At last I can pay tribute to hero
Geoffrey Towers, who shot down the world’s first jet fighter, in a quiet moment among the names of the fallen. ‘I think everyone was scared but you didn’t dare show it,’ he recalls IT WAS cold and foggy in the middle of “Bomber County” and Margaret Drake was fighting back tears as she sought the name of the father she never knew.
Margaret, 75, who was just six months old when her father’s plane was shot down over Holland in May 1943, carefully searched the 270 bronzing steel panels dedicated to young aircrew killed serving their country during the Second World War.
And at yesterday’s unveiling of the £13.5million International Bomber Command Centre, she found him among the 57,861 names of the fallen.
Alexander Steel, a 22-year-old rear gunner on his fourth bombing mission, was returning from a raid on Duisburg, Germany, when his Lancaster was downed.
Margaret paused, touched his name, placed a poppy and cross reverentially into the carved letters – and at last felt she was able to communicate with her father. The retired winepacker from Bristol, who joined 300 veterans among a crowd of 4,000 at the centre in Lincoln, said: “Finding Dad’s name was so emotional.
“He and my mother had been married only two years. He had seen me – just before his last raid. I was never ever able to speak to him or call him Dad or wish him happy birthday. But I was able to do that here today.”
Recognition
Margaret, at the ceremony with her former builder husband Derek, 82, said her mother Dorothy never got over her loss.
“She never remarried. She said she would never do that. She stayed true to him and she lived to be 83,” she said. “She would have loved to have been able to come to this memorial and to feel she could be in contact with my dad.”
Yesterday’s ceremony was billed as the last major gathering of the Bomber Boys aged 92 to 100, who came from all over the world – 16 from Australia and one from Canada – for the IBCC launch.
The crowd was so big, extra rows of seating had to be brought to the front. But Britain’s weather, as so often during the war, disrupted the plans.
It was so cold, veterans were given silver foil survival blankets and the fog was so thick, Lincoln Cathedral could not be seen on the hill opposite, grounding a Lancaster flypast as a result. The last British member of the 1943 Dambusters raid, George “Johnny” Johnson, 96, had to leave early because of the conditions.
At the IBCC’s heart is a 102ft spire of Corden steel, the same length as a Lancaster’s wingspan, and yesterday’s unveiling included a real-life pageant of characters dressed in period uniform and civilian clothes. Nearby, the Chadwick Centre tells the story of Bomber Command, which includes a German perspective. Lincolnshire was known as Bomber County because it hosted 27 bases.
Pilot Ron Houghton, 93, from Sydney, flew 33 missions on Halifaxes and is Bomber Command Association Australia’s president. He said “I hope future generations will realise what wars of this nature are like and hopefully we will not have any more.”
Former rear gunner Geoffrey Towers, 93, of Pontefract, Yorkshire, survived 40 missions and downed a Messerschmitt 262 – the world’s first jet fighter – over Bochum in 1944.
He said: “I think everybody was scared but you did not dare show it.