We now know that the aircraft was shot down by a night fighter and crashed at 0240 hours on 10th July 1943 at Eprave (Namur) 4kms south west of Rochefort, Belgium.Four of the crew were killed and Sgt’s Brand, Stockton and Edwards were POW’s.Those killed are buried in the Florennes Communal Cemetery,Namur, Belgium. Thanks to the internet and the typically thorough record keeping of the Luftwaffe, I know the name of the German pilot who shot them down. ( Hauptman August Geiger, Staffel Kapitan of 7th Staffel 111 Gruppe NJG 1 who himself was shot down and killed 2 months later.)
As Frances Gibb says in her article today in The Times whilst relating how her own pilot father desccribed his experience:
“It was a tale we rarely heard. A reserved, sensitive man, my father said little about what must have been a searing experience. In any case, his generation did not tend to boast or grandstand — far less show emotion publicly — about the horrors of what they had seen or done.
The enormity of their courage, night after night, was in almost inverse proportion to what they said about it, in contrast to the cult of heroism today. Their attitude was “we just got on with it”. And they had a strong sense of duty: my father never doubted that the missions were the right thing to do.”
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