Two Sheffield men among six wartime servicemen named after more than 80 years

Two Sheffield men were among six Second World War servicemen given back their names this week, more than 80 years after they were buried in graves marked ‘unknown’.

Four were airmen from the crew of a Lancaster bomber that crashed in Germany in December 1944. The other two were soldiers killed a week apart in February 1945, in the last months of the war in Europe.

The identifications were made by investigators at the Ministry of Defence’s Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre, whose caseworkers are known as the ‘War Detectives’, working with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. On the morning of 8 December 1944, Lancaster PD374 of No. 218 Squadron took off from RAF Methwold in Norfolk, one of more than 130 aircraft sent to attack the Neerbeck oil plant at Homberg in the Ruhr. Three of the seven crew escaped by parachute and were taken prisoner. Four were killed. Their remains lay in graves marked ‘unknown’ for decades because of what the MOD describes as a series of post-war administrative errors. At the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s Venray War Cemetery in the Netherlands, they have now been honoured by name: Flying Officer Leslie Markland Hough of the Royal Australian Air Force, Pilot Officer John Henry Tales, Sergeant Henry Charles Burnside and Sergeant John Lawson, all of the RAF Volunteer Reserve. Eyewitness accounts suggest Hough, the Australian captain, stayed at the controls of the burning aircraft so that others could escape. Tales was born in Attercliffe, Sheffield, on New Year’s Eve 1917, one of 11 children. A poster writer before the war, he joined the RAF in September 1939. He had already completed a full operational tour when he volunteered to go back to frontline flying, joining 218 Squadron in August 1944. Lawson, known as ‘Geordie’, came from a mining family in County Durham. Burnside was remembered for his professionalism and immaculate turnout. Tales’s nephew, also named John, said: “It has been an extremely poignant occasion and we are honoured and quite overwhelmed to have been here.” The second Sheffield man is Lance Corporal Ronald Smirthwaite, of the Hallamshire Battalion. He joined the Army on 4 May 1944 and first served in the General Service Corps as a blacksmith’s striker, the man who supplies the muscle for the blacksmith’s skilled work. After a fierce engagement in the Netherlands on 22 February 1945 he was reported missing, presumