“Lost in France” (2018)
Posted on June 22, 2018 | by |

In the first year after the creation  of Wikisita I loaded a document called “Lost in France” which is the history of a Halifax from the RAF shot down during WW2 near my oncle’s house at Hermeray. There has been some confusion about what happened to one of its crew,  Sgt O’Leary, a gunner, a matter which is still not definitely clarified today.

Both Dick King, a RAF pilot of Margaret Thatcher, and myself for this side of the Channel,  have been working at solving that enigma. 

Recently I received an email from Gerald O’Leary (see below) the great son of Sgt O’Leary who has learnt about  “Lost in France” at a RAF museum in UK. It was all new to him as he had not been previously aware of what happened to his great father and wanted to know more from me about that story. Finally the whole family i.e. son, great son and great great son and more will come to France this summer to visit the places that Sgt O’Leary is supposed to have crossed and where he was discovered dead a day after his landing.  

I was only 14-year old when these events took place and I would have never imagined then that one day I would be contacted on that subject by a party including the great great son of the airman who landed on a near-by meadow: on that day the Halifax ended its flight but time has kept flying! 

Hello Bernard,

Please excuse me emailing you out of the apparent blue.  Dick King gave me your details some time ago and I wonder if you could help me please.   

To my family’s great surprise we learnt that Gerald had survived the crash only to be killed some time later.  I wonder if you have any information about the incident and if your research uncovered any information about when and how he actually died.  

I would like to be able to let my father know how his dad died and the build up to that incident. I believe Gerald was on his second mission when shot down.  He had been a police sergeant and wasn’t released to serve in the RAF until 44 which, according to letters to family, frustrated him greatly.  

My father wasn’t born until Sept 44 so never knew his dad and I think my grandmother was hesitant to go into much detail.  She was killed in an air crash when my Father was 15 so we haven’t had much luck with aeroplanes.  

If there was anything you could tell me about my grandfather I would be eternally grateful.

​Kind regards,

Gerald Colan-O’Leary​

About

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.

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