Terence Patrick Armstrong Bradley

Wing Commander Terence Patrick Armstrong Bradley (service number 39267) was a British officer of the Royal Air Force, the son of Terence Arthur Ernst and Annie Josephine Bradley and husband of Leila Campbell Bradley of Bishop Burton, Yorkshire. A pre-war regular who held the Distinguished Flying Cross, he flew Handley Page Halifax heavy bombers and took part in Bomber Command’s daring daylight attack on the German battleship Scharnhorst at La Pallice on 24 July 1941, an operation for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, gazetted on 2 September 1941 (London Gazette, Issue 35263, page 5102). By 1945 he had moved to the Far East as commanding officer of No. 27 Squadron, which operated rocket-firing Bristol Beaufighters on anti-shipping and ground-attack strikes over Burma as part of the South East Asia Command strike wing. On 10 April 1945, having been with the squadron only a short time, he was killed at the age of 28 when his Beaufighter struck a vulture while coming in to land in the Chiringa area, his navigator also losing his life. Wing Commander Bradley is buried in Chittagong War Cemetery, Bangladesh (grave reference 5. A. 7.), where his headstone bears the inscription “His dauntless courage was the breath of freedom, chivalry and truth.”