Lost in France
This is not a purely SITA story but it started before I joined SITA and was revived 70 years later some time after I had retired from SITA.
In the summer of 1944 my parents had passed away and I was working as a ploughman with a pair of horses in a farm at Hermeray in the Beauce plain. On the night of 2/3 June a Halifax bomber had been shot down and crashed a few hundred meters from the farm. My dream was to become an airman and I was eager to reach 18 to be able to join the Air Forces. Meanwhile when I had a little time free I was exploring the wreckage of the plane or listening to people involved in the rescue.
Many years later at the occasion of a commemorative ceremony I realise that what was said in the media did not match with what I had heard at the time of the crash. I contacted the Royal Air Force to get more information from them. They reacted quickly and positively and we clarified most of the event. To summarise it, by not knowing the number of crew on board, the local people thought that the man who had been rescued by them was the one who came later to thank his helper whereas they were two different men, how one of them died remains a mystery.
Dick King, the RAF man who wrote the document here below was a captain of VC10 at the 10th squadron. Incidentally he knows about SITA since the RAF is a SITA member and himself while flying for AIR 2000 had to write a leaflet about the use of ground communication, including SITA for the other captains of that company.
(click on link below to read report from Dick King and then click to previous page with your web browser to continue reading this article)
I have been following up the case and at Chartres cemetery I had confirmation that effectively one of the dead crew had been collected by the Germans at La Boissière and the two others at Amblaincourt (Hermeray). Further more I obtained a copy of the document concerning Sgt O’Leary on which instead of a death certificate number it is only mentioned « La Tay ». I went to La Tay, it is a very small hamlet. At the entrance is a statue of the Résistant Jean Moulin in front of a piggery where he had be locked in with the trunk of a woman in full decomposition. At that time La Tay was made of a few farms which have now been replaced by « residences secondaires » but not even a café where it could be possible to obtain some local contacts. La Tay is a part of a village called St Georges. I went to the city hall and we looked into the archives. There is no record of Sgt O’Leary’s death nor of any particular event occurring around the 5th of June 1944. From my discussion with the local staff either those who brought the body to Chartres neglected to inform the local administration or more likely La Tay was not the true place and the name of that location has been given in order not to reveal the actual place where the helpers were standing. In fact during that period and in similar circumstances it was quite current to laid such dead body in front of the cemetery without any indication. Thus so far the place and circumstances of Sgt O’Leary’s death remain a mystery.
The 10th sqn has lost trace of the only survivor, Sgt Hunter, and they asked me to find out whether at the time his uniform was handed to Caen museum any UK address was given. I met C. Prime the historian of Caen War Memorial. We inspected in details the whole storage area and we found 3 RAF jackets but none in the name of Hunter. C. Prime was interested by this story since from a museum point of view a uniform with its own story has much more value than an anonymous jacket.
Later on when revising the dates of the various events I found out that based on the Thames TV broadcast and other medias the handing of Hunter’s uniform had been done in 1988 which the year of the opening of Caen Memorial but prior to that time all military gears were handed to Falaise Memorial. It would be interesting, if someone of the Normandy area visits Falaise, to take a copy of this document and check whether the Memorial has any record concerning that matter.
Bernard Leroy
About Bernard Leroy
Following the death of my parents I found myself at the end of WW2 at the age of 14 working as a ploughman behind two horses. Four years later I joined the French Air Forces for five years. In 1953 I joined the French Civil Aviation Administration and was in charge of the engineering maintenance of the Saigon Regional Control Centre, a very busy centre as the war was going on. Three years later the service was transferred to the Vietnamese Administration. At that time the SITA Management had in mind to operate, in Iran and in the newly independent countries of Indochina, the air/ground and ground to ground telecommunications on behalf of the local administration, in the same way as Aerosiam was doing in Thailand. For that reason I was seconded to Air France and sub-seconded to SITA in order to provide the technical support to the local SITA Representative based at Saigon. These projects did not materialise for the simple reason that the countries concerned, at least in Indochina, were expecting to obtain equipment free from US Aid, Colombo Plan and other sources instead of having a third party operating on their behalf. Some years later I ended as SITA Representative for Thailand, Laos and Cambodia and soon after took control of some centres in the Pacific while opening Sri Lanka and Burma. During these years in Bangkok I got experience dealing with local PTTs which were quite tough in those days, and competing with Aerosiam I understood airlines business and what these airlines were expecting from us. I was then appointed DR and in 1970 transferred to Hong Kong. Not long after this move I resigned from the French Civil Aviation and became a SITA staff. While based at Hong Kong and later Singapore, aiming at providing all the needs of airlines operating in the area, mostly the rapidly growing local airlines, I prepared projects, negotiated with local administrations and implemented SITA services in more than 30 Asia and Pacific countries.
