1/10/2024 0 Comments Lancaster bomber crew stories![]() If you can add to this story in any way at all, or recognise any of the many unknown faces in the pictures here, please get in touch by email or leave a message at the site guestbook. I hope you find the site interesting and informative. What I found out and how I found it, Dad's story, pictures and documents, those of his crew mates, and my Mum's pictures from her time in the WAAF in World War II are the subject of this website. It was 2004 and I now had the power of the Internet at my disposal in the search for more information. When James' school project came along I dug out all my Dad's stuff again and found renewed interest in his story. I did mount a picture of my Dad in his RAF uniform, with his cap badge and medals in the house on display though, and although they are "just" campaign medals, this elicited a lot of interest from friends and as they grew a little older, my two boys. This is a theme I return to on the page " Be Proud of Bomber Command".īack then I found this interesting, and even stopped off on my way back from a trip up north in the village of Dunholme in Lincolnshire to see the site of the airfield, but I was a father myself now with a young family and there was no real time to dig deeper so I left things as they were. While the country has rightly celebrated the actions of "The Few" the heroics of "The Many" in Bomber Command were quietly forgotten for many years. ![]() The were almost all reluctant heroes and their country has done them a huge disservice by its embarrassment over what they did in the darkest of times, which was just what they were asked to do by their commanders. This has proven to be a common story with the Bomber Command veterans and their families that I have met during this journey. I guess the actuality of the events were a little overwhelming and my Dad would very rarely actually say much about what went on during his time in the RAF. He had been picked up by the Resistance, had lived for a short while as a Frenchman near the town of Beauvais, north of Paris, with the Pelletier family, and had returned home safely.īeyond hearing his hearty rendition of "Alouette" which he had learnt in France and came out on particularly drunken occasions and a doll that had been sent to me by the Pelletier family shortly after my birth (they had heard Michael, decided it was Michelle and I was a girl!) the events of 1944 were always kept a little in the dark. I was brought up knowing that my Dad, John Edgar Wainwright, known by everyone as Jack, then a Constable in the Metropolitan Police, had survived having been shot down by a Messerschmitt 110 night fighter over France in 1944. The original version of this website (published in 2005) is now long gone due to the web host folding and this is a relaunch (2014). This website now displays to those interested what we found with a little digging around the records available, and much more detail pulled together after making contact with relatives of the members of the crew and continues to grow as I get further information. ![]() In the process of doing the research for the project we have found out much more than we ever knew before about my father's time in Bomber Command during WWII and his amazing, yet sadly commonplace story and the stories of the men he shared a Lancaster bomber with in dark hostile skies 75 years ago. The project was excellent thanks to James' hard work on it, and he got an A+ and won the end of year project prize at his school, Gidea Park College. Knowing I had my own Father's memorabilia from his time serving in Bomber Command in the RAF I suggested we could base it on that. My eldest son's school set a Spring project every year and in March 2004 he came home and told me that he had to write 30 pages on a subject to do with the Second World War.
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