Venray Cemetery Burial Rededication
Introduction
On 07 October, I visited the Venray Military Cemetery for the Rededication of 4 Bomber Crew burials. The four had been previously identified as unknowns but had recently been identified through an in-depth investigation by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). The CWGC does not permit exhumation to allow DNA analysis, preferring to preserve the sanctity of the burial. They have very stringent rules to ensure the bodies are properly identified, so the analyses must provide irrefutable evidence of the member’s identification before the headstones are changed.
Among those present were family members, the Mayor of Venray, representatives of the British and Australian embassies, military representatives of the Royal Air Force, Royal Army, Royal Navy, Royal Australian Army, and Royal Australian Air Force, and adoptive parents. Under a radiant autumn sun, a beautiful ceremony paid final respects to the four fallen crew members of Lancaster PD374, which was shot down near the German village of Horstgen on December 8, 1944.
The town of Venray, 40 km east of Eindhoven near the German border, was liberated by Allied troops in the middle of October 1944, and the burials in the cemetery date from October 1944 to March 1945.
Venray War Cemetery contains 692 Commonwealth burials of the Second World War, 30 of them unidentified, and one Polish burial.
The Flight
On 08 December 1944 Lancaster PD374 of 218 Squadron took off from Methwold in Norfolk at 0825 heading for Homberg- to attack the Meerbeck oil plant. 136 Lancasters, all from 3 Group were involved in the attack and only 1 aircraft lost. The weather over the target was clear and fair, the flak (Anti Aircraft Fire) was intense, but no fighters were encountered. The raid opened well but smoke quickly obscured the target and bombing then became quite scattered.
PD374 was hit by flak and was last seen on fire and gradually losing height heading toward Horstgen. Around 1030 2 km east of Horstgen, the plane nose dived and a into a field. Four parachutes were seen to open before the crash. Three of these were captured by Police and became Prisoners of War (PoWs). The fourth, PO Tales, was captured then executed by the SS. The remaining three bodies were found in the aircraft. PO Tales and the other three bodies were buried in the cemetery at Dachsberg without a Christian burial or military honours.
Their bodies were exhumed in the Autumn of 1945 by American forces and reinterred in the American Cemetery at Margraten, near Maastricht. Their initial burial location was incorrectly recorded and abbreviated to Dachs, so when the records were turned over to the British in 1949, they tried to match the bodies to a different crash and ultimately determined the place did not exist, so buried the bodies as unknowns. As a result, their names were recorded on the Runneymede Memorial that commemorates missing aircrew. Recent work by the CWGC successfully identified the unknowns.
The Crew
Pilot: Flying Officer Leslie Hough RAAF Age 26 Killed in Action
Flight Engineer: Pilot Officer John Tales RAF Age 26 Murdered
Navigator: Flight Sergeant John Clifford, RAF Age 21, Prisoner of War
Bomb Aimer: Flying Officer John Barron, RAF, Age 20, Prisoner of War
Wireless Operator/ Air Gunner: Sergeant Henry Burnside RAF Age 22, Killed in Action
Mid Upper Gunner: Sergeant John Lawson RAF Age 21, Killed in Action
Rear Gunner: Sergeant Kenneth Lee RAF Age 19, Prisoner of War
As was usual for Bomber crews, this group trained together at 26 Operational Training Unit in Buckinghamshire, before joining 218 Squadron on 10 August 1944. The Crew had completed 13 missions before their crash.
Flying Officer Leslie Hough
Leslie Hough, the Australian pilot, enlisted in pilot training in April 1942, and conducted his initial flight training in Australia before being shipped to the UK via the United States. He did his advanced flying training at 21 Advanced Flying Unit at Kidlington, then operational bomber training at 26 OTU. Hough remained at the controls of the aircraft until the final moments of the flight to allow other crew members to escape.
A surviving crew member said:
With that last glance I saw Les Hough, that kindly, raucous, irreverent, competent, sometimes irascible and very Australian skipper, sitting there stubbornly keeping a burning wreck airborne while his crew bailed out. Like the good Aussie he was, he stuck by his mates until the end.
Pilot Officer John Tales
PO Tales enlisted in the RAF in 1939 and trained as a Flight Engineer. He married Megan Stringer in 1940 and tragically his wife passed away a year later due to Tuberculosis, so he was a widower at 23. He had completed a full 30 mission tour with 209 squadron before becoming an instructor. Despite being one of the few who survived through a full tour, he declared the RAF was his life and volunteered for a second tour.
PO Tales successfully parachuted out of the burning aircraft but was then captured by civilians and beaten up before being handed over to a Policeman and two SS Soldiers who took him away on a motorcycle. A short time later two shots were heard by a local farmer named Johannes Quernhorst, who ran to the scene to find PO Tales mortally wounded in the road. A doctor was called but Tales died before the doctor arrived. PO Tales was buried with the other three casualties.
Sergeant Henry Burnside
Sergeant Burnside enrolled in the RAF in May 1942 at age 20 and trained as an Air Gunner and Wireless Operator in October 1943 and joined the crew at 26 OTS.
Sergeant John Lawson
John enlisted in the RAF in July 1943 at the age of 20. He trained as an Air Gunner and was the Mid Upper Gunner on PD374.
The Ceremony
The very solemn and dignified ceremony was conducted by Group Captain Ruth Hake, RAF Deputy Chaplin-in-Chief. In her address Group Captain Hake quoted Queen Elizabeth, a phrase that really struck a chord with me:
Grief is the price you pay for love.
