Leading Aircraftsman Lawrence Reynolds

Leading Aircraftsman Lawrence Reynolds was 20 years old when he died.  He was the gunner/ radio operator in a light bomber called a Fairey Battle, the lead aircraft in a raid on bridges crossing the Albert Canal in Belgium on 12 May 1940.  He is buried in Heverlee War Cemetery near Leuven next to the two other members of his crew, Flying Officer Donald Garland, the pilot, and the navigator/observer, Flight Sergeant Thomas Gray.  Gray was 26 and Garland was 21.

 

The crew were part of No. 12 Squadron, RAF and their flight had been based at the village of Amifontaine, France from the previous December.

The Four Chinese Nurses of St. Stephen’s College Hospital.



Stanley Military Cemetery, Hong Kong (Wikimedia)

The plain gravestone at the Stanley Military Cemetery in Hong Kong bears a simple inscription, “Met their deaths at St. Stephens, 25^th December 1941”. Then it lists a number of the known fatalities followed by … “and many unknown Chinese, Indian, Canadian and British Ranks of all units”.  The names of the four Chinese nurses that disappeared on Christmas Day 1941 are among the ‘many unknown’.  Their fate is mentioned in a letter from George H. Calvert, a former member of the Royal Hong Kong Regiment.

The hospital unit at St. Stephens College, a private school in Hong Kong once known as ‘The Eton of the East’, was functioning as a military hospital during the defense of the island. It became the scene of a massacre.  Patients and staff were killed, many by bayonet wounds while in their beds or while trying to protect their patients.

Sections of Japanese infantry known as the Tanaka Butai reached the Stanley area early that morning.  Lt. Colonel Black, a doctor in a white coat and a Red Cross arm band, carried a white flag out to the advancing troops to inform them the building was a hospital.  He was killed, as was Captain Whitney, another doctor who tried unsuccessfully to stop their entry.

David Hornell, Ferdinand St. Laurent and Donald Scott

PBY-5 'Canso' Flying boat in CWHM

 

 

The citation for valour in the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum (CWHM) to Flight Lieutenant David Hornell, VC can generally be found close to the Consolidated PBY-5 ‘Canso’ Flying Boat, the ‘Mary K.’, dedicated in his name and now bearing the livery of RCAF 162 Squadron to which he belonged. Beside it also is a copy of the London Gazette entry of July 1944 recording the posthumous award of Britain’s highest military honour for heroism in the face of the enemy to Hornell.

Three members of the crew died that day.  On patrol in the Atlantic on 24 June 1944 in a PBY-5, they spotted a U-Boat (U-1225) on the surface off Iceland. 

Josef Horak

Wynne Horakova, with photo of Josef

(Radio Praha website; photo www.czech-tv.cz)

Josef Horak was a Czechoslovakian Air Force officer.  During World War II he served in the RAF No. 311 Squadron, first as an air gunner and later as a pilot.  311 Squadron was one of the ‘3-series’ squadrons comprised of Czechoslovakian military personnel, many of whom had escaped after the German occupation.  They fought against an enemy that had taken over their country and their skills and experience were desperately needed by the RAF at that point.

Horak and Josef Stribrny, another Czech pilot, were from the village of Lidice and much of his story is told at the Radio Praha website.  In June 1942, as part of the reprisals for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS Officer in charge of the region, Lidice was selected for destruction and was razed completely to the ground.  All its male occupants and some women were shot on site, the remaining women sent to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp and most of its children, other than those deemed suitable for ‘assimilation’, were killed in another camp.  It appears that the village was selected because the Nazis knew that it had two airmen serving in the RAF. They made this act known on the radio and it was communicated to Horak by his best friend, Vaclav Student, another Czech pilot.

Ancient and Tattered Airmen

 

 

There is a photograph on various memorabilia web sites of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) showing a group of four older pilots in World War II; the photo above is at the Poetry In Action-Aviation web site section on the ATA. 

