Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Britain’s Royal Air Force in London on Tuesday, the Queen witnessed a flyover of various RAF aircraft from past and present.
Their number included the famous Spitfire fighter plane, which helped win the Battle of Britain against the Nazis in 1940 and Britain’s newest fighter jet, the F-35, a powerful asset that will help the RAF penetrate powerful air defense networks.
My mother was also at the flyover, celebrating her father, Harold Kerr.
A career RAF officer and pilot who flew with Bomber Command and Coastal Command in World War II (the photos below are from his scrapbook), Kerr retired as a Wing Commander and officer of the order of the British empire. I remember my grandfather fondly as a gentleman of confidence, kindness, and true British class. He always wore a suit out to dinner and respected those around him. He built a close bond with my American grandfather, a U.S. Marine-turned- career Army officer, who still today holds him in awe.
But my grandfather was also a man of humor. Following the end of the war, he and my grandmother dined with a West German couple. The couple asked my grandfather if he had ever visited their home city; Hamburg or Dresden (I can’t remember which). With cheeky British understatement he responded, “only briefly.”
Of course, war is a hell measured by those who do not live to grow old and the families they leave behind. My mother once told me of a story in which my grandfather returned to his barracks after an operation only to find a close friend’s belongings packed up neatly on his bed. His friend had been killed earlier that day while flying in defense of his nation and human freedom.
Over the course of the war, nearly 56,000 (or more than 44 percent of RAF aircrews) would die along with their comrades from the 8th and 15th U.S. Army Air Forces.
But some lived to make fake tea with their grandsons. And that speaks to the RAF today: a living force defending British and NATO airspace, striking ISIS terrorists abroad, and standing ready with its closest partner, the U.S. Air Force, to fight and win.
