Reginald Charles Morris

Reginald Charles Morris was a Welshman from Newport, Monmouthshire, the son of Ernest Edward and Fanny Morris and husband of Eva Mary Morris of the same town. A Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (service number 119221), he flew as a navigator with No. 139 (Jamaica) Squadron, equipped with the de Havilland Mosquito light bomber and operating in the precision daylight-raiding role. He took part in the squadron’s celebrated daylight attack on Berlin on 30 January 1943, timed to disrupt Nazi anniversary speeches in the German capital, and his award of the Distinguished Flying Cross was gazetted in the London Gazette supplement of 12 February 1943. On 16 March 1943, aged 33, Morris and his pilot, P/O Peter McGeehan, were returning from a raid on the railway workshops at Paderborn, deep inland from the Dutch coast, when their Mosquito B.IV (DZ497, coded XD-Q) was hit by German anti-aircraft fire and crashed near Den Hoorn on the island of Texel; both men were killed. He is buried in Texel (Den Burg) Cemetery in the Netherlands, his headstone bearing the inscription “His sacrifice was made with honour and courage to save us from oppression.” (Note: the available casualty and loss records record his decoration as the DFC rather than a DSO.)