Farewell at last for long lost brother in arms

And Gordon Rutherford would marvel at the trappings of an airman when his older brother Ken came home on leave to show him his escape kit full of French, Belgian and Dutch notes, or let him fire dumdum bullets from his Smith and Wesson 45.

But there would be no more homecomings for Flt Sgt Rutherford after his Stirling aircraft, on which he served as a wireless operator and air gunner, failed to return from a bombing raid on a submarine factory at Vegesack in the German city of Bremen, in September 1942.

For more than 50 years Mr Rutherford knew only that he was “missing presumed dead”, and his parents and eldest brother Cecil both died knowing nothing more about his fate.

But after some remarkable detective work – including the help of a German historian and a highly decorated member of the Dutch resistance – Mr Rutherford pieced together the final moments of Stirling R9187, and has now located the crash site in the North Sea.

On May 4 he will be guest of honour at a memorial service on the Frisian island of Schiermonnikoog to remember Ken and all others lost at sea during the Second World War. And to complete the circle, the island’s rescue boat brigade will take Mr Rutherford out into the choppy waters off the Dutch coast to lay a wreath of poppies where his brother’s aircraft went down at 3.15am on September 24, 1942, with the loss of all seven crew.

“I’m honoured really,” said Mr Rutherford, 84, from Hedon, near Hull. “It was a big surprise. My mother, father and eldest brother never knew what happened to Ken. I’ve had more help from the ‘enemy’ than my own Government really.

“It’s always at the back of you but over the years I’ve got hardened to it.”

As part of his research Mr Rutherford has now contacted the families of all the other airmen who died with Ken, and recently caught up with a relative of the flight engineer in Austria.

The trip is being organised by his friend Jacqui Whitehead, 55, from Thorne, near Doncaster, who set up The Flight Path to Friendship Reconciliation organisation nearly 20 years ago to bring airmen from both sides together.

She said: “Gordon said he just wanted to stand on the beach and say goodbye but now he is going to be the guest of honour, which is amazing and I think it will be quite emotional.

“For the first time in the island’s history they are dedicating the service to those during the war that lost their lives at sea.”

Historian Katharina Holterhoff-Grote managed to track down the German pilot who shot the bomber down, Karl Pfeiffer, and he wrote a letter describing the event.

He had been transferred to Leeuwarden airfield in the Netherlands as punishment for landing a Focke-Wulf without its wheels down, and was in an Me110 on his first combat patrol when he came across the Stirling.

Miss Whitehead said: “That’s why he says he’ll never forget it because it was the first time he’d ever shot down an enemy plane. He was running out of fuel and this Stirling came out of nowhere. He said he knew it was coming for him and it was either him or them.

“When he pressed the ‘tits’ on the guns to fire nothing happened because he hadn’t loaded them. He quickly took evasive action, went underneath the plane, got his guns ready and brought it down.

“He never saw any parachutes and circled the sea to see if he could see anybody in the water, but didn’t. He went back and recorded the kill.

“I think he shot down 11 more after that but that was the one he remembered because it was the first.”

A trip to the airfield where Pfeiffer took off from, which is now a Dutch military base, will form part of the trip.

The group will be shown around Schiermonnikoog by former Dutch resistance heroine Joke Folmer, whom they met on previous meetings between RAF and Luftwaffe veterans.

She began helping downed Allied airmen escape her occupied homeland at the age of 17, but was eventually captured and imprisoned in Germany, a horrendous ordeal for a young woman.

After the war, her bravery was rewarded with two of the highest honours available in Britain and the US – a George Medal presented by the Queen and an American Medal of Freedom presented by President Truman.