Ernest Alfred Deverill, who was lost due to fog on Black Thursday, 16/17 December 1943, survived many hazardous operations in his time but perhaps none more so than the Augsburg raid on 17 April 1942.
Tales from the Archive this month will be on the Augsburg raid and the RAF’s PR war.
There is a commemoration for this raid taking place in Leicester in 11 days time.
Commemoration at Leicester, 17 April 2017
This image is from the notebook of John Conybeare Landon (see The Stories Behind the Gravestones on our sister site: RAF MISSING RESEARCH, WAR GRAVES, & REMEMBRANCE). Landon trained as a navigator in Canada and subsequently became a bomb aimer with Main Force.
If you have any documents or photographs about the RAF’s training programme, from initial training camp to Bomber Command Conversion Unit, please get in touch. We are planning an online exhibition this year on Bomber Command training, and all contributions will be gratefully acknowledged.
From time to time we include details of the air war which form the background to who the Pathfinders were and what they did.
This particular oddity is such fun that we cannot resist it. It comes from RAF Station Tain, and celebrates those who had made it through the war and were about to be demobbed. As the certificate says, it is a token of remembrance made between brothers in arms, the person named on the certificate being about to become ‘a mere civilian’.
It was sent by David Wingate, and it had originally been awarded to one of his relatives who was a Section Officer in the WAAFs.
