The USS North Carolina (BB-55) My all-time favorite warship. As an elementary school student in North Carolina, I donated nickels and dimes to save this ship back in the early sixties.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Oldest Battle of Britain Pilot Dies in 2012-- Part 2

William Walker (1913-2012)

The obituary read that he had "taken to the skies for the last time."

He was called to full-time service September 1, 1939 and posted to Cambridge November 15th.

He was at RAF Brice Norton in Oxfordshire on Feb. 17, 1940 and at the end of his courses, was commissioned and posted to 616 Squadron at Leconfield in East Yorkshire 18 June.

On August 26, 1940, a large group of German bombers along with  a heavy fighter escort was engaged off the Kent Coast by British Defiants, Hurricanes and Spitfires.  Walker's plane was hit and he was forced to bail out over the water and clung to a shipwreck on the Goodwin Sands before he was rescued by a fishing boat, transferred to an RAF launch and brought to shore at Ramsgate

As Winston Churchill said about the RAF pilots and crews, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

--GreGen

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