I should first apologise that this book has taken so long to come to fruition. In the years before he died in l998, I persuaded my father to write down as much as he could remember about his early life and RAF career. He had never been particularly forthcoming about this but from the various tales I had heard over the years, I felt that the story of his rather remarkable life might be of interest to his grandchildren and to future generations in years to come.
Sadly my father died before the book was completed – he got as far as the end of the Second World War and so I enlisted my mother’s help to finish the project. You will therefore be able to detect a slight change in style and perhaps emphasis as my mother, who also sadly died before the book was published, had an elephantine memory for detail.
My task has been to edit both my father’s and my mother’s writings. I have added detail from the many letters my father wrote to my mother from when they started ‘going out’ in the early thirties to the end of the Second World War. I have also added detail from my father’s first log book starting in August l935 through to when he took over command of 229 Squadron in October l940, from 229 Squadron Operational Records and from my father’s subsequent log books. In addition, I have drawn on articles my father wrote and from various books written about the war. In order to complete the story I wrote the final few chapters. They are therefore based on my memory of events and probably do not cover adequately the ‘political’ aspects entailed in my father’s last few jobs.
My siblings Elisabeth, Nicholas and John have helped me with additional stories and have encouraged me to ‘get on and finish it’, for which I thank them enormously.
I would also like to thank Julia Johnstone and Sally Price who have spent hours deciphering my longhand manuscript scrawl and typing draft after draft.
Finally, I would like to thank Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael ‘Mike’ Graydon for reading through the draft and for his comments and suggestions.
David Rosier
Rosier family crest
Extract from the author’s log book