SILENT HERO

Vi Davies, 88, knew Tony "Bunny" Barnes's plane had been lost during the night of March 12 and 13, 1943 - one of three RAF raids during the ferocious Battle of Essen.

But she never realised Winston Churchill had praised the airmen killed for saving hundreds of thousands of Allied troops' lives.

The information about Mr Barnes - who was killed at the age of 26 - came to light after New Forest East MP Julian Lewis stumbled across his war records during a visit to the National Archives in west London.

Mrs Davies said: "Finding out about this has provided comfort that Tony's death was not in vain. Without their sacrifice, the war would have gone on much longer."

THE words written on the piece of paper, browned slightly by the passing decades, are heartbreakingly poignant.

"I don't see how I can see this through," they read.

They were penned by bank worker Tony "Bunny" Barnes in a tender letter to his wife Vi on March 12, 1943 - the day he was due to fly a Halifax bomber on a treacherous raid over Germany.

With hindsight, the words sound like a grim premonition.

Several hours later Flight Officer Barnes, then 26, was killed on the flight back to RAF Pocklington in North Yorkshire.

For more than 60 years, Vi - who had been married four years - did not know what had happened to her first husband on that fateful night. Had her husband's plane been shot down or forced to ditch after being struck by flak?

Now grandmother Vi, 88, of Hythe, has finally learned the true extent of her first husband's bravery in the Second World War.

For Bunny, alongside other airmen killed on the raid, were praised by Winston Churchill and in official Defence Ministry documents for helping save the lives of "hundreds of thousands" of Allied troops.

The story of Mr Barnes - who had two children, ballerina Margaret, 63, and Christopher, 62, - came to light after New Forest East MP Julian Lewis stumbled across his war records during a visit to the national Archives in Kew, west London.

Mrs Davies, who later remarried, said: "Finding out about this has provided comfort that Tony's death was not in vain. Without their sacrifice, the war would have gone on much longer."

Father-of-two Mr Barnes, a bank worker from Surbiton, London, was part of a seven-man crew who had been carrying out bombing raids and surveillance over Germany during early 1943.

He was also part of the Battle of Essen - three nights in March and April when thousands of pounds of explosives were dropped on the town's factories and homes.

Essen, an industrial town in the Ruhr Valley, was "indispensable" to the Nazis' war effort. Indeed, the Friedrich Krupps Works, which employed some 80,000 people, manufactured millions of guns, shells, tanks, engines for U-boats and locomotives.

The Defence Ministry report, produced after the attacks on the town, said: "A blow at Krupps is a blow directed at the basis of Nazi power."

Churchill's war room had concluded that the locomotive works was the 'most important individual target'.

It said a shortage of locomotives would damage Germany's ability to transport enough troops, supplies and weapons to battle.

The report said: "Its inability to transport her still great supplies of armaments over the thousands of miles of railway track which lead to the vast eastern Front, to Tunisia and to the other battle fronts which, above all, limit the German effort."

On the night of March 12 and 13, Bunny was ordered to fly on the second Battle of Essen. The fear in the hearts of the air crews must have been unimaginable.

Essen was, according to official defence reports, "defended like a fortress" with heavy guns and searchlights.

Yet wave upon wave of Royal Air Force bombers, engines humming gently, miraculously avoided the flak fired into the dark night sky.

Large areas of the town - including its imposing Krupps Works - were little more than smouldering ruins. Factories which manufactured guns, shells, tanks, engines and, most importantly, locomotives were destroyed.

The Nazis were faced with the unenviable choice of turning their backs on the flagship industrial centre - or rebuilding it and suffering the possibility that they would be bombed to smithereens again.

The raid also had a major influence on the success of the Allied troop landings on the Normandy beaches on D-Day a year later.

In a telegram to Soviet Union leader Josef Stalin, dated March 13, Churchill said the results of the Essen raids were "good".

He said: "There is no doubt these increasingly frequent and heavy raids are having an effect on German morale and I expect Hitler will be forced to order the strongest retaliation in his power.

"He is holding a strong bombing force in the west to be used against the beaches in case we make landings.

"One of our objects is to compel him to bring this into action against Great Britain, where we shall give him a warm reception."

Subsequently, the Luftwaffe suffered such huge losses in dogfights that it did not have any aircraft to attack the beaches - one reason D-Day was such a massive success.

Up to 400 UK airmen were lost during the three raids on Essen, though many were taken prisoner of war after bailing out of stricken planes. Bunny's plane was lost on the way home.

The MoD report adds: "If such losses are described as small an impression of callousness towards these brave and highly trained men may be conveyed.

"At the same time it is necessary to point out that this loss of men and material is indeed an astonishingly small one to have sustained in the achievement of such immense results."

It added: "In fairness to the millions of Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen at present fighting throughout the world, we must be willing to sustain such losses as these if by doing so we can destroy German armaments which would have killed and maimed not 400, but hundreds of thousands of our men, if they had reached the battlefields."