Donald Hopkinson

Donald Hopkinson was born on 19 September 1920 at Royton, near Oldham in Lancashire, the second child of Harold and Sarah Hopkinson; his mother died when he was an infant and his father later remarried. Educated at Chadderton Grammar School, where he was a keen cricketer, he was working as a clerk when he volunteered for the Royal Air Force in 1941, and after initial training at home was sent to Canada, qualifying as a bomb aimer in 1942 before being commissioned. He crewed up under pilot Bill Astell and, after spells with other squadrons, moved with that crew to the newly formed No. 617 Squadron in March 1943, in time for Operation Chastise, the attack on the German dams. On the night of 16/17 May 1943 he flew as bomb aimer in Lancaster ED864, coded AJ-B, in the first wave bound for the Möhne and Eder dams. The aircraft never reached its target: outbound over Germany it struck a high-tension electricity pylon and crashed in flames near Marbeck, in the early hours of 17 May, killing all seven men aboard. Initially buried at Borken, Hopkinson and his crewmates were reinterred after the war and now lie together in Reichswald Forest War Cemetery in Germany. He was 22 years old.