On 14th January 1944, scarcely one month after the K-King crash, on the first operation he had flown since that night, Leslie went missing with his new crew.
Much later it would become known that five of the crew had died but two had survived to become PoWs. It was from one of these PoWs, Albert East, that many details have come of what happened that night.
Flight Sergeant Albert C East was always known to his crew as "Ace" because of his initials. He joined the crew of Kenneth Munro Steven as a flight engineer in June 1943.
The crew arrived at Bourn on 8th August of the same year, directly from the training unit. Between August and January 1944, they flew nearly 30 operations, over half of the required tour of 45.
Flight Lieutenant Kenneth Munro Steven, known affectionately to his crew as "Steve", was a very able pilot who would be posthumously awarded the DFC. He had worked for a bank in civilian life and at thirty years of age was older than most wartime pilots. His bomb aimer, Pilot Officer Ridley Brown, was the only other officer in the crew. Easy going, dark-haired, with a neat moustache, "Rid" came from Hexham in the north of England.
Flight Sergeant Samuel Stevenson, the navigator, was a quiet and serious young man of 22 years of age. Always known as "Paddy", he came from Belfast in Northern Ireland. He was to be posthumously awarded the DFM.
Flight Sergeant William Gadsby, "Bill", was the wireless operator, again fairly old for the RAF, being 27 years of age, and, like most of the crew, married. Clifford Skinner, "Jack", the mid-upper gunner, was more typical, being only 22, but he too had a wife, Edith.
The crew's usual rear gunner was Sergeant K D Newman - Ken.
The crew had been through some bad times together, but with the commencement of the Battle of Berlin in mid-November, there had begun a period of increasing stress with ever more exhausting demands being made upon all of the crews at Bourn. Steven's crew saw many dangerous times - on one of these, on the Berlin attack of 29th/30th December 1943, they were severely hit by flak. The outer port engine was damaged and caught fire, and the plane's fuselage was badly holed. Steve got the Lancaster home on three engines, earning a mention for this in the Operational Records Book of the squadron.
Leslie, who had been placed on ground duty on 17th December, the day after K-King's crash, returned to flying duties on the 30th. As was all too often the case, little allowance could be made for any trauma he had suffered in the horrific accident which only he and Joe had survived.
As he had lost his entire crew, Leslie had become a "spare bod", one who would step in when other crews were short of a rear gunner. But for the first two weeks of January no such occasion arose. Then Ken Newman, the rear gunner of Steven's plane, was taken off flying duties by the MO because he had a skin complaint.
To such flukes of luck did men owe or lose their lives. Ken Newman could not fly, so Leslie took his place.
As the replacement rear gunner, Leslie had no time to get to know the crew - as Ace said, he was "just a body dressed up", boarding the aircraft in the near-darkness of the winter's evening of 14th January before settling down in his turret far away from the rest of the crew.
The raid was made against the German city of Brunswick, and it was extremely costly, with 38 aircraft being shot down, amongst them S-Sugar, Steven's plane, which was hit immediately after crossing the coast of Texel, at about half past eight in the evening.
Belonging to Holland, Texel had been occupied by the Germans along with the rest of Dutch territory. It was a very prominent feature on the enemy coastline, being the first and largest of the string of West Frisian or Wadden islands. Texel had only one big town, Den Burg, though there were several other settlements and hamlets. Otherwise the place was lightly populated, its inhabitants being mostly fisherman or farmers.
It was also home to German heavy flak installations. Texel was, in fact, so notorious for its fire-power that it was often used as an alternative target for bombers which had to turn back for technical reasons; this was the last scrap of enemy territory which could be bombed before the perilous crossing of the North Sea.
For the only two survivors of S-Sugar's destruction, it was fortunate that the aircraft did not reach the North Sea before it was shot down otherwise they almost certainly would have drowned.
Whoever was the attacker - whether it was a nightfighter as Rid Brown was later to testify or a flak installation as Albert East thought at the time - S-Sugar went down so quickly that it never reached the sea but crashed in the pine woods which edged the western sand dunes.
At the time of the attack, all the crew were beginning to feel that the worse was over, "we were thinking we were nearly home", and nobody saw a thing which might have warned them that they were in the gravest danger. It was as if the attack simply materialised out of nothing. A burst of something tremendous hitting them, and one of the engines caught fire. Steven called Ace back to feather (shutdown) the engine in question; even as he did so, there was another burst, and a second engine caught fire. Ace feathered that one also, then all at once the situation became critical, with the petrol tanks igniting and the plane catching fire from wing to wing. Steven yelled over the intercom to the crew to abandon the aircraft, "Parachute, parachute, jump, jump, jump". An instant later he spoke over the radio to Bourn, transmitting the last message they would ever send, informing base that they were on fire over Texel and that they were abandoning the aircraft in the air.
S-Sugar was losing height rapidly though Steven struggled at the controls to keep it going long enough for the crew to bale out. Leslie's state of mind when he realised that yet another appalling tragedy was imminent, that his second operation was going to end as horrifically as the first, is too dreadful to imagine. One can only hope that things happened so quickly, the need for action was so pressing, that he did not have much time to think.
In the front of the aircraft, reacting virtually instantaneously, Ace and Rid went through the forward hatch. They were the first to leave the aircraft, and probably the only ones to do so. Paddy, the navigator, who could easily have been out of the hatch an instant after them, seems to have elected to stay with his pilot, Steven. Perhaps he was waiting with him to be sure that everyone had baled out; perhaps he felt that he just could not leave him. Such a dreadful scenario was played out all too many times during the war.
Still losing power, blazing with the brightest light, the plane sunk down towards the west side of Texel. It approached the sea and the slope of the high wooded dune, Fonteinsnol, half-way between De Koog and Den Hoorn. Eyewitnesses saw it come flying over on fire, the clouds above it shining with the red light of the flames, then suddenly it crashed vertically into the ground after one last explosion had broken it up completely. The wreckage fell onto Fonteinsnol amongst the tall pine trees there and ignited them.
Amongst the wreckage of the Lancaster, the Germans found the dead body of Steven, who like so many pilots before him had carried out his duty to the letter and kept the Lancaster flying as long as possible to give his crew the maximum chance to get out. There were two other bodies with him. The pine woods and sand dunes were combed for the four missing aircrew, but the Germans found no one.
Two days later, Ace and Rid were to give themselves up so as not to put the very kind Dutch family who had helped them into mortal danger.
The municipal records of Den Burgh confirm the burial of three of the crew at the Den Burg cemetery - on 15th January - and that two of them were unknown.
Leslie's remains were buried in the same cemetery 16 days later on 31st January. Whatever fate overtook him, his body was not discovered for a fortnight.
What remained of the wreckage of S-Sugar was guarded by German soldiers and the local people were forbidden to go near it. It is thought that when the Germans came to clear away the wreckage, they found the remains of the last crew member. No dog tag was found with the body. Local memory has it that the unknown young man was buried at the crash site, and during the war the local people cared devotedly for the grave and often placed wild flowers upon it.
It was not until Rid returned from PoW camp after the war that Leslie's family heard the story of what had happened to him. On June 15th 1945, Rid wrote to Wally and ended all hope. Having briefly told the story of the crash, he concluded "I do not think there is much chance of your Brother turning up now. I'd rather presume him dead than live on in the hopes that he may still be alive. I can only offer you and his parents and family my deepest sympathy for your great loss."
Wally wrote to thank him. "Yes, we have been very anxious indeed, particularly my Mother who has worried over the affair as she has not known whether she could hope for his return ... For my part, I think it will be better when her mind is at rest about it one way or another, as he was the youngest of the family and she misses him so much ... I would again thank you for your letter, and also would express the sincere hope that you are in good health, and have at least somewhat recovered from the Prison Camp experience."
It was a very bitter relief to Leslie's mother, Jenny, to know. Before this letter, she used to say to her daughters about Leslie, "I wish I knew what happened to him, I wish I knew". In her desperation she had even been to a spiritualist to find out. The medium, holding the dead man's glove, had told her of the moment of Leslie's death, "he's in a tight cage trying to get out". The family felt sure this referred to the lethal confines of his gun turret, and their only consolation was that the medium had added that he had not suffered long but had died quickly.
The Netherlands War Graves Committee arranged pilgrimages for almost thirty years after the war to British and Dominion war graves in the Netherlands. A visit by two of the relatives would be financed, and thus, around 1950, Jenny went out to Texel to see Leslie's grave with her eldest daughter Marjorie. It is Jenny's tribute which appears on her much loved son's tombstone:
Although you've gone, my Boy,
I know that some day
We'll meet again
In a world of gladness.
Though she lived to be 89, Jenny was never reconciled to the loss of her youngest child.
Sometimes, in her grief, she believed that Leslie came to visit her. She continued to live on in the old Victorian house in Panmure Road with her invalid daughter, Dorothy, who could not climb the stairs. Upstairs there was still the big sitting room with the piano, in which once the whole family had gathered for parties and singsongs. Jenny had always been strict about having doors shut; she did not like open doors in the house, and in the old days she had forever been telling her children to shut them. Leslie, he was always leaving that dratted door open; he would go upstairs and tinker on the piano and leave the door ajar. One day, years after his death, when Jessie was visiting her mother, Jenny suddenly turned to her and said, "That front room door's open again upstairs - Leslie must have been in".