ATA pilots were officially civilians, but being responsible for the delivery of aircraft to operating units they had a close link to the RAF and the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm.  Most of the pilots were ineligible for military service, despite the constant need of the RAF for aircrew.  Some were too old or had disqualifying disabilities, others were female in an era where the terms ‘flight crew’ and ‘combat’ meant ‘male only’.  Some of their flights are described in my ebook In a Moon’s Course.

The two in the centre of the photograph did not survive the war.  Douglas Fairweather, second from the left, was a pilot who regularly flew Anson aircraft, small ‘taxi’ and cargo planes often used to deliver and collect the ferry pilots from their departure and arrival points. 

He was also a pilot who flew medical emergency flights and was noted for his ability to fly in marginal weather conditions, despite the requirement that ATA pilots only flew by visual flight rules.  Their aircraft had none of the instruments needed for night or ‘blind’ flying in cloud.  It was on one of these flights in 1944 heading up to Prestwick to collect a patient when he and a nursing officer, K. M. Kershaw, crashed into the Irish Sea.

The Other Brother

T. E. Lawrence

Lawrence of Arabia, Thomas Edward Lawrence (known professionally as T.E.) had four brothers.  His youngest brother Arnold is probably the most well-known of these today.  He was a professor of archeology at Cambridge University and also inherited the enormous job of being T.E.’s literary executor. 

Two younger brothers, William and Frank, were to die in military service during WWI, the same war that brought Lawrence of Arabia to fame.  The other brother, the oldest of the siblings, was Montagu Robert who was known by his second name.

Bulgari Serpenti

A Bulgari Serpenti watch (at stylecurated.blogspot.ca)

I am revealing my ignorance around jewelry in saying I became familiar with the Serpenti watch for the first time yesterday, when the heavyweight glossy magazine ‘Style & Fashion’ fell out of our neighbour’s Sunday Star newspaper. At $88,000 for this version of the ornate gold and diamond ‘snake’ watch I saw in the magazine (not the image above) I wasn’t really in the marketplace. 

But the sight of the BVLGARI name, with its Latin ‘V’ for ‘U’, caught my attention.  It is more usual for me to see the brand while weaving through duty free malls in airports (these days, you can’t seem to get from security clearance to your departure gate without this steeplechase).  Each time I see it I think about something I read a number of years ago; the addition of two members of this family of jewelers to the List of the Righteous Among Nations, a Jewish recognition process for those who helped save Jews in in peril during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, compiles and maintains this list of now around 24,000 names.

Arrivals and Departures by Moonlight

Noor Inayat Khan in uniform

The Tiger Claw is a novel about the life and fate of Noor Inayat Khan, codename ‘Madeleine’, one of many operatives behind enemy lines during World War II. She and other agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) were often delivered by Westland Lysander aircraft into improvised landing strips in darkness, the pilots landing with the brief guidance of small lights illuminated to mark the edges of the arrival field.

A Different Nightingale

WWII RAF recruitment poster for the WAAF 

In a 2008 Daily Mail article  on three war-time ‘Flying Nightingales’, Lilian Bancroft, Elsie Beer and Joan Crane, are brief descriptions of their experiences as WAAF Nursing Orderlies in World War II. They and other ‘Nightingales’ looked after the seriously wounded being airlifted in C-47 ‘Dakota’ aircraft from the ever-moving front lines after the D-Day invasion.

I featured one ‘Nightingale’ flight of an unknown WAAF Orderly from a log book entry found on the RAF Museum web site in my ebook In a Moon’s Course, despite the fact it was not an Air Transport Auxiliary flight.  I was moved to do so because, like the pilots of the ATA, it was about courage in the air in World War II rather than courage in combat.  These women had to deal with sights, sounds and situations that would have many of us in shock, unable to react.

In a Moon's Course



In a Moon's Course is my first book, about the delivery of fighters and bombers across Britain by the men and women of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) in World War II .  The title is from the epitaph in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London to the 173 men and women of the ATA who died in service delivering these aircraft.

I had no plan when I chose the book title to use it as a blog theme but find that it is, in fact, generally applicable to my writing interests at present.  Not that I  am morbid about the transitory nature of life; on the contrary, I enjoy celebrating life's accomplishments - including those by others that I come across in what could be easily-forgotten documents.