Peace at last for lost NZ warrior

Thousands of bombers like this 218 Squadron Stirling were shot down during the war. Picture / RNZAF Museum

Sergeant Leonard Edward Moss, like most young New Zealanders who flew in bomber crews, probably thought he was fireproof. He expected to survive and return home.

But Sergeant Moss was among the 47,000 Bomber Command aircrew who lost their lives flying from bases in England to attack targets in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.

On the night of August 27, 1942, his 15 Squadron Stirling, a big four-engined aircraft, was hit by German night fighters or flak over Holland on its way to bomb Kassel, a city east of the Ruhr Valley.

The bomber burst into flames and crashed on a farm a few kilometres from Hengelo, a town close to the Dutch-German border in northeast Holland.

None of the seven-man crew survived.

Rear gunner Glen Smith, the only other New Zealander on the Stirling, got out of the flaming aircraft but his parachute did not open - the Auckland man's body was found on the ground 5km from the crash site. He was buried in the nearby village of Ambt Delden.

What happened to Sergeant Moss, the bomb aimer on the Stirling, remained a mystery for six decades.

At the time, he left a young English wife to mourn and a close-knit family in the Rangitikei hit by the news their son and brother was missing.

Sergeant Moss, 28 when he was killed, was raised on a farm just outside Marton and was working with his father when he enlisted in late September 1940.

After training in Canada as an air gunner-wireless operator he reached England in July 1941 and spent another year undergoing further courses that also qualified him as a bomb aimer.

Soon after arriving in England, Sergeant Moss met Josephine Hicken, a pretty young woman just turned 19. He told his parents: "During my short nine days of leave I met in London a girl who I fell in love with. [She] took me to her home in Coventry where I spent seven days of my leave."

They were engaged in October 1941 and married a few weeks later, on December 6 in St Martins-in-the Fields, Coventry.

Letters from Sergeant Moss and his wife to the family in Marton - mother, father, sister Mavis and brother Harry - survived six decades in safe keeping and were compiled recently by a family member.

Sergeant Moss wrote little about his airman's life or what fears he might have about the future, but he and his bride clearly planned to live in New Zealand.

He mostly wrote about everyday things - the shortage of film in England, the food ("the tucker at this [training] school is OK") - and the weather - and asked about people at home - "Has Sam still got the Railway Pub, how is Cyril these days?" He questioned his father about labour to get in the summer hay.

The new Mrs Moss was the one who gave details about their wedding.

"I was married in the suit I am wearing in that photo outside uncle's, as I only had it in August and had no new coupons, but I had a new hat, a brown one with a feather in it, and I had a spray of cream roses."

They had a short honeymoon in London - and were given wrong directions for the hotel that had been recommended. Stranded in numbing rain, they eventually found a small hotel off the Strand.

"It does not sound very romantic, but it was all such fun to us - we were very happy."

In July 1942, a few weeks before Sergeant Moss' death, his wife found she was four or five months' pregnant. She wrote to her sister-in-law: "We are hoping hard it will be a boy. I shall name him after Len, if he is."

She began collecting baby gear. "I have a wee cot, one of those ones you can carry, made of pale blue and cream leather cloth."

Then Sergeant Moss was missing and there was no word about him or the crew.

He had joined 15 Squadron at Bourn, Cambridgeshire, just four weeks before his death. It's not known how many operations he flew in that short time (his log book has not survived) but his letters disclose that while training he was pressed into a scratch crew on a Wellington for the famous 1000-bomber raids on Cologne and Essen in late May and early June 1942 - "I dropped the eggs both times, which helped the bomb fire along."

For weeks, Josephine Moss hoped and prayed for her husband but the Air Ministry said in December 1942 the Stirling crew were not prisoners and were presumed lost.

"They say there is very little hope of him being alive," she told Mavis Moss.

"Well, what can I say? Except that I have not given up hope, and you must not either."

Fate inflicted another crushing blow the same month. Josephine Moss' baby, a girl, was delivered stillborn. She wrote to Mavis: "My baby things have been sold - all the things I spent so many hours over making, so they won't be around when I get up, to depress me."

In May 1946, an RAF investigation team discovered that Rear Gunner Smith, found with his identity disc intact, and two unidentified bodies pulled from the wreckage of the crashed Stirling had been buried four years earlier in Ambt Delden.

The RAF reported that witnesses said they had seen three, perhaps four, parachutes against the searchlights and speculated that surviving airmen might have drifted into Germany.

Recently, some experts have said the witnesses might have seen falling wreckage caught in the glare of the lights.

Last year, the Dutch excavated the crash site, removed and detonated unexploded bombs - and found human remains. The four missing crew had gone to their deaths in the Stirling.

The remains will be interred with full military honours in a single coffin with a single headstone next to Flight Sergeant Smith's grave on August 31. All seven bodies will now be in the same group in the same small graveyard.

Sergeant Moss' six nieces and nephews left New Zealand this week to attend the burial ceremony and the unveiling of a memorial at the crash site.

* Sergeant Moss asked his close friend Robert (Johnnie) Johnston, a fellow New Zealander with whom he trained in Canada and sailed to England, to take care of his wife if he were killed. When he heard that Sergeant Moss was missing, the Christchurch man wrote to Josephine from the Middle East where he had been posted.

When he got back to England, he contacted her. They already knew each other well and their friendship blossomed.

Josephine Moss and Mr Johnston were married in the Coventry Registry Office in September 1943 after Sergeant Moss was legally confirmed dead.

They stayed in England after the war, living in the Coventry area. Mrs Johnston bore a son in 1949 and a daughter in 1961.

She died in 1999, six years after her second husband.

* Max Lambert is the author of Night After Night, an account of New Zealanders in Bomber Command.

- NZPA