Much later it would become known that five of the crew had died but two had survived to become PoWs. It was from one of these PoWs, Albert East, that many details have come of what happened that night.
Flight Sergeant Albert C East was always known to his crew as "Ace" because of his initials. He joined the crew of Kenneth Munro Steven as a flight engineer in June 1943.
The crew arrived at Bourn on 8th August of the same year, directly from the training unit. Between August and January 1944, they flew nearly 30 operations, over half of the required tour of 45.
Flight Lieutenant Kenneth Munro Steven, known affectionately to his crew as "Steve", was a very able pilot who would be posthumously awarded the DFC. He had worked for a bank in civilian life and at thirty years of age was older than most wartime pilots. His bomb aimer, Pilot Officer Ridley Brown, was the only other officer in the crew. Easy going, dark-haired, with a neat moustache, "Rid" came from Hexham in the north of England.
Flight Sergeant Samuel Stevenson, the navigator, was a quiet and serious young man of 22 years of age. Always known as "Paddy", he came from Belfast in Northern Ireland. He was to be posthumously awarded the DFM.
Flight Sergeant William Gadsby, "Bill", was the wireless operator, again fairly old for the RAF, being 27 years of age, and, like most of the crew, married. Clifford Skinner, "Jack", the mid-upper gunner, was more typical, being only 22, but he too had a wife, Edith.
The crew's usual rear gunner was Sergeant K D Newman - Ken.
The crew had been through some bad times together, but with the commencement of the Battle of Berlin in mid-November, there had begun a period of increasing stress with ever more exhausting demands being made upon all of the crews at Bourn. Steven's crew saw many dangerous times - on one of these, on the Berlin attack of 29th/30th December 1943, they were severely hit by flak. The outer port engine was damaged and caught fire, and the plane's fuselage was badly holed. Steve got the Lancaster home on three engines, earning a mention for this in the Operational Records Book of the squadron.
Leslie, who had been placed on ground duty on 17th December, the day after K-King's crash, returned to flying duties on the 30th. As was all too often the case, little allowance could be made for any trauma he had suffered in the horrific accident which only he and Joe had survived.
As he had lost his entire crew, Leslie had become a "spare bod", one who would step in when other crews were short of a rear gunner. But for the first two weeks of January no such occasion arose. Then Ken Newman, the rear gunner of Steven's plane, was taken off flying duties by the MO because he had a skin complaint.
To such flukes of luck did men owe or lose their lives. Ken Newman could not fly, so Leslie took his place.
As the replacement rear gunner, Leslie had no time to get to know the crew - as Ace said, he was "just a body dressed up", boarding the aircraft in the near-darkness of the winter's evening of 14th January before settling down in his turret far away from the rest of the crew.
The raid was made against the German city of Brunswick, and it was extremely costly, with 38 aircraft being shot down, amongst them S-Sugar, Steven's plane, which was hit immediately after crossing the coast of Texel, at about half past eight in the evening.
Belonging to Holland, Texel had been occupied by the Germans along with the rest of Dutch territory. It was a very prominent feature on the enemy coastline, being the first and largest of the string of West Frisian or Wadden islands. Texel had only one big town, Den Burg, though there were several other settlements and hamlets. Otherwise the place was lightly populated, its inhabitants being mostly fisherman or farmers.
It was also home to German heavy flak installations. Texel was, in fact, so notorious for its fire-power that it was often used as an alternative target for bombers which had to turn back for technical reasons; this was the last scrap of enemy territory which could be bombed before the perilous crossing of the North Sea.
For the only two survivors of S-Sugar's destruction, it was fortunate that the aircraft did not reach the North Sea before it was shot down otherwise they almost certainly would have drowned.
Whoever was the attacker - whether it was a nightfighter as Rid Brown was later to testify or a flak installation as Albert East thought at the time - S-Sugar went down so quickly that it never reached the sea but crashed in the pine woods which edged the western sand dunes.
At the time of the attack, all the crew were beginning to feel that the worse was over, "we were thinking we were nearly home", and nobody saw a thing which might have warned them that they were in the gravest danger. It was as if the attack simply materialised out of nothing. A burst of something tremendous hitting them, and one of the engines caught fire. Steven called Ace back to feather (shutdown) the engine in question; even as he did so, there was another burst, and a second engine caught fire. Ace feathered that one also, then all at once the situation became critical, with the petrol tanks igniting and the plane catching fire from wing to wing. Steven yelled over the intercom to the crew to abandon the aircraft, "Parachute, parachute, jump, jump, jump". An instant later he spoke over the radio to Bourn, transmitting the last message they would ever send, informing base that they were on fire over Texel and that they were abandoning the aircraft in the air.
