BRITAIN: Fifty-nine years after he was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission into deepest Nazi Germany, a British air ace was laid to rest with military honours yesterday in a solemn ceremony.
Wing Commander Adrian Warburton was just 26 when he failed to return from a mission on April 12th, 1944, with the 7th Photographic Reconnaissance Group of the US 8th Army Air Force.
The flight was authorised by the group's commander, Elliott Roosevelt, son of the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His 91-year-old widow, Eileen Westcott, followed Warburton's remains in driving hail and rain as a six-man Royal Air Force honour detail carried his Union flag-draped coffin into the Duernbach Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, in view of the snow-covered Alps south of Munich.
The simple white headstone to his grave was inscribed with the words: "Fond memories of our short time together". A bugler played the Last Post and uniformed officers among 100 mourners saluted as the coffin was lowered into the grave, while Warburton's widow stood with her head bowed.
"It is very emotional. I think if things had been different we could have had a life together," she said, ahead of the ceremony to commemorate the most decorated British airman of the second World War. The couple married hastily in 1939, when she was working as a barmaid.
Within a year, Warburton was posted to Malta, where he gained a reputation as a daring reconnaissance pilot.
In November 1940, he helped prepare a British air attack on the Italian fleet at anchor in the southern port of Taranto, and went on to take part in the North African campaign and the invasions of Sicily and Italy.
"I think that was the life that he wanted," said his widow, who later remarried and moved to Australia. Recalling him as a shy man, she said, "I didn't dream he would really go where he went."
Warburton's exploits were immortalised in the 1953 film, The Malta Story, starring Alec Guinness as the pilot.
But his fate remained a mystery until the wreckage of his Lockheed F-5B aircraft, along with his remains, were recovered last September by German archaeologists at a site west of Munich.
Leading Warburton's memorial service at the St Aegidius church in the lakeside town of Gmund, RAF chaplain Rev Alan Coates paid tribute to the pilot with words from The Great Luqa Harrier, a 1943 poem in his honour written by John Snook. "Salute the man since no praise is too high for Adrian Warburton's deeds in the sky," the poem reads.
"He was absolutely fearless - when he went out to do his photos, he always got them," recalled Jack Vowles (81), a ground crew member with the RAF's 69 Squadron who also flew with Warburton and paid his respects yesterday.
The RAF kept Warburton out of the cockpit after he was injured in a car accident in late 1943.
At the beginning of April 1944, he was posted officially as RAF liaison officer to the US 7th Photographic Reconnaissance Group, based at Mount Farm in Oxfordshire, where Roosevelt let him fly again.
After Warburton's azure blue plane was found last September, German authorities, noting its US markings, called in the US Memorial Affairs Department, which determined, after archive research and tests, that the aircraft and remains were those of Warburton.
"We had no idea who it was," said Mr David Roath, a director at the department.
The archives, he said, then showed that Roosevelt "had authorised this flight ... to attempt the deepest penetration of Germany to date".
A roll of film found at the crash site, along with bone fragments, helped in the search.
Despite her regrets at having spent little time with Warburton, his widow said she was glad to be able to finally say goodbye.
"I'm very proud to have known him," she said. - (AP)