John Joseph Kavanagh

John Joseph Kavanagh served as a sergeant in the Royal Air Force, flying Bristol Blenheim light bombers with No. 211 Squadron — a unit that spent the early war years based in Egypt and the wider Middle East. By December 1939, the squadron was operating from El Daba on the Egyptian coast, and it was there or in connection with those early desert operations that Kavanagh’s skill and steadiness in the air earned him the Distinguished Flying Medal, gazetted on 22 December 1939. No. 211 Squadron went on to fly dangerous low-level missions against Italian targets in Libya and the Western Desert from June 1940, and then survived a catastrophic deployment to Greece in spring 1941, where six of the squadron’s aircraft were shot down in a single day. By July 1941 the battered squadron had been withdrawn to Wadi Gazouza in Sudan, where it served as a nucleus for the formation of No. 72 Operational Training Unit. It was in this training role that Kavanagh’s war came to an end: on 18 October 1941 he was killed in a Blenheim flying accident at or near Khartoum. He is buried at Khartoum War Cemetery, Sudan, at grave reference 14. A. 2. Note: the decoration recorded in this database as a DFC is in fact a Distinguished Flying Medal (DFM); the DFM is confirmed by both the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the RAFCommands awards database against his service number 508631.