WW2 100 – 4 August 1943 – Thanks to a Canadian connection: Sergeant John Stephen Harris (1922-43) Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, Operational Training Unit (OTU) 42
Continued from 8 Dec 1942 - ‘One of the dearest, one of the best’:
GUNNER ALFRED EDMUND BURCH (1920-42) Royal Artillery, 83 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2021/01/ww2-75-8-december-1942-one-of-dearest.html
Budleigh Salterton’s War Memorial at the
junction of Coastguard Road and Salting Hill
It was difficult to identify John as a Budleigh-linked
casualty of WW2, with only his name on the War Memorial and no further
information initially available. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists
many war dead with the name J.S. Harris.
This would explain why the excellent Devon Heritage website of local war dead lists him as ‘Not yet confirmed’, along with, sadly, half a dozen or so other names on Budleigh’s War Memorial. So far, with help from local residents, I’ve managed to identify half of them, so we currently have only three ‘orphans’ to track down.
A search of the CWGC database, after John had been identified, told us only that his parents lived at Ringwood, in Hampshire. And Ringwood is nowhere near Budleigh. But the chances are that they were living in Budleigh in September 1939.
The 1947 Journal article about Budleigh's War Memorial
Image credit: Budleigh - Past and Present (Facebook)
In 1947 this article about the reinstatement of
the War Memorial was published in the Exmouth Journal. The monument had
been removed at the beginning of WW2, and I’ve been told that it had in fact been
so well protected that at the end of the war its whereabouts were a mystery. Eventually
it was tracked down to the workshop of an Exeter stonemason!
The article stated that at a recent town meeting it had been unanimously agreed that a list of names of all personnel who were killed during the war – both servicemen and civilians – should be added to the memorial.
However, on 6 September 1947, the newspaper published
this letter from Mr E.J. Witherby, Hon. Secretary of the War Memorial Fund. It
was written just as the War Memorial was about to be reinstated, and announced
that it had been decided that ‘the list shall only include the names of those
who were actually resident in Budleigh Salterton at the outbreak of war’. Mr
Witherby requested that ‘relatives or next of kin’ should send the names to him
as soon as possible.
I imagine that not all relatives or next of kin would have read the letter, especially if they had moved away from Budleigh. But anyway, John’s name was included on the list for Mr Witherby.
That still left us with the puzzle of when and how he had died, let alone what those initials J.S. stood for.
The answer came by chance when Budleigh resident Kevin Curran was kind enough to tell me that he had read about my ‘orphans’ and had come across this three-line news item in the Journal. It announced that Sergeant Air Gunner John Stephen Harris, RAFVR, son of Mr and Mrs J. Harris, of ‘Raleigh’, Budleigh Salterton, had been killed on active service. Where was ‘Raleigh’? Was this Raleigh Road? What active service had John seen? How had he been killed? There is no record of the name Harris in the 1939 Kelly’s Directory for Budleigh. But at least we now knew that he was a member of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and we knew his rank. Exmouth researcher Carol Fogg kindly told me that John’s death was also reported in the Western Morning News of 17 August 1943.
The book Through Footless Halls of Air:
The Stories of a Few of the Many Who Failed to Return was published in 1996,
with a foreword by Air Vice Marshal J.E. (Johnnie) Johnson
The answer to some of the questions came from
Canada. John would have been one of a number of aircrew who are easy to
identify thanks to records of air crashes worldwide which have been put
together by experts in these matters. Working my way through the members of
John’s aircrew I came across this book, written by Floyd Williston. And I’d
noted that Flight Sergeant David Archibald Williston (Service Number R/124616),
of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) had been one of the four members of the
crew in an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley Mark V medium bomber (Serial Number N1505)
which had crashed on 4 August 1943.
Floyd Bennet Williston (1931-2015). Image credit: www.cropo.com
Floyd Williston was a resident of Winnipeg, in
Manitoba, Canada. A bookshop manager, he was also an author, local historian
and folk music enthusiast who had been involved in a wide range of fine community
ventures. His two brothers, David and Albert Williston, had both died in WW2,
and his book had been written as a tribute to them and to other RCAF servicemen
who had lost their lives. Floyd died on 28 December 2015, and I am so sad not
to be able to acknowledge personally to him my debt to his research while I’ve
been tackling the story of John Harris.
Thanks to Floyd’s investigation, it is sad also to learn that the story was yet another WW2 tragedy that could have been avoided.
According to the CWGC record, John’s parents were John and Violet Thompson Harris. His death at the age of 21 means that he was probably born in 1922, but where? And did he grow up in Budleigh?
We do know from records of the Pennfield Parish Military History Society that John attended Pennfield Ridge Air Station in Charlotte County, New Brunswick, Canada, as part of his training for war service. He is already listed as a Sergeant, having been rapidly promoted, perhaps because he had already had flying experience in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve prior to the outbreak of war.
Britain was considered an unsuitable location for air training, due to the possibility of enemy attack, the strain caused by wartime traffic at airfields and the unpredictable weather. The extensive and ambitious Commonwealth Air Training Plan (CATP) had been drawn up in the early stages of WW2 so that the facilities in the Dominions could train British and each other's aircrews.
On 17 December 1939, the Air Training Agreement had been signed. It stated that the training was to be similar to that of the RAF: three initial training schools, 13 elementary flying training schools, 16 service flying training schools, ten air observer schools, ten bombing and gunnery schools, two air navigation schools and four wireless schools were to be created.
The agreement in the CAPT called for the training
of nearly 50,000 aircrew each year, for as long as necessary: 22,000 aircrew
from Great Britain, 13,000 from Canada, 11,000 from Australia and 3,300 from
New Zealand. Under the agreement, air crews received elementary training in
various Commonwealth countries before travelling to Canada for advanced
courses. Training costs were to be divided between the four governments.
According to Floyd Williston’s book Through Footless Halls of Air, it was at Pennfield Ridge Air Station that John flew with Dave Williston and the other aircrew members who were killed with him on his last flight.
Loddiswell War
Memorial bears the name of Leslie Brooking, the second Devonian airman who died
with John on 4 August 1943 Image credit:
Mark Newton and Imperial War Museums
The others were Pilot Officer Victor Hnidan, also from the RCAF – who used the name Hindin for convenience – and Pilot Officer Leslie Trewin Brooking, another RAF airman, from Loddiswell, in Devon’s South Hams.
The RCAF Memorial at
Pennfield Ridge. Image credit: virtualmuseum.ca
The air station grew from a community of 188
people in 1939 to approximately 5,000 in 1942, complete with hospital, theatre,
dance hall, sport facilities, and restaurants
Canada and Pennfield Ridge Air Station may have been considered safer for training aircrews than the relatively crowded skies of Britain, but it was also the scene of many accidents. ‘When Air Training Could Prove as Demanding of Pilots and Crews as Operational Flying’ is the sub-heading of an article by veteran Bob Fowler describing a nearly disastrous training flight from Pennfield Ridge in 1943.
A total of fourteen fatal crashes which took place in various parts of Canada surrounding the Air Station during WW2 have been recorded, accounting for the loss of 40 airmen. Another seven aircraft crashed into various bodies of water accounting for over 20 airmen and 1 seaman – a passenger – being listed as ‘missing’.
John and his crewmates in 34 Operational Training Unit (OTU), managed to survive the training at Pennfield Ridge. The only major incident occurred on 2 January 1943, when the brakes on their Lockheed Ventura aircraft failed minutes after landing. Pilot Officer Brooking managed to avoid a disaster by steering it into a snowdrift only two feet from the hangar.
The SS Pasteur in wartime on Convoy WS19. Image
credit: Lt H.A. Mason, Royal Navy official photographer. This is photograph A
10612 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums
In April 1943, according to Floyd Williston’s book, his brother Dave boarded the SS Louis Pasteur at Halifax harbour for its nine-day voyage across the Atlantic, presumably along with John and the two other crew members, Pilot Officers Brooking and Hindin. The ship, launched in 1938 by the French Compagnie de Navigation Sud-Atlantique as an ocean passenger liner, had been taken over by the British government at the fall of France and was used as a troop transport and military hospital ship between Canada, South Africa, Australia and South America. She had been designed to carry 751 passengers, and ended up transporting around 300,000 soldiers during WW2.
The voyage of John and his friends was uneventful, but not without risk. Dave Williston noted in his diary that the ship was shadowed by three German submarines. However the submarine captains would have been aware that Pasteur was being protected from the air by an escort of Lockheed Hudson aircraft, and later by Sunderland flying boats, and presumably would have decided that the risk to their own craft was too great for an attack on the troopship.
After disembarking at Liverpool, John and the crew members travelled to Bournemouth, where they arrived on 18 April, reporting to No.3 Personnel Reception Centre (3PRC). Floyd Williston writes that his brother Dave’s ten-week stay in Bournemouth was longer than usual, but does not give a reason. The explanation is almost certainly the disruption to RAF planning caused by a massive Luftwaffe bombing raid on 23 May, a few weeks after the arrival of the servicemen from Canada.
The Metropole Hotel, Bournemouth after the bombing raid on 23 May 1943. Almost 200 people, mostly Allied airmen were killed here. Image credit: www.birtwistlewiki.com.au
At least 131 people were killed in the raid, including 22 Commonwealth airmen and 110 civilians, and hundreds more were injured. The air attack, which included the dropping of 25 high-explosive bombs, destroyed 22 buildings and damaged over 3,000 in central Bournemouth.
The mass funeral of some of the victims of the Bournemouth raid of May 1943. Image credit: Findagrave.com
It seems that the bombing raid by 26 Focke-Wulf 190 aircraft had been carefully planned in response to the Dam Buster raids of Operation Chastise the week before. German intelligence would have known that Bournemouth was the location of No.3 Personnel Reception Centre, and that hundreds of Canadian and Australian airmen were staying at the Metropole and Central Hotels in the town. You can read about the raid here
You can also imagine the traumatic effect that the bombing raid would have had on these young airmen, newly arrived from the relative peacefulness of Canada. Perhaps the after-effect of the raid was to make them more determined than ever to seek revenge on the enemy, just as the Luftwaffe had sought to punish Allied airmen for the destruction of the Ruhr dams and the loss of German lives. An estimated 1,600 civilians – about 600 Germans and 1,000 forced labourers, mainly Soviet – had died following Operation Chastise.
In Canada, John and his crew had been members of 34 Operational Training Unit (OTU) at Pennfield Ridge air station. In Britain, they joined 42 OTU which had been formed in July 1941 at RAF Andover, in Hampshire, to train army support crews. Later, on 26 October 1942, the Unit moved from Andover to RAF Ashbourne, in Derbyshire.
A Royal Air Force Armstrong Whitworth Whitley
bomber in flight, circa 1940. Image credit: Wikipedia
It was at RAF Ashbourne that John and his crewmates had their first flight in an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley aircraft.
Following the outbreak of war in September 1939,
the twin-engine medium-range Whitley had participated in the first RAF bombing
raid upon German territory and remained an integral part of the early British bomber
offensive. In 1942 it was superseded as a bomber by the larger four-engined ‘heavies’
such as the Avro Lancaster.
Nicknamed ‘the flying barn door’ because of its appearance, the Whitley was viewed as a sturdy airplane with few vices and generally liked by those crews who flew them on operations according to The Bomber Command Museum of Canada.
However, on their first flight, Trevor Brooking the pilot was forced to return early because of problems with the oil pressure gauge. Various flights followed, including low-flying exercises, bombing and dinghy drill and night flying.
Darley Moor Airfield, Derbyshire. Photographed
from above from the South from a hangglider. Image credit: Lawrie Noctor/Wikipedia
On Sunday 3 August, Trevor Brooking alerted the crew to prepare for a routine night-flying exercise. By 11.05 pm their Whitley Serial Number VN 1505 was ready for take-off from Darley Moor, the satellite airfield for RAF Ashbourne which had been built the previous year.
According to Floyd Williston, the three-hour outward flight path would take them over Rugby, Hungerford, Taunton, Lundy Island, and Tenby before arriving over RAF Fishguard. Here they were to carry out an infra-red photography exercise at the Fishguard photography range before returning to Darley Moor.
