True heroine from Bomber Command dies at age 99
ONE of the backroom girls who helped our RAF heroes take the war to Nazi Germany has died aged 99.
Peggy Edwards served as a staff sergeant in Bomber Command’s operations room.
She saw the raids being planned – and got to know the crews who suffered the highest casualty rate of any British command in the Second World War.
Peggy served from 1942 to 1946 at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. On a return visit five years ago, she said: “We would be having breakfast with a crew in the morning, and that night they may be dead or missing. But we couldn’t let ourselves go to pieces, we had to keep morale up.
“People just don’t have a clue today of the scale of the losses of these young men, some of them no older than 22 or 23.”
Two months ago, Peggy helped celebrate the 75th anniversary of VE Day in her home village of St Florence,WestWales, and was driven around in a flag-decked car.
During the war she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) which saw 180,000 women enlisted by 1943.
After the war she and her husband David ran a guesthouse in Saundersfoot until she was 82, before retiring to nearby St Florence. David died in 2016.
Charismatic
Her friend Carol Grant said: “Peggy was held in high regard as the matriarch of St Florence. She was a wonderful, charismatic lady who was so proud of her wartime service. Everybody loved and respected her, and she made so many friends. It’s such a shame that she didn’t make it to her hundredth birthday, but we are hoping to have a celebration of her life on that day next March.”
Peggy’s funeral will see a cortege make its way around the village for friends and neighbours to pay their final respects.
Generous Daily Express readers donated about £2million towards the £12million cost of the Bomber Command Memorial which was opened by the Queen in London’s Green Park in 2012.
MEDALS and logbooks of a tragic Dambusters pilot have emerged for sale for £10,000.
Flak downed 23-year-old Vernon Byers’ Lancaster 300ft above the Dutch coast en route to the Sorpe Dam.
The Canadian’s body was never found. His last logbook entry reads: “‘OPS’ SORPE. MISSING.”
Vernon, pictured, and his six crewmates were among 53 RAF airmen killed out of 133 in the 1943 Second World War raid.
Thomas Fell, of London auctioneer Spink & Son, said: “These men were true heroes.”