Fitting memorial for hero

liverpool annie · Jun 19, 2009

I'm not sure of the date on here ! ......

“Nelson’s greatest wartime hero,” who was involved in a daring World War 2 air raid on an Amsterdam power station and the famed Great Escape, has been recognised with a fitting memorial.
A Takaka marble memorial, acknowledging the bravery of Group Captain Leonard Trent (NC 1928-34), was unveiled by his brother Austin Trent (NC 1940-43) beside the road that bears his name – Trent Drive, near Nelson Airport.
Nelson MP Nick Smith, who chaired a board that pushed for the memorial, said Group Captain Trent’s values were an inspiration for future generations. “This memorial is about properly recognising Nelson’s greatest wartime hero.”
Group Captain Trent was awarded the Victoria Cross for his leadership during a “ramrod” – a mission that had to be continued regardless of losses – bombing raid on an Amsterdam power station on May 2, 1943. He was flying one of the few planes in his squadron that reached the target but was shot down shortly afterwards, and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in the German camp Stalag Luft III.
He was involved in an escape attempt immortalised in the book The Great Escape, in which 250 prisoners attempted to break out using an elaborate tunnel system.
Many failed, including Group Captain Trent, and many of those who escaped were killed. He was released after the war and died in 1986.

Article courtesy The Nelson Mail

http://www.nelcollege.school.nz/oldboys/documents/07Bulletin.pdf

Adrian Roberts · Jun 19, 2009

The date is right!
Trent (then Squadron Leader) was leading 11 Lockheed Venturas of 487 Sqdn RNZAF.
Every one of them was shot down; Trent being in the lead aircraft (i.e. furthest from the pursuing fighters) was the last to go down, pressing on his attack despite his squadron falling all around him. He shot down a Bf109 with the fixed front guns of his bomber. Miraculously he and one other crewman survived when his aircraft broke up. His VC was not awarded until after his return from captivity.
After the war he had to eject from both a Vampire and a Meteor, and commanded a Valiant bomber squadron.

Kyt · Jun 20, 2009

He was extremely lucky in the escape as he was one of the ones not executed because he was captured at the treeline and returned to the camp immediately.

And his wiki entry

Leonard Henry Trent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Antipodean Andy · Jun 21, 2009

A remarkable man.

spidge · Jun 22, 2009

I have always wondered how these men went back to normal lives after their experiences in war.

Adrian Roberts · Jun 22, 2009

I have always wondered how these men went back to normal lives after their experiences in war.
Click to expand...

Some didn't, or couldn't!

We've had various threads on those who had mental breakdowns. Others spent their lives searching for thrills in various ways; some became test pilots, others followed less respectable paths.

Some such as Trent, stayed in the forces, but the forces in peacetime were more regimented than in war, and those with a rebellious streak didn't fit in at all. For those who did fit, it was often precisely because of the regimentation which gave them a sense of security.

Of course there were many who did go successfully into civilian careers. I imagine those who did were very good at compartmentilizing their lives, having the ability to put the past firmly behind them, and very often not talking about the war at all.

Antipodean Andy · Jun 22, 2009

Well said, AR.

This op has been bothering me as my first thought was I didn't have anything about it but it was very familiar. Just remembered where I read it - Max Lambert's Night After Night. Just had a look, this is going to take a while and will challenge a few things about Trent. In no way, however, am I casting dispersions on the man. This is simply adding to this thread's information about the raid and those involved.

Pages 232-238

Trent VC and the unsung heroes

Jack Sharp still remembers the shocked voice of his navigator, Paddy Gibson, that day in 1943. 'Christ, look at this,' he said, pointing down. Sharp, at the controls of a Ventura, saw a cluster of stubby-nosed Focke-Wulfs climbing to attack in the late-afternoon sky. The Ventura had come in over the Dutch coast a few minutes earlier, headed for Amsterdam, and was now flying past Haarlem with Schiphol airfield off to starboard. Sharp barely had time to alert his two gunners before the fighters pounced, pouring in fire from behind and below. Tail-end Charlie of the group of 11 aircraft, his is thought to have been the first picked off by the Germans.

'The starboard engine caught fire and then there was attack after attack', Sharp says. 'In a matter of moments both engines were dead and belching flames.' Fire flared in the nose, and flames streamed back through the instrument panel. The control column flapped uselessly. Neither of the English gunners answered Sharp's urgent cries to bale out, probably dead already. As Gibson, a Belfast man, headed back to jump from the door behind the cockpit, Sharp clipped on his own chute. Now the flames roared aft, fed by the draught through the open doorway, and Sharp knew he couldn't get out the same way.

He stood up and got his head and shoulders through the escape hatch above his seat but couldn't seem to wriggle further. The plane was falling steeply. 'From then on I can't remember what happened. I don't know.' His best guess is that he pulled the rip cord while still partly in the aircraft and that the opening parachute yanked him free. The dazed pilot landed among cowpats in a farmer's field near Haarlem. His aircraft, trailing smoke and flames, crashed nearby, the gunners' bodies in the wreckage. Gibson had jumped but was dead.

