Flight ED352. 57 Squadron.

57 Sqdn: Corpus non Animum Muto (I Change my Body, Not my Spirit)

63 years ago on the night of 4/5 February 1943 a brave young aircrew from 57 Squadron took-off from RAF Scampton in their Lancaster which rose slowly into the clear and freezing winter skies above the flat Lincolnshire landscape. The plane's flight path took it across the Normandy coast at Cabourg, on to Aix- les-Bains in the French Savoie and then high over the Alps into Italy to bomb strategic targets, including the Fiat works, in Turin, Italy.

Sadly, three aircraft, all Lancasters, including ED 352 were not to return home from the raid. The RAF night raid report records that two returning crews reported that they had seen an aircraft crash into the Alps near Mount Cenis. This was almost certainly ED 352 as several years ago one Gordon Busby, by then an octogenarian, told me that on a visit to Bourg St Maurice in the Haute Savoie he had met an elderly man, once a mountaineer, who had helped bring the bodies of the crew, including that of his brother Denis, down from the mountains in June 1943, from an area way above the snow line and only accessible in the summer months.

The plane was piloted by Alister Ritch a 22 year old Canadian from Toronto; his navigator/bombers were Denis Busby, 20, from Hastings Sussex, and Eric Atkins, age unknown, of Southampton. The flight engineer was Thomas Cosford, 36, from Wembley, Middlesex and the air gunners were Douglas McNeil, 23, from Stockport, Eric Perkins ,19, from Surrey and rear gunner Ronald Shears, my mother’s cousin, 24, from Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne.

All bomber crew were volunteers.

The crew are remembered in the Book of Remembrance in Lincoln cathedral and are laid to rest in a small Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in the village of St. Germain-au-Mont-d’Or above the Rhone valley to the north of Lyons.


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