I recently had the great pleasure of meeting and talking to Sir John Hall DFC who was a veteran of 60 sorties as rear gunner in a Lancaster during WW2.
After cheating to join up at 17, he underwent training then joined in a strange selection process where about 120 men were basically left in a large hall and told to form themselves into flight teams of 5 - pilot, navigator, front gunner, rear gunner and bomb-man.
He had lots of funny and poignant stories, with one involving Sir Winston Churchill taking a ride in his plane during which he insisted on sitting on a flight crate to and refusing to move to a normal seat until John informed him that the crate contained explosives which - if jolted- could give Winnie a rather sore posterior.
The most moving story was of a crew-mate and very great friend of his - more like a brother - who had been with John since day 1, however, he had a medical condition which grounded him following his 59th sortie, and both he a John were to return to stop flying after their 60nd flight. The average lifespan for a crew member was 5 sorties!
On johns final flight, his plane's controls/flaps froze over Eastern Europe and the only way they could steer was by throttling on or off the port or starboard engines.
Before ditching the plane, They had to use as much fuel as they could by flying straight across England and Wales then take a slow port steer to bring them back over land toward Devon before jumping out (with parachutes) so the plane would eventually ditch into the channel - amazing!!!
John was then scheduled to work as ground crew and remembers seeing his old crew-mate friend off on his final flight from which he never returned as his plane was downed somewhere over Germany.
For nearly 3-years John kept trying to find out what happened to his friend to no avail.
In 2011 at an old army friends gathering, John was telling another old airman his story, when he was introduced to a lady whose father had been shot down over Germany - she was the daughter of his friend and told John that her fathers plane had been found in Belgium in '47 and that his grave was in a Belgian war cemetery.
A support group for ex servicemen in the North East helped raise funds for John to go over there in 2012 where he was eventually able to say goodbye to his old friend.
A very moving, poignant and heart-warming story of a regular bloke who just did his bit and made a deep and lasting friendship.
Edited: I had the number of missions/sorties wrong
