, October 4, 1992 – 50 years almost to the day after the station opened – Group Captain Ken Batchelor, the trust’s patron and former Chedburgh C.O. – unveiled the memorial, which was decorated with wreaths including one labelled ‘From the Netherlands,’ adorned with red, white and blue ribbons. This was a testament to the airmen from Chedburgh who took part in Operation Manna. As two Spitfires flew past in salute, Ken Batchelor paid an eloquent tribute to the 55,000 members of RAF Bomber Command who were killed in action in World War II.

BK767’s sole survivor

WHEN I began researching the fate of Stirling BK767, one of my priorities was to try and trace the two survivors – Edwin Taylor and Kieth Neilson. I had no idea where to find them, so at the suggestion of the Bomber Command Association I wrote to the RAF Personnel Management Centre at Innsworth, Gloucester, giving them Taylor’s service serial number and asking them to forward a letter to him at his last known address. Flying Officer Neilson’s serial number, 411092, was prefixed ‘NZ,’ so I wrote to the Military Attaché at the New Zealand High Commission in London and asked him to forward a letter to Neilson at his last known address. In September 1990 I received a reply from Frances Neilson, giving me the sad news the Keith had died in 1972, but by corresponding with her and reading letters she had previously written to Peter Rhebergen, I learned about his life in the RAF and his experiences on and after June 25/26, 1943.

Earlier I had received a letter from the present occupant of Edwin’s last known address in Stockport, near Manchester, who had enquired about him among neighbours and been told that he had died in about 1965.

I should have sought official confirmation of this, instead of accepting hearsay. Fortunately, Peter Rhebergen – one of the two tireless researchers in Holland whom I had come to call ‘the persistent Peters’ – had been trying to contact relatives of all the airmen of BK767, mainly in the hope of obtaining photographs of every member of the crew in order to complete his dossier on the bomber. In April 1993, thanks to the help of the police and newspapers in Stockport, Peter heard from Edwin’s two sisters, who still live in the town. They told Peter that their brother was still very much alive and well, and living near Liverpool. Edwin wrote to Peter, who passed Edwin’s address on to me. During the first weekend of May I telephoned Edwin and asked him several questions about my cousin and the ’ops’ in which he took part.

“When and where did you first meet John?”

“Early in 1943,” said Edwin. “I had finished my navigation training and was posted to the OTU at Wing. They used to lump us all together – pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, gunners and wireless operators. We did our operational training on Wellingtons and were then posted to Stradishall, where we met our flight engineer, Bill Thompson.

“John was a delightful man. We were very fond of him. Yes, he was the ‘old man’ of the crew – we were 20, 21 or 22 (I was 21) – and we all got on very well. John and I were great friends.”

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I then asked Edwin about the Wuppertal-Elberfeld raid (Bernard Church’s crew’s first bombing ‘op’) and the Gelsenkirchen raid.

“On the first raid we were hit by a burst of flak, which cut the hydraulic line to the rear turret and also smashed the Elsan chemical toilet in the back of the ‘plane into pieces! Fortunately no one was injured. Bill Thomas reported sick before the Gilsenkirchen ‘op’ – he had not been well for some time. It was not until I came home after the war that I heard that he had joined another crew and soon afterwards been killed on another raid. I was unable to get any details of ‘how’ and ‘when.’”

From what Edwin told me, I was also able to put the record straight about several aspects of BK767’s course across Holland and its air battle with Ludwig Meister’s Me 110.

“We were near Aalten,” said Edwin. “We had seen the red target indicator and we were turning towards it when the fighter came up from beneath us and set the whole bomb load alight. All I remember was Neilson shouting ‘Get out!’ He jumped first, then Bill Thompson, and I followed them. We all went out the front hatch. Why John – and the pilot for that matter – didn’t get out I shall never know, because John was standing by the hatch, holding it open.”

Edwin told me that they had not been hit by flak before Mesiter attacked, nor had they lost their way, nor were they flying too low to give John Tritton and Bernard Church a chance to bale out safely after the others had jumped.

“It was a foul night, which didn’t help us find the target. but we did see the first target indicator; just as we saw it, we were attacked. In another few minutes John would have been able to release his bombs. We were at about 13,000 ft and when we were hit the nose of the aircraft went down. We weren’t corkscrewing as we dived – as bombers did when they had a nightfighter on their tail – but we were weaving from left to right.”

Edwin went on to say that, as he headed towards the forward escape hatch, he looked back along the blazing fuselage and noticed that Bill Davis, in the mid upper gun turret, had not moved. He was, perhaps, already dead. Freddie Mills in the rear turret was obscured by smoke and flames. If he was still conscious and capable of attempting to escape, he would have had to turn the turret until its entrance faced away from the fuselage. (Normally, the entrance faced a double door between the fuselage and turret). Having turned the turret, he would have been able to fall clear of the aircraft and open his parachute. However if, as seems likely, the turret had been damaged, Mills would have been able to turn it only slowly – if at all – and would have had little if any chance to bale out.

