Orders, Decorations and Medals

A rare and poignant Second World War D.F.M. group of six awarded to Flying Officer F. H. Thompson, Royal New Zealand Air Force, an Air Gunner who was killed in action in March 1945 while serving in No. 161 Squadron on clandestine S.O.E. operations - his remarkable wartime career is recounted in depth by Gibb McCall in Flight Most Secret, Air Missions for S.O.E. and S.I.S.

Distinguished Flying Medal, G.VI.R. (N.Z. 412766 F./Sgt. F. H. Thompson, R.N.Z.A.F.); 1939-45 Star; Air Crew Europe Star, clasp, France and Germany; Defence and War Medals; New Zealand War Service Medal 1939-45, extremely fine (6)
£2500-3000

Just 175 Distinguished Flying Medals were awarded to members of the Royal New Zealand Air Force in the 1939-45 War.

D.F.M. London Gazette 9 July 1943. The original recommendation states:

‘Flight Sergeant Thompson, in the capacity of Rear Gunner, has taken part in many operational sorties. His determination, resource and coolness in difficult circumstances have been material factors in the success achieved. On one occasion, when returning from a mining operation, he shot out the lights of a searchlight battery. On other occasions, this airman has made successful machine-gun attacks on enemy trains and an airfield, where fires were started. At all times, he has set a splendid example to the younger members of his crew.’

Forrest Harold “Tommy” Thompson was born in Auckland in December 1917 and educated at Gisborne High School and Ruakura Agricultural College, before taking up sheep farming at Tokomaru Bay. Enlisting in the Initial Training Wing of the R.N.Z.A.F. at Levin in May 1941, he completed his elementary training before departing for Canada under the Empire Training Scheme that August. Subsequently awarded his Air Gunner’s Brevet, and advanced to Sergeant, he departed for the U.K. in January 1942 where, after attending an O.T.U. and conversion course, he joined No. 218 Squadron, a Stirling unit operating out of Marham, Norfolk, in September of the same year. Thus ensued a busy tour of operational sorties, some of which is described in Gibb McCall’s Flight Most Secret, Air Missions for S.O.E. and S.I.S.:

‘On 18 March 1943, he [Thompson] was on his way home from a sortie over Nuremburg with 218 Squadron, the unit named after the Gold Coast which had adopted it ... As fires marking Nuremburg faded into the distance, 25-year-old Thompson was keeping a sharp look-out for night-fighters which were expected soon to be harrying the returning stream of Stirlings ... Suddenly an enemy airfield swam into view immediately below. For some inexplicable reason the Luftwaffe had ignored blackout regulations and had left their flare path and barrack buildings clearly outlined. Knowing the bomb racks were empty, Thompson swivelled his quad-mounted .303 calibre machine-guns and squinted down the sights, and watched his tracers spew out in a descending arc, hitting the target just as he had scored a bull’s eye on the searchlight battery only a month before. This time the result was equally spectacular. Every light below was extinguished, and his pilot confirmed that fires could be seen blazing in several sections of the Luftwaffe base. It was Thompson’s eighteenth operational sortie ... He was to continue his private war the following month when he shot up trains in a marshalling yards near Sedan. One of them, perhaps more, was seen to disintegrate in a cloud of smoke and steam.’

Tour expired, and having been awarded the D.F.M., Thompson was commissioned as a Pilot Officer and rested at a Bombing and Gunnery Flight at Warham. But in March 1944, and by now a Flying Officer, he commenced a second tour of duty with No. 161 Squadron, operating out of Tempsford in Bedfordshire on clandestine S.O.E. sorties, a role he would fulfil until his Hudson was shot down by a night fighter on returning from a mission on the night of 20-21 March 1945. In that period he flew numerous clandestine missions to Denmark, France, Germany, Holland and Norway, his aircraft dropping off at least 35 agents, in addition to carrying out “Ascension” operations, in which radio contact was made with the Resistance by air-to-ground telephone. And many of these missions are recounted in Gibb McCall’s Flight Most Secret, a book that also describes Thompson’s courtship and marriage to a Bedfordshire girl in the summer of 1944, and the poignancy of their final meeting, for she was expecting their first child. So, too, details of his joining-up with his brother, Onslow, who was also killed in action while serving as a Flying Officer in No. 105 Squadron, a Mosquito unit.

In fact, in the context of this current catalogue, it would be impossible to do justice to Thompson’s career with 161 Squadron as per the detail contained in McCall’s Flight Most Secret, but the following extracts, taken from the author’s account of a memorial service held in 1970 at the site where his Hudson crashed, are reproduced for the record:

‘They had died together on the first day of spring, entombed in a man-made fireball which fell out of a stormy moonlit sky into a wooded hillside of the Ardennes. Now, in a clearing marked by a crop of young trees, the crumpled wreckage of their aircraft lies still as an official memorial, the path of its final, destructive flight marked by those trees much younger than the rest of the forest, trees which had started growing after scorched earth had recovered from the impact ... The aircraft is, or was, a Hudson light bomber, registration FK 803, with squadron code-sign N-for-Nan. It had flown eighty successful operational sorties over Germany and Occupied Europe during World War II, dropping agents and supplies by parachute, and enabling contact to be made with agents in the field by air-to-ground telephone. Four of these sorties had been daring pick-up operations in which the aircraft had actually been landed in enemy territory, virtually under the noses of the unsuspecting Germans ... For much of the time it was flown by Terence Helfer, who took it out on one of his first operations when he joined the squadron whose activities even now are cloaked in secrecy ... There were two other men on that early flight: Air Gunner Forrest Thompson, aged twenty-six, a cheerful New Zealander known as Tommy to his friends, who had crossed the world for the purpose of killing Germans ... Their first successful operation together as a team was in N-for-Nan. And all were together on the last take-off made by the same aircraft from a top secret base in Bedfordshire. A few hours later the Hudson was ripped apart by machine-gun fire and plunged in flames into the forest above the village of Maulusmuhle ... The bodies of three of them lie in the shadow of the wreckage of N-for-Nan, buried side by side with the three secret agents who died with them ... ’

Remarkably, in the circumstances, Thompson’s pilot survived, having escaped the plunging aircraft with badly burned face and hands - his parachute pack had been on fire as he jumped, but the flames went out as he descended on to a road, and he managed to stagger to the nearest inhabitants for help. Of the burial site of Thompson and the remaining crew, and the three Belgian agents who perished with them, Commonwealth War Graves Commission records state:

‘The burials at Maulusmuhle were left where an aircraft of 161 Squadron was shot down on 21 March 1945, when returning from a special mission to Germany. Three airmen are buried in the graves, together with three Belgian casualties, which are marked by locally made rather than Commission headstones. The remains of the aircraft, a Lockheed Hudson, have been left at this isolated site at the request of the local community and the relatives.’