William Charles Arthur Long

Sergeant William Charles Arthur Long (service number 1600540, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve), known as “Ginger,” was born on 11 September 1923 at Eastleigh in Hampshire and was British. He volunteered for the RAF in October 1941, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, trained as an air gunner through the spring and summer of 1942, and was posted to No. 106 Squadron that September, where in December he joined the crew of the Canadian pilot Lewis Burpee and flew some twenty-three operations with him. When Burpee’s crew was selected for the newly formed No. 617 Squadron in late March 1943, Long moved with them, serving as front gunner aboard Avro Lancaster ED865, coded AJ-S, for Operation Chastise. Flying in the raid’s third wave, AJ-S took off from RAF Scampton in the early hours of 17 May 1943, but while crossing the Netherlands the aircraft strayed off course, was caught by searchlights and anti-aircraft fire, and crashed at the edge of Gilze-Rijen airfield, killing all seven men aboard; Long was nineteen years old. He was first buried by the Germans in a communal grave at Zuylen Cemetery, Prinsenhage, and after the war the whole crew was reinterred together at Bergen-op-Zoom War Cemetery in the Netherlands, where he rests today.