Sharp was not the only one shot down during this disastrous 3 May 1943 raid when New Zealander Leonard Trent won his Victoria Cross. Twelve twin-engined Ventura light bombers from 487 Squadron, RNZAF, took off from Methwold, Norfolk, just before 5.00 pm on a sparkling afternoon to attack a power station in Amsterdam. One turned back, its escape hatch gone, just after the formation had left England. Only one of the 11 that reached the Dutch coast returned to Methwold. The other 10 were gunned down one after another in one of the heaviest single-action, single-squadron losses of the entire war.

The sky over Dutch soil became a whilring mass of German crosses and swastikas as the fighters ambushed the Venturas. Spitfires detailed to protect the sluggish and vulnerable bombers at high level had arrived early and already left, low on fuel. But they had been spotted on enemy radar, and the Germans were up and waiting, or climbing, as the Venturas headed for their target. The close-support RAF fighters were outnumbered and the Venturas were pretty much on their own, unprotected prey for the FW 190s and Me 109s.

Aircrew losses on the Venturas were heavy. Twenty-eight airmen, seven of the them New Zealanders, died. Six New Zealanders were among the 12 who survived to become POWs. Killed were pilots Tom Baynton, 27 (Dunedin), Andrew Coutts, 27 (Whakatane), Stuart McGowan, 22 (Hastings), and Rusty Peryman, 21 (Christchurch), gunners Des Goodfellow, 23 (Auckland), and Tim Warner, 25 (Motueka), and wireless operator/gunner Cyril Smith, 29 (Miller's Flat, Otago). Captured were pilots Trent, 28 (Nelson), Sharp, 23 (Wellington), Terry Taylor, 28 (Christchurch), and Owen Foster, 22 (Omihi, North Canterbury), navigator Tom Penn, 29 (Christchurch), and gunner Ivan Urlich, 20 (Hawera).

The late-afternoon massacre virtually destroyed 487 Squadron, which had to be brought up to strength again with replacement aircrew and planes. The squadron's diary commented, 'It's a very bleak day ... everyone is dazed by the news.' Formed as an RNZAF Squadron in England on 15 August 1942, 487 was a light day-bomber unit flying the American-designed and built Ventura, a derivative of Lockheed's civil transport, the Lodestar. It was an unsatisfactory aircraft, and after 487 left Bomber Command at the end of May 1943 the squadron was re-equipped with Mosquitoes.

Numerous New Zealand aircrew and some ground crew served with the squadron but it was not exclusively a New Zealand outfit and had a good Commonwealth mix. It flew its first operation on 6 December 1942, taking part in the famous raid on the Philips radio works at Eindhoven, Holland. The only casualty that day was the squadron's CO, W/C Frank Seavill, a 32-year-old New Zealander in the RAF. He was shot down by flak and killed. Fellow New Zealander Gordon Grindell, who succeeded him, did not fly on 3 May 1943.

Trent's Victoria Cross wasn't announced until almost a year after he'd arrived back in England from a POW camp in May 1945. A pre-war RAF officer, he wanted to remain in the service and did not return to New Zealand immediately. He was on a Transport Command squadron when he learned on 1 March 1946 that he'd won the VC. His career in the RAF was assured with such a decoration and he finally retired as a G/C in 1965.

The London Gazette notice announcing the award cited Trent's 'outstanding leadership', adding, 'Such was the trust placed in this gallant officer that the other pilots followed him unwaveringly. His cool unflinching courage and devotion to duty in the face of overwhleming odds rank with the finest of these virtues.'

The citation indicates Trent's Ventura was the last in the air over the target that day, and most accounts of the action agree. Not so, according to Owen Foster, who lives in retirement in Christchurch. Foster was in the six-plane A-Flight behind the five aircraft of B-Flight led by Trent and watched as other Venturas disappeared in flames. One disintergrated in front of him, showering his aircraft with wreckage. Foster's A (Apple) was also under constant attack from flocks of fighters and soon lost an engine. Foster wrote in a family memoir that gunner Tim Warner appeared in his cockpit, blood running from his mouth. 'He said "Goodbye skipper" and slumped down on my seat and died.'

As Warner fell, Foster was on his bombing run, Tom Penn huddled over the bombsight calling instructions. Australian Russell Mann's .5-inch machine-guns were still hammering away. 'While this was going on the remaining plane up in front disappeared. I saw it turn over and dive straight down. I believe it was Trent's plane. Now we were on our own, the last of the twelve. We were still going on one engine, trying to keep up and start our bombing run when he was shot down in front of us.'

Suddenly the Ventura's bombs had gone and Penn came up from the nose to debate who'd let them go prematurely, just short of the target. Neither mad had. Attack damage had triggered their release. That moment a shell set off the plane's front ammunition containers, the explosion knocking off the nose of the aircraft. Had Penn still been there he would have gone with it. As it was his back was showered with shrapnel.

