Missing RAF airman to be finally laid to rest

When Lancaster ED470 was shot down over Holland on its way home from a bombing raid in 1944, among the six men on board to be killed was Flying Officer Derek Heather.

The 22-year-old bomb aimer left behind a heavily pregnant wife, Betty, who gave birth to his daughter Gillian, five months after his death.

Now 68, Gillian Rumsey, who lives in the US, still travels every other year to the RAF memorial at Runnymede, near Windsor, to lay flowers there for the father she never met.

The monument remains the only site at which he is commemorated, because the bodies of Heather and his crewmates were never recovered from the wreckage of their aircraft, which was buried in a Dutch field.

Now, though, officials in the Netherlands announced that they were to excavate the aircraft and recover any remains left inside, to allow them to receive a proper burial.

The dig follows a long campaign by Peter Monasso, a Dutch historian who has traced dozens of missing aircraft from the Second World War.

After nine years of lobbying, the authorities have agreed to the search, which is expected to start in October and will be conducted by a specialist unit from the Royal Netherlands Air Force.

Mrs Rumsey said: “It is wonderful news. I am so pleased that they are going to do this.”

Her parents met before her father joined up, when he and her mother were working for an insurance firm in London. Mrs Rumsey was their only child.

“They lost so many aircraft that my mother said that half of her always thought that something would happen to my father,” she said.

“That’s why she got pregnant. She wanted to keep a part of him - that is what she used to tell me.”

Betty, who died in 1999 remarried in 1951, to a merchant sailor, Albert Myers, and the following year the family moved to Nassau and then, in 1954, to California.

Mrs Rumsey first made the journey to Runnymede at the age of 16 and has returned regularly ever since.

ED470, from 61 Squadron, had set off for its last mission at 7.20pm on September 23, 1944 from its base at RAF Skellingthorpe, near Lincoln.

It was one of 136 bombers, accompanied by five Mosquitos, sent to attack the Dortmund-Ems canal, near Gravenhorst.

The waterway was an important transport link for German industry and at that location, the level of the canal water was well above that of the surrounding area.

Despite thick clouds, the attacking force, which also included aircraft from 617 Squadron - the Dambusters - managed to breach the banks and a six mile stretch of the canal was drained.

ED470 reached the target but it is thought a mechanical fault prevented it from dropping all of its bombs.

Travelling home, it was intercepted by a Junkers 88, a German nightfighter, which attacked it from above and astern. It was repelled by gunfire from the Lancaster, but either the same or a different aircraft attacked again, setting the bomber on fire.

It crashed near a farm just outside the village of Zelhem, near the German-Dutch border.

One of the crew survived the attack - Sergeant John Miller, the rear gunner, had been able to parachute to safety.

In an echo of the war time film One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Miller, from Warrington, was able to link up with the Dutch resistance, who protected him.

He stayed with a family on a farm until the Allies liberated the country the following year. When he left, he took the farmer’s niece, Tilly Reterink, back to London with him, where they married - although they divorced in 1949. Miller, who later remarried, died in 1992.

Mrs Rumsey said: “After the loss of my father, it was very, very difficult for my mother. For years and years, she thought he would come back, because there was no grave.

“When people go missing, there is always hope. It gave her hope that one of the crew had come back. She thought maybe my father had stayed over there and had another life.”

Mr Monasso said: “After all these years, it is still important for relatives to know where their loved ones came down. They have their whole lives wondering where their father or brother was killed.

“We think its is important to have a proper place of rest for them. It is more satisfying than the memorial to the missing at Runnymede. We always say ‘missing is worse than dead’.”

The other men lost when the aircraft went down were: Flying Officer Albert Hornibrook, 20, the pilot from Queensland, Australia; Sergeant Tegwyn Roberts, the flight engineer, from Denbigh, Wales; Flying Officer John Condon, 24, the navigator, from New South Wales, Australia; Sergeant Robert Stanley Meachen, 23, the wireless operator, from Billingham, County Durham; Sergeant Thomas Brown, 25, the mid-upper gunner from Southport.

The dig will cost 400,000 euros (£340,000), 70 per cent of which will come from the Dutch government, with the remainder provided by the local authority.

British reports initially suggested that ED470 had crashed into the River Waal but Mr Monasso located it by examining local records in Zelhem, which recorded a crash on the evening the aircraft was lost and gave the location.

According to locals, the aircraft exploded a few minutes after crashing as explosives on board went off. Local records say that a small amount of human remains were buried in a local cemetery.

An aerial shot of the area taken later in 1944 showed a large crater near the farm, but there is now no sign of the crash. It is thought that the farmer filled the crater with sand.

Mr Monasso, 63, a former civil servant, then traced the whereabouts and identity of all the other 17 bombers lost that night to determine which one had crashed at the spot.

He has been campaigning to get the local authorities to dig since 2004.

His interest in locating missing aircraft began in 1972, when he stumbled upon part of a Lancaster bomber while out walking in marshland. He has since set up a museum and a foundation involved in investigating cases of missing aircraft.

His team, which covers an area of eastern Holland of around the same size as London, has searched for 400 British, German and American aircraft lost during the war.

Some of the crash sites were fully cleared at the time, by many others were buried.

The team have been involved with about 200 excavations and have helped find the resting places of 22 missing personnel.

Decisions on what will happen to any remains will be made once the dig has taken place. Wreckage from the plane will be put in the foundation’s museum in nearby Lievelde.

Thursday 4 July 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/britain-at-war/10156906/Missing-RAF-airman-to-be-finally-laid-to-rest.html