S-Sugar was losing height rapidly though Steven struggled at the controls to keep it going long enough for the crew to bale out. Leslie's state of mind when he realised that yet another appalling tragedy was imminent, that his second operation was going to end as horrifically as the first, is too dreadful to imagine. One can only hope that things happened so quickly, the need for action was so pressing, that he did not have much time to think.
In the front of the aircraft, reacting virtually instantaneously, Ace and Rid went through the forward hatch. They were the first to leave the aircraft, and probably the only ones to do so. Paddy, the navigator, who could easily have been out of the hatch an instant after them, seems to have elected to stay with his pilot, Steven. Perhaps he was waiting with him to be sure that everyone had baled out; perhaps he felt that he just could not leave him. Such a dreadful scenario was played out all too many times during the war.
Still losing power, blazing with the brightest light, the plane sunk down towards the west side of Texel. It approached the sea and the slope of the high wooded dune, Fonteinsnol, half-way between De Koog and Den Hoorn. Eyewitnesses saw it come flying over on fire, the clouds above it shining with the red light of the flames, then suddenly it crashed vertically into the ground after one last explosion had broken it up completely. The wreckage fell onto Fonteinsnol amongst the tall pine trees there and ignited them.
Amongst the wreckage of the Lancaster, the Germans found the dead body of Steven, who like so many pilots before him had carried out his duty to the letter and kept the Lancaster flying as long as possible to give his crew the maximum chance to get out. There were two other bodies with him. The pine woods and sand dunes were combed for the four missing aircrew, but the Germans found no one.
Two days later, Ace and Rid were to give themselves up so as not to put the very kind Dutch family who had helped them into mortal danger.
The municipal records of Den Burgh confirm the burial of three of the crew at the Den Burg cemetery - on 15th January - and that two of them were unknown.
Leslie's remains were buried in the same cemetery 16 days later on 31st January. Whatever fate overtook him, his body was not discovered for a fortnight.
What remained of the wreckage of S-Sugar was guarded by German soldiers and the local people were forbidden to go near it. It is thought that when the Germans came to clear away the wreckage, they found the remains of the last crew member. No dog tag was found with the body. Local memory has it that the unknown young man was buried at the crash site, and during the war the local people cared devotedly for the grave and often placed wild flowers upon it.
It was not until Rid returned from PoW camp after the war that Leslie's family heard the story of what had happened to him. On June 15th 1945, Rid wrote to Wally and ended all hope. Having briefly told the story of the crash, he concluded "I do not think there is much chance of your Brother turning up now. I'd rather presume him dead than live on in the hopes that he may still be alive. I can only offer you and his parents and family my deepest sympathy for your great loss."
Wally wrote to thank him. "Yes, we have been very anxious indeed, particularly my Mother who has worried over the affair as she has not known whether she could hope for his return ... For my part, I think it will be better when her mind is at rest about it one way or another, as he was the youngest of the family and she misses him so much ... I would again thank you for your letter, and also would express the sincere hope that you are in good health, and have at least somewhat recovered from the Prison Camp experience."
It was a very bitter relief to Leslie's mother, Jenny, to know. Before this letter, she used to say to her daughters about Leslie, "I wish I knew what happened to him, I wish I knew". In her desperation she had even been to a spiritualist to find out. The medium, holding the dead man's glove, had told her of the moment of Leslie's death, "he's in a tight cage trying to get out". The family felt sure this referred to the lethal confines of his gun turret, and their only consolation was that the medium had added that he had not suffered long but had died quickly.
The Netherlands War Graves Committee arranged pilgrimages for almost thirty years after the war to British and Dominion war graves in the Netherlands. A visit by two of the relatives would be financed, and thus, around 1950, Jenny went out to Texel to see Leslie's grave with her eldest daughter Marjorie. It is Jenny's tribute which appears on her much loved son's tombstone:
Although you've gone, my Boy,
I know that some day
We'll meet again
In a world of gladness.
Though she lived to be 89, Jenny was never reconciled to the loss of her youngest child.
Sometimes, in her grief, she believed that Leslie came to visit her. She continued to live on in the old Victorian house in Panmure Road with her invalid daughter, Dorothy, who could not climb the stairs. Upstairs there was still the big sitting room with the piano, in which once the whole family had gathered for parties and singsongs. Jenny had always been strict about having doors shut; she did not like open doors in the house, and in the old days she had forever been telling her children to shut them. Leslie, he was always leaving that dratted door open; he would go upstairs and tinker on the piano and leave the door ajar. One day, years after his death, when Jessie was visiting her mother, Jenny suddenly turned to her and said, "That front room door's open again upstairs - Leslie must have been in".
Leslie Laver's Last Flight
December 16/17 1943 & The Battle of Berlin