At 1.25 am, as the Whitley approached the range at the lowest possible altitude, it was engulfed by the glare of powerful searchlights, temporarily blinding the pilot. Trevor Brooking rapidly tried to regain height. Two minutes later the duty officer of HM Coastguard at Strumble Head, on the north-west tip of Pembrokeshire, observed an aircraft crashing into the sea and exploding, one or two miles off the coast. Three boats were sent to search the area, but no trace of the crew was found.
A court of enquiry was convened on 6 August at RAF Ashbourne on the commanding officer’s orders.
Over in Canada, at Dave Williston’s home in Sydney, Nova Scotia, when she had recovered from hearing the shocking news of her son’s death, his mother wrote to the authorities in Ottawa insisting that they provide her with details of the accident. According to the book Through Footless Halls of Air, they never did. Nor did they share the official report of the investigation into the accident with Flight Sergeant Albert Williston, Dave’s brother.
But Albert found time to write a first-hand report of the Whitley crash to the parents of the other crew members. At the time he had just arrived at RAF Stradishall as a member of 514 Squadron.
John Harris’ mother Violet was obviously grateful as she invited him to spend his next leave at the family home in Ringwood, Hampshire.
On 12 September 1943, Air Vice Marshal Greenway, on behalf of the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Fighter Command Headquarters, reviewed the findings of the court of inquiry. The report, writes Floyd Williston, pointed to an unauthorised searchlight experiment initiated by the operators at Fishguard. Initially it had not been possible to determine the details of the experiment, which used an unfamiliar searchlight whose intensity was not revealed. However Air Vice Marshal Greenway was clear in his concluding remarks, which were attached to the report:
I concur in the additional findings of the Court. I consider it most regrettable that these experiments should have been permitted without the Ministry of Supply officials being firstly informed of the safety rules in operation for the Searchlight Defences.
Until pressure was brought to bear from the Headquarters to secure an explanation for the actions of the searchlight party, an attempt appears to have been made to mislead the Court into believing that on security grounds statements could not be taken from the searchlight operators.
I ask that strong action be taken with the Ministry of Supply to ensure that searchlight experiments are conducted under close control and with a full knowledge of the regulations in force for the operation of such equipment in the UK.
Flight Sergeant Dave Williston, the wireless
operator/air gunner in Whitley V (N1505) which crashed in the Irish Sea on 4
August 1943. Image credit: National Archives
According to Floyd Williston, copies of the report were
placed in the service record files of the four crash victims. In Canada they
were accessible after 20 years. In the UK, however, they were locked away for
75 years. There are no documents in the files to show that anyone was
personally reprimanded or demoted for causing the tragic incident. As a loyal member of the Royal
Canadian Air Force, Albert Williston accepted the word from the authorities
that it was an accident. He enquired about the absence of any public
acknowledgement of the accident and was told that this wasn’t the RAF policy. ‘Not
good for the morale of the troops, you know’, was one of the responses he
received. Tragically for the family he
too would be killed while serving, on 21 January 1944.
This was certainly an accident that should not have happened. A year before the incident took place, an intelligence report on German anti-aircraft tactics had appeared in the August 1942 No.6 of the American publication Tactical and Technical Trends, dated 27 August 1942:
A 90cm Projector Anti-Aircraft or searchlight c.1940,
displayed at Fort Nelson,
Hampshire. It required a crew of nine, and had a luminosity of 2 billion candlepower, with a top range of 8km (5
miles). Image credit: Wikipedia
‘Dazzle effect of British searchlights has in several cases brought down British fighters and bombers,’ the report observed. ‘British pilots report that dazzle or glare at altitudes even exceeding 10,000 feet (as used by the Germans) blinds pilots, makes location of target and accuracy of bombing difficult, impairs night adaptation of eyes, and has a pronounced psychological effect.’
Image credit: Commonwealth War Graves Commission
All four crew members of Whitley Serial Number VN 1505 are remembered on the Air Forces Memorial, or Runnymede Memorial, in Englefield Green, near Egham, Surrey
The next post is for SERGEANT CHARLES PHILIP SOUTHCOTT (1914-43)
who was killed in Italy
on 8 Aug 1943 while serving with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve 61 Squadron
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2021/01/ww2-75-8-august-1943-thundering-through.html
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