James McDowell

James McDowell was born in Glasgow on 13 August 1910, but his family emigrated to Canada in 1924, settling at Port Arthur, Ontario, where before the war he worked for Coca-Cola and then as a gold miner. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941 and trained as an air gunner before being posted overseas to Britain, where he crewed up under the Canadian pilot Vernon Byers; the crew served briefly with No. 467 Squadron from February 1943 before transferring to the newly formed No. 617 Squadron on 24 March 1943 to prepare for the Dams Raid. On the night of 16/17 May 1943, McDowell was the rear gunner of Lancaster ED934, coded AJ-K, one of the aircraft of the Second Wave detailed to attack the Sorpe Dam. AJ-K took off at around 21:30 but was shot down as it crossed the Frisian island of Texel on the outward flight, falling into the Waddenzee some 18 miles west of Harlingen with the loss of the entire crew before they had even properly crossed the Dutch coast. McDowell’s body was recovered from the Vliestrom channel near Terschelling on 22 June 1943 and was buried the following day in Harlingen General Cemetery in the Netherlands — the only member of Byers’ crew to have a known grave, his fellow airmen being commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial.