Frank Paul Trautman

Frank Paul Trautman was a Flying Officer pilot in RAF Coastal Command, flying the Bristol Beaufighter on anti-shipping operations off the enemy-held Dutch coast. By early 1945 he was serving with No. 236 Squadron, one of the units that made up Coastal Command’s hard-hitting strike wings, attacking German coastal convoys and shipping with cannon, rockets and bombs.

On 17 January 1945 his Beaufighter, serial RD140, was part of a force striking enemy ships near the port of Den Helder, on the northern tip of Holland. Two of the attacking aircraft were lost into the sea. Trautman’s Beaufighter and a second, NV187, pressed on inland and made a firing pass at the water tower at Wieringerwaard; on the far side of the village the two aircraft collided and crashed, killing both crews. Trautman was 28 years old. His navigator, Flying Officer Noel Evans, died with him, as did the pilot and navigator of the other aircraft, Flying Officers G. D. Warburton and J. A. Grey.

All four airmen were buried together at Wieringerwaard General Cemetery, where their graves remain among the small number of Commonwealth war dead in that North Holland village. Trautman’s death is a reminder that Coastal Command’s anti-shipping crews faced losses every bit as severe as Bomber Command’s, and that flying itself — at low level, in formation, over a hostile coast — could be as deadly as the enemy.