Alastair James Taylor

Sergeant Alastair James Taylor was a Scotsman, born on 19 December 1922 at Alves in Morayshire and the eldest of the family’s children. He joined the Royal Air Force as an aircraft apprentice at RAF Halton in January 1939, serving as ground crew before being selected for flight engineer training in the summer of 1942 and gaining his flight engineer’s badge in October that year. Crewed up with the Canadian pilot Pilot Officer Vernon Byers, he was posted briefly to No. 467 Squadron before the crew transferred to the newly formed No. 617 Squadron at Scampton at the end of March 1943. On the night of 16/17 May 1943 Taylor flew as flight engineer aboard Lancaster ED934, coded AJ-K, in the second wave of Operation Chastise, tasked against the Sorpe Dam. Their aircraft was the first lost on the raid: it was hit by flak from the defences on the Dutch island of Texel and came down in the Waddenzee, west of Harlingen, killing all seven men on board before they had reached their target. Taylor, who was twenty, has no known grave and is commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey.