FLIGHT LIEUTENANT DAVID LORD, VICTORIA CROSS: AN ARNHEM HERO - Softcover

Hynes, James Patrick

9781718148451: FLIGHT LIEUTENANT DAVID LORD, VICTORIA CROSS: AN ARNHEM HERO

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1718148453 ISBN 13: 9781718148451

Publisher: Independently published, 2018

The highest award of the British honours system, the Victoria Cross (VC) is presented to members of the British armed forces who have exercised gallantry "in the presence of the enemy". For example on the very day that Flight Lieutenant Lord was exercising gallantry in the air as a non-combatant in an unarmed aircraft, Captain Queripel of the 3rd. Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, was exercising gallantry on the ground as a combatant using a variety of weapons in close quarter fighting. Both earned a Victoria Cross. Almost exclusively therefore the medals have been awarded to combatants in action against the enemy but there have been exceptions. During World War One, chaplains, the Reverends Hardy, Mellish and Addison gained Victoria Crosses and most notably so did Captain Noel Chavasse, a doctor serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps, who won it twice attending to wounded soldiers when under intensive fire. Flight Lieutenant David Samuel Anthony Lord, D.F.C., 271 Sqn was also one such exception as he served in the RAF Transport Command, most often in aircraft without defensive armament. In 1941 when flying on operations in North Africa, ‘Lummy’ Lord was shot down when attacked by three Messerschmitt 109s. He and his co-pilot were slightly wounded as they crash landed in the desert in a cloud of dust and rending metal. For his courage on that occasion he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. However three years later he was killed in the blazing aircraft during an action which won him a Victoria Cross, posthumously. Flight Lieutenant Lord was pilot and captain of a Dakota aircraft detailed to drop supplies at Arnhem on the afternoon of the 19th September, 1944, during very heavy anti-aircraft fire order dropping zones. His aircraft was twice hit by anti-aircraft flak which caused an increasingly furious and consuming fire in his starboard engine. “He would have been justified in leaving the main stream of supply aircraft and continuing at the same height or even abandoning his aircraft.” (Citation for the Victoria Cross). Although he and his crew realised that the starboard wing was in imminent danger of collapse he continued his mission while his crew threw the vital containers out of the low flying aircraft. However at the end of that run two containers remained on board so a second run was made. The containers were ejected by his Royal Army Service Corps despatchers. Only then did Lord order them and his co-pilot and navigator to bail out. Only one of them managed to do that as the aircraft’s fuel tank exploded, the wings broke, folded upwards and the Dakota plunged to earth. His Victoria Cross citation ended with, “By continuing his mission in a damaged and burning aircraft, descending to drop the supplies accurately, returning to the dropping zone a second time and, finally, remaining at the controls to give his crew a chance of escape, Flight Lieutenant Lord displayed supreme valour and self-sacrifice.”

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