Ian Willoughby Bazalgette

Ian Willoughby Bazalgette was born on 19 October 1918 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, a great-grandnephew of the Victorian engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who built London’s sewerage system. His family moved to England when he was a boy, settling in New Malden, Surrey. As a child he suffered a serious bout of tuberculosis and was treated at the Royal Sea-Bathing Hospital in Margate. On the outbreak of war he first joined the Royal Artillery and was commissioned, but transferred to the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1941, qualifying as a pilot the following year.

Bazalgette flew his first tour with No. 115 Squadron on Wellingtons and Lancasters, work for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. In April 1944 he joined No. 635 Squadron of the Pathfinder Force at RAF Downham Market in Norfolk, the elite force whose task was to find and mark targets ahead of the main bomber stream. By the summer of 1944 he was an acting squadron leader and an experienced master bomber.

On 4 August 1944 — his fifty-eighth operation — Bazalgette was detailed as master bomber for a daylight attack on a V-1 flying-bomb storage site at Trossy St Maximin in northern France. As his Lancaster ran in to mark the target it was hit repeatedly by anti-aircraft fire; both starboard engines were knocked out, the bomb-aimer was badly wounded and fire broke out in the wing and fuselage. Despite the damage Bazalgette pressed on and marked the target accurately so that the following aircraft could bomb. With the Lancaster crippled and burning he ordered those who could to bale out, but two crewmen who could not jump remained aboard. Rather than abandon them, Bazalgette tried to crash-land the blazing aircraft near the village of Senantes. The Lancaster touched down but exploded; he and the two men with him were killed. He was 25.

For pressing home his attack and for his final act of sacrifice in trying to save his crew, Bazalgette was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, gazetted in August 1945. He is buried in Senantes Churchyard in the Oise. He was the only Victoria Cross awarded to a man from Alberta in the Second World War.