Foster slammed the bomb doors shut and put the plane into a steep dive to escape the fighters, before levelling off and heading down the canal linking Amsterdam to the sea. Once over the water and clear, he turned for England. But the Ventura was finished, its fuselage full of holes, its port fin and rudder partly shot away, both wings holed, the nose shotoff, the starboard motor stopped and pointing skywards, petrol pouring from holed fuel tanks. Suddenly the port engine quit and the plane smacked into the sea, 15 miles off the Dutch coast.

Somehow Foster, Penn and Mann emerged from the water-filled aircraft. Their dinghy had been riddled by German fire, so they floated about in their Mae Wests, each waging his own private struggle for life in the cold choppy water. A fishing boat rescued them two hours after they'd ditched. Warner's body washed ashore later and today lies in Bergen-op-Zoom Cemetery.

There were many remarkable tales of heroism that afternoon, and all the airmen who flew on the mission deserve a share in the tributes subsequently lavished on Trent. Heis rightly lauded for his 'press-on' attitude, but at the preraid briefing the participants were told that that was what was expected of them all, and they were ordered to press home the attack regardless of the opposition. That's exaclty what most of them did, many paying with their lives. Sharp says he was surprised when he heard Trent had been awarded the VC. 'The citation said he carried on regardless. Well, that was done every night by bomber pilots. If they got smacked up a bit they still carried on. I didn't think it worthy of a VC but it was awarded so they must have thought otherwise.'

Foster reiterated in an interview in 2001 that his had been the last Ventura to remain in the air. 'I was the only aircraft left. We were behind Trent. He couldn't see what was going on behind him.' When Foster and Penn met Trent at Stalag Luft III, Trent took them aside and told them he had been last down. Foster's response: 'I said, "No, that's not true", but [after that] we let it go and never bothered about it. After the war when we were back here and heard that Trent had got the VC, we couldn't believe it.'

A plot of the known Vnetura crash sites shows Trent's aircraft closest to the power station, in the northern suburbs of Amsterdam. The wrecks of the McGowan, Peryman and Baynton aircraft are not far away. Those three pilots pressed on to the point of death. McGowan's gallantry was never recognised. He and Canadian navigator Ernie Thornber saved wounded gunner Ivan Urlich. The time they took doing so probably cost them their own lives.

Urlich, the only survivor of the four in his aircraft, told NZPA correspondent Alan Mitchell when he got back to England from POW camp that he owed his life to McGowan and Thornber. He was hit in both legs in a succession of attacks, and then the Ventura was battered again from the front by a fighter.

He really smashed up [my] turret. I got nicked in the left side and one of the guns was hit by a cannon shell and knocked out of its mounting. The nose of the aircraft was on fire now and McGowan and the Canadian came back and began to drag me from my turret. McGowan put on my parachute and pushed me out of the door. This is the last I ever saw of him.

As well as McGowan and Thornber, New Zealand WO/G Cyril SMith died in this aircraft.

Peryman and the rest of his crew perished when their plane, minus a wing, crashed. Baynton's Ventura plunged down on reclaimed land, the bodies not recovered from the wreckage until 1947. Coutts and Goodfellow died when their plane was shot into the sea, Terry Taylor was the only pilot that afternoon who managed to crash-land a damaged Ventura. He put it down, on fire, on marshy ground saving himself and two of his crew.

Dutch aviation historian Han Hogendijk, 17 at the time, has vivid memories of the day.

At about 5.30 pm the air raid warning sounded. As I was very much interested in the air war I climbed on the roof of our house in Haarlem. At first I did not see anything because the planes came from the west and so out of the sun. But I heard the rattling of machine guns and 20-mm cannon shells above. When I saw the planes it was a big turmoil. Everywhere I saw planes coming down, one or two Venturas with thick black smoke from their tails.

Trent went through the bombing run-up unscathed and even nailed a German fighter that foolishly flew across his nose and the guns he controlled from his cockpit. But his luck didn't last and his aircraft was hitby enemy fire moments after the bombs, which fell short of the target, had been released. As the Ventura hurtled toward the ground it broke up and the New Zealander and his navigator were thrown clear. The other two cremen died.

Trent, whom some New Zealanders on 487 found more British than the British and 'very RAF', became commanding officer in 1956 of 214 Squadron, at that time equipped with Valiants as Britain's first V-Bomber squadron. Two years later he flew a Valiant to Ohakea to help celebrate the RNZAF's 21st birthday. That visit left a sour impression on Jack Sharp. He wrote to Trent care of Ohakea but got no acknowledgement. Sharp, who has lived in the Hutt Valley most of his life, drove to Ohakea just the same. He found Trent in the crowd and greeted him. Sharp says that when Trent professed not to know him and was told who he was, he turned to someone in his part and said, 'Jack was on our squadron but didn't take part in the raid.' Sharp hit back with, 'So who was in the cell next to you in Amsterdam jail?' But 'He gave me the cold shoulder, so I thought, "Bugger you".'

Trent retired to Perth in Western Australia but finally came home to New Zealand, where he died in 1986 at the age of 71.
Click to expand...

As you may gather from the above, Night After Night is an excellent book.

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