84-year-old's skydive honours Kiwi war hero

John Lawrie was killed after his Lancaster bomber was shot down over Belgium during WWII. Photo / Supplied

Australian Robert Chester-Master has skydived over a Brisbane beach at the age of 84 to remember the young New Zealand pilot who saved his life in World War II.

John Lawrie lived on his father's Taranaki dairy farm before joining the Royal NZ Air Force.

He died on August 13, 1944, after a German night fighter attacked and crippled his Lancaster bomber over the River Meuse in Belgium.

The big aircraft, homebound from a raid on a German engine plant near Frankfurt, began losing height and one by one the engines failed.

Lawrie, the captain, held the plane aloft long enough for the other six men in his crew, Chester-Master among them, to take to their parachutes.

The aircraft crashed and exploded in a field near a village not far from Ghent before Lawrie could jump.

A farmer found Lawrie's body and buried it in his garden before the Germans arrived to investigate.

Lawrie's remains were exhumed after the war and interred in a military cemetery in Antwerp.

Lawrie, 21 at the time and flying with the Royal Air Force's 514 Squadron, was on his 13th operation the night he was killed.

Sixty-five years to the day after the young Kiwi's death, Chester-Master leaped in tandem over Brisbane's Redcliffe beach.

"I wanted to do it to remember the pilot who held the craft steady so we could get out," Chester-Master said. "Without him I wouldn't be alive."

- NZPA