Sgt FG Fisher

 

Frederick Graham Fisher was born in 1924, the son of Frederick Charles (who saw service and was wounded in the First World War) and Margaret Kathleen Fisher. He was known as Graham, presumably to avoid confusion, and at the outbreak of the Second World War he lived with his parents and younger brother John at No 20, The Street. He appears in the school photograph from 1933 and in 1935 won a special free place at Newbury Grammar School.

 

He enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve and on 18 November 1944 he and the rest of his crew were posted into 103 Squadron RAFVR at Elsham Wolds in north Lincolnshire direct from No 1 Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Hemswell. He was the bomb aimer.  Pilots, bomb aimers and navigators took 2 years to train, usually in Canada or South Africa, so he must have volunteered about as soon as he could (all aircrew were volunteers, not conscripts) and these roles were usually confined to those with grammar school education.

 

Their first operational sortie was to Karlsruhe on 4 December 1944 and 2 nights later their aircraft, Lancaster NG276 (code PM-E), delivered in early November and on its seventh operation, was one of 10 from 103 Sqn that took part in an attack on the I G Farben Leuna-Werk synthetic oil plant at Merseburg near Leipzig in eastern Germany - the most heavily defended target in Europe. The aircraft took off at 1645 in poor weather and one aircraft was forced to return early with unserviceable navigation aids. The remainder followed a route from Lincolnshire to the south coast at Newhaven, passing over Reading en route. They crossed the French coast at Etaples, skirted the Ruhr to the south then headed north east to Goslar where they turned onto the final approach to the target from the north west. On this run in, with its bomb load still on board, NG276 was hit by flak and exploded in the air over Merseberg, a few miles north of the target. The target was completely obscured by cloud up to around 6000 feet but the remaining aircraft bombed between 2039 and 2056 from a height of 17,000 to 20,000 feet using their H2S radar. The other eight aircraft all returned safely between midnight and one o’clock.

 

Sgt Fisher is buried in the military cemetery at Jonkerbos near Nijmegen in the Netherlands.