91�ȱ�

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Allan Price, of 91�ȱ� Scotland, on behalf of Bente Svasand and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

In the early hours of the 13th of August, 12 Bristol Beuforts of 42 Squadron Coastal Command took off from RAF Leuchars to lay mines in the Karmsund near the town of Havgesund, Norway, north of Haugesund. Beaufort AW200 (“R”) was shot at by a German gunboat. There was engine failure and a fire and the aircraft crashes in the fjord off Buroy, the island of Bomlo. Some local people rowed out to the wreckage to look for survivors. Only the wireless operator Sgt Roy Harcourt was found, and he is buried at Mollendal Cemetery in Bergen.

In September 1989 I was told of the airmen found in the fjord and decided to find out who he was and why he was there. But it wasn’t just one man, the Beaufort had a crew of four, and Beauford “R” (serial number AW200) crew was; Sgt Norman Morrison, pilot, Sgt Gaunt Gibbin, navigator, Sgt Roy Harcourt, WOP, and Sgt Robert McNab, air gunner. I spoke to the local police who remember the events of the early hours of the 13th August 1941 and with some of the veterans of 42 Squadron how also flew that night. I looked at 42 Squadron’s Operational record books found in the public records office, visited Cardigton to see parts of a Beaufort being rebuilt to go on display at the RAF museum, Hendon. Armed with all this information, I spoke to the council at Bomlo about the possibility of erecting a memorial to the crew and bring the families of the crew over to Norway.

13th August 1991, 50 years to the day of the loss of AW200, a memorial was unveiled by Roy C Nesbit, President of the Beaufort Association — himself a navigator with 217 Squadron Beauforts. Present were the families of all four crew — the brother and sister in law of the pilot, the widow, children and grandchildren of the navigator, cousins of the wireless operator and brothers of the air gunner. Also there was Sgt Arthur Jones who flew on the same operation, members of the council at Bomlo, about 200 local people and from the British Embassy in Oslo, Commander George Pearson.

At the start of my research, I was unsure about contacting the families and bringing back sad memories of wartime, but they’d all received the telegram “missing, believed killed” and knew no more. All the families were grateful to know what had happened, it was an end to years of wondering, Mrs Hilda Sherwin, widow of Navigator Sgt Gibbin, said it was like a funeral and Gaunt was at last laid to rest.

10 years on, in 2001, Sgt Gibbon’s grandmother Lyn and husband Dave, came back to visit the memorial and I was able to give her the navigator’s folding seat which had been recovered from the fjord that morning of 13/08/41 and given to me by one of the local people who found it. It actually went back to Britain on the 13th of August 2001, 60 years to the day when they left Leuchars. These events changed my life, whilst I bought a house here and left Norway to live in Scotland something which wouldn’t have happened if Beaufort AW200 hadn’t crashed.

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