OWEN Roger

Roger Owen completed his initial pilot training at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire in early June 1942. Known as ‘Mac’ to the crew he enlisted, they flew in Halifax bombers and were considered an experienced crew after being on 158 Squadron for 4 months.

On the night of 9th/10th January 1943 Roger and his crew took off from their base at Rufforth, Yorkshire and along with 120 other aircraft set out across the North Sea towards Denmark. Their mission was to lay mines in the Frisians, the German Bight and the Kattegat. By using radar to fix their positions, two large anti-shipping mines were to be dropped off the Danish coast. However, the position was incorrect and the crew found themselves flying towards the town of Esbjerg so the aircraft went back out to sea to make a second attempt at locating the correct position. Unfortunately the radar again took the aircraft to the same incorrect position where flak hit the aircraft and caused it to crash on a farm. The farmer’s son retrieved a piece of bullet proof glass from the cockpit and his father hid it, saying that one day someone from the crew would come for it. One crew member, Peter Skinner, did indeed survive the crash and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of war. In 1983 Peter went to the farm and met the boy, now a farmer himself, and the glass was returned to England where it is now an exhibit in the Yorkshire Air Museum at Elvington. Mac and the remainder of his crew were buried at Esbjerg.