The incredible story of the Welshman whose heroics inspired The Great Escape
Wing Commander Ken Rees s bravery and daring has just been immortalised
Ken Rees, who was a pilot in the second world war (Image: WESTERN MAIL)
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Ross Giblin
Neville Sandiford (centre), 97, served as a gunner in WWII. Training in a Wellington bomber in England, in 1945, he suffered a serious head injury when his plane caught fire and crashed. Supplied photo. It would be 90 minutes before rescuers cut him out, and he was taken to hospital unconscious. “My skull was cracked and my eye badly damaged.” It was not until he was visited in Oxford Hospital, where he spent two weeks, and was visited by a priest that he would get any idea of what happened. One of the engines in the twin engine bomber had caught fire and the inexperienced pilot had not been able to keep the plane even as he attempted to land.
WARWICK SMITH/Stuff
Lorraine Gray has her father Trevor’s war-time diary and letters he wrote home before his death in 1941. “I was about 4. My mother was crying. I remember a tartan tea cosy he must have bought in England. “I kept thinking, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ That’s when the death part hit me.” Trevor’s Wellington bomber crash-landed in northern Holland on November 7, 1941. The 27-year-old and his crew-mates died, but his family back home had no confirmation from inside the German-occupied country for years. Trevor Gray was born in Whanganui and was educated at Marton, Taringamotu and Moturoa primary schools. He was dux at Moturoa before attending New Plymouth Boys’ High School, then working at the Kingsway Menswear in the city.
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