Philip Sidney Burgess

Philip Sidney Burgess was born in Portsmouth on 19 September 1922, the son of Willis and Marie Burgess. Orphaned as a small child, he was adopted at the age of four by an aunt in Folkestone, Kent, where he was educated at the Harvey Grammar School. He volunteered for the RAF shortly after his eighteenth birthday and completed part of his aircrew training in Canada, was commissioned in May 1942, and was promoted Flying Officer before joining No. 61 Squadron in January 1943; though he had qualified as a bomb aimer, he much preferred navigation and flew as navigator on a series of operations from that unit. When his pilot, Flight Lieutenant Norman Barlow, was selected for the new squadron forming for a secret operation, Burgess and wireless operator Charlie Williams transferred with him to No. 617 Squadron, and on the night of 16/17 May 1943 he flew as navigator of Lancaster ED927 (AJ-E) in the second wave of Operation Chastise, the attack on the German dams. Crossing into Germany at very low level on the way to the Sorpe Dam, the aircraft struck high-tension electricity cables near Haldern, east of Rees, at around 23:50 and crashed, killing all seven men aboard; at just twenty he was probably the youngest officer to take part in the raid. He was first buried in Düsseldorf and, after the war, reinterred in the Reichswald Forest War Cemetery in Germany.