BK767 disappeared from Edwin’s view as his parachute opened and he heard no more about the incident until he was repatriated. He then visited the families of his five fellow airmen, to offer his condolences. He completed his RAF service as a motor transport driver and then returned to his pre-war profession as a mechanical engineer and engineering draughtsman.

After talking to Edwin I sent him a draft of this article; he wrote to me a few days later, putting the record straight on several points.

“John was certainly more than 5 ft 5 in. tall,” he said (referring to the personal details I had read in John’s service records). “He was much nearer

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5 ft 8 in. or 5 ft 9 in.” Commenting on my suggestion that on the evening after their first ‘op’ the crew went to the ‘Marquis of Cornwallis’ to celebrate John’s 28th birthday, Edwin said: “I have no doubt at all that we’d have gone to the nearest pub, but you’ll probably be interested to know that John was strictly ‘T.T.’”

On a more serious point, arising from Frances Neilson’s letters, Edwin said: “It is true that we were a young crew and relatively inexperienced, but to put all the blame on the crew for Keith Neilson’s bad luck is utterly wrong . . . a new crew was no more likely to be shot down than an old, experienced one; this was well known to Neilson when he decided to come with us that night . . . things did go wrong on this operation but to say that the aircraft was lost in completely wrong. I knew we were south of our intended track but decided to hold our course as the turning marker was due to go down at, I think, 01.10 hrs. This would then give one a positive position. As expected, we saw the marker at the set time but almost at once the fighter attacked and the aircraft caught fire.”

Ludwig Meister’s account of his air battle with BK767 left Edwin rather puzzled. “Our gunners didn’t open fire,” he said. “As the attack came from below, the gunners wouldn’t be able to spot the German fighter, this being the type of attack the Germans had perfected.” Referring to his description, written on the aircraft loss card in 1945, of how he and two fellow crew members baled out, he commented: “I feel quite sure that it was Neilson who passed me first, followed by Bill Thompson on their way to the nose hatch. Due to the flames and smoke in the fuselage it would have been impossible for anyone to get to the rear hatch, let along survive the fire for long enough to get there. It took me a few seconds to get my parachute fitted and by the time I got to the hatch, Neilson and Bill Thompson had already jumped. John was standing quite calmly, holding the hatch open for me, and I knew that Bernard Church had left his seat and was right behind me. I shall never know why John and Bernard didn’t leave the aircraft, unless of course it went completely out of control after I jumped. Up to my leaving, the nose was well down and speed had really built up, but at least the ‘plane was going straight.

“Due to the fire and smoke in the fuselage, it was impossible for anyone to help the gunners and although Keith Neilson called to them, he wouldn’t have been able to do anything to help; in fact, he and Bill Thompson were very fortunate in getting clear themselves. Sadly, although he baled out, Bill did not survive.

“John was a most delightful man; even tempered, good humoured and completely unflappable. As navigator, I worked very closely with him and I could always rely on him to co-operate in everything we did. He was truly a great man; the ‘gran’dad’ of the crew.”

Edwin returned home from the PoW camp on April 26, 1945 and married Cecilia on April 3, 1948. They have two daughters, Rita and Colette. Fifty years after preparing to join 214 Squadron, Edwin’s surprise at hearing from Peter Rhebergen and me, and receiving details of our research, was matched only by our delight in hearing that he was still alive, and our pleasure at being able to contact him and obtain his account of a forgotten but brave and tragic event; an event that touched the lives of several families in England and many more in IJzerlo and Aalten.

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Top: Mr H.J. ter Horst with the ladder which was used by BK767’s crew, found in some bramble bushes near the crash site, and later used by fugitives who hid in the Horst family’s farmhouse (left).

Above: inside a Stirling bomber, showing the ladder in position beneath the mid upper gun turret. (Photos by courtesy of Peter Rhebergen)

Overleaf: Top picture: Peter Rhebergen in Mr ter Horst’s field at IJzerlo where the main part of the fuselage of BK767 crashed and where, on March 17, 1993, Peter discovered several fragments of the aircraft. In the background are the bridge over the Keizersbeek and (left) the van Lochem family’s farmhouse.

Centre picture: Fragments of BK767 found at IJzerlo. (Photos by courtesy of Peter Rhebergen). Bottom picture: The memorial to RAF Chedburgh’s fallen is unveiled. (Photo by courtesy of the RAF Chedburgh Aviation Group Memorial Trust)

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Peter Rhebergen
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“ENGINE TEST”