Robert Alexander Urquhart

Robert Alexander Urquhart was born on 2 August 1919 in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, the son of Alexander and Susie Urquhart, and worked as an apprentice jeweller and stock manager before applying to the Royal Canadian Air Force in May 1940; he enlisted in January 1941 and, after being initially selected for pilot training, qualified instead as a navigator and was commissioned in January 1942. Arriving in England that March, he flew his first fifteen operations with No. 50 Squadron from August 1942, and in January 1943 he became navigator to Squadron Leader Henry Maudslay, with whom he flew a further dozen sorties before the whole crew was posted to the newly formed No. 617 Squadron on 25 March 1943. For the Dams Raid on the night of 16/17 May 1943 he navigated Maudslay’s Lancaster ED937, coded AJ-Z, in the first wave; their mine overshot the Eder dam and exploded behind it, damaging the aircraft. Limping homewards, ED937 was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed near Emmerich, close to the Dutch–German border, in the early hours of 17 May, killing the entire crew. Urquhart, who had completed some twenty-eight operations and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for navigation skill praised as “of the highest order,” was first buried by the Germans at Düsseldorf North Cemetery and after the war reinterred at the Reichswald Forest War Cemetery in Germany.