In an interview after the service Ruth said:
It is my immense privilege to conduct the ceremony for Fg Off Hough, Plt Off Tales, Sgt Burnside and Sgt Lawson today. They gave their lives in defence of our nation, and in dedicating their graves today with their names rightfully in place, we are able finally, to honour that debt that we all owe to them and their loved ones.
Along with several prayers and the last post was the Kohima Epitaph that I think of every time I visit a cemetery:
When you go home tell them of us and say:
‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today.’
One of the readings, called The Lancaster appears to have been written specifically for the ceremony.
The Lancaster
She lifted into the morning sky,
Her four great Merlins calling clear:
A Lancaster bound for distant skies,
With seven men who conquered fear.
Some came from Britian’s ancient shores,
One from Australia’s sunlit land;
But once they climbed aboard that plane,
They flew as one – a single band.
The darkness held no thought of rank,
No measure made of where they’d grown.
The trust that bound a bomber crew
Was stronger far than flesh and bone.
For some, that flight became their last,
The starts receiving their final breath.
Their youth was given for our peace,
Their courage shining beyond death.
The Lancaster returned no more,
Yet neither did their spirit fade,
For every life they touched endures,
And every debt is still repaid.
So let us stand in grateful silence,
Remembering those who dared to fly.
Not British only, nor Australian
But brothers beneath one sky.
A Dutch Colour guard was present with about 150 mostly Dutch attendees, a strong gathering for a Wednesday morning.
All four servicemen had family members present, celebrating the closure of finally having identified the fallen. A photo of the family members all holding pictures of their relatives.
National flags were presented to the family members and wreathes laid from several organizations.
The four Headstones.
Burnside, Lawson, Hough, Tales
Interestingly, the headstones of Burnside and Lawson both say Buried Near this Spot, indicating that their graves could not be uniquely identified. Hough, the Australian, and Tales, the member who was executed had artifacts that allowed them to be uniquely identified, but the other two did not.
Family members for each service member.
Sergeant Burnside
Sgt Lawson
Flt Lt Hough with Australian Army and Air Force Representatives
WO Tales
The Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre (JCCC) was responsible for the research, identification and burial of British casualties worldwide. JCCC Caseworker, Tracey Bowers, said:
Today we honour the British and Australian airmen who served and died together during World War 2. To have so many families present here today has made this occasion especially poignant and seeing them interacting with members of the local community who have adopted these graves incredibly moving.
Flight Sergeant Boleslaw Filipiak – Polish Air Force – Lancaster NG501
Air Gunner, Flight Sergeant Filipiak is the lone Polish Serviceman buried at Venray, so I was curious of his story. He flew for 300 Squadron out of RAF Faldingworth, one of two bomber squadrons that operated out of the UK. The remaining crew were all killed and buried in four different locations in Belgium, the Netherlands and one in Germany.
Crew Members
All crew members aboard perished:
Flt Lt Władysław Wyganowski (Pilot, Age 31) — Buried at the British War Cemetery in Hotton, Belgium.
Sgt Jacek Filek (Flight Engineer, Age 25) — Buried at the Polish War Cemetery in Lommel, Belgium.
Sgt Edmund Kulikowski (Navigator) — Buried at the Polish War Cemetery in Lommel, Belgium.
Józef Babiarz (P/O / Ppor.) — Buried at the Polish War Cemetery in Lommel, Belgium.
Stefan Chętnicki (Kpr.) — Buried at the Polish War Cemetery in Breda, the Netherlands.
J. R. Horobiowski (Kpr.) — Buried in Kleve, Germany.
B. Filipiak (Kpr.) — Buried in Venray, the Netherlands.
All the crew perished on impact except for Jacek Filek, who managed to parachute to safety but was tragically murdered by German forces upon capture.
NG501 was involved Daylight raid on Cologne (Köln), Germany, taking off from RAF Faldingworth, Lincolnshire at 07:14 AM on 2 March 1945. The aircraft was hit by enemy anti-aircraft fire and/or fighter aircraft during the operation and crashed on fire in the vicinity of Zülpicher Straße and Gottfried Straße in Cologne.
Final Thoughts
A beautiful, moving ceremony held on a perfect fall day. It was very gratifying to see the care and respect shown to the service members and great to see the number of family members in attendance. It was also wonderful to see the number of Dutch people who attended the ceremony. The respect they have for their liberators is still strong 82 years on. There have been a number of rededication ceremonies this fall, I was happy to be able to attend this one.
RAF Bomber Command (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, & Allied Nations) suffered between 55,573 to 58,438 killed. RAF Bomber Command experienced one of the highest casualty rates of any branch in the Western Allies. Out of 125,000 aircrew who served, approximately 45% were killed in action or training.
I enjoy researching Air Force stories, partly because the squadron records list every participant of each mission so you can get a good appreciation of their flights. The International Bomber Command Centre (IBCC) also has details of every Bomber Command loss and links the records by crew so you can see who else was killed on the flight.
Many of the fallen are also commemorated in the Aircrew Remembered website where additional details of the crew and the actions are available:
While at the Cemetery, I collected a few additional bomber crews that I will take a look at in the next post.
It is amazing to me that 80+ years later research continues to identify the missing soldiers. Such young men with so much bravery.
Beautifully described. I am glad you were there for it and so many family members. Thank you and well-done.