A Tale Of Two Uncles

I would like to add information about my two uncles who both had very different experiences in the Second World War.

Firstly my Uncle John Edward Jenkins who was my Mother's brother and was born on the 26 April 1922.

When the war started in 1939 my uncle, who was then 17 had just left school. He immediately enlisted in the RAF, and was subsequently selected to go to Canada to train as a pilot.

Many years later my younger niece, Sarah, was doing a project into the WW2 and wrote to John asking about his experiences. The attached letter is his reply in he describes some of what happened to him. He flew Lancasters and was also in the Pathfinder Squadron.

In the letter he describes ditching in the North Sea and there is more detail about this in the eulogy which was given at his funeral. I quote

On one such mission (bombing raid over Germany in Lancaster) his plane was hit, members of his crew suffered injury and his co-pilot died in his arms. He kept his aircraft in the air most of the way home across the North Sea but was finally forced to ditch. He and his survivors lay in their inflatable raft in freezing conditions for 22 hours before being picked up. For this and other exploits John was awarded the DFC.

The photo shows John's crew at one time standing in front of 'his' bomber M for Mother. Note the awards that they all held.

The photo of John with his wife Vida shows him wearing his medals. John taught in BFES schools for a number of years in both Singapore and Cyprus and I guess the photo was taken at a mess night at one of the stations.

My second uncle, Walter Alfred Pearce (Uncle Wally to my sister and me) was born on the 17th February in the East End of London. He was one of the largest family in the East End at that time and was proud of being a true cockney born within the sounds of the Bow Bells. I believe there were 11 or 12 children in the family. He left school and became a compositor. In 1937 he joined The Territorial Army and we have a photo of him at the 131st Infantry Brigade Camp in Falmer in 1937.

In 1939 he was a L/Cpl in the Territorials who were ordered to Southampton en route to Le Havre. He was captured when retreating to Dunkirk and eventually found himself in Thon POW camp in Poland. Family history tells that he did escape at one time, was captured and interrogated but we don't know anything about this episode. He and his fellow POWs left the camp with German guards and suffered a dreadful time crossing from Poland into Belgium eventually. A march which took About 4 months. The story he has written down for us is so moving. At one stage they saw Lancasters dropping bombs near Danzig to help the Russian Army. He later found out that one of his brothers was in the bombers. After the war Uncle Wally was interviewed by the Imperial War Museum who recorded his story.

It appears from materials he has left behind him that at least two colleagues had approached him for his memories. Among these are a few draft chapters where someone has collected some of his memories of the war. I will add one or two stories from these at the end of this story. Unfortunately we do not know the name of the author.

My Uncle Wally and Auntie Dot married after the war. She, too, had had many experiences in the war but my cousin says she talked very little about them. He has managed to find out that she was a gun layer in the ATS and saw service in the South of England and on mainland Europe. At the end of the war she was in Brussels, Cologne and possibly Berlin sorting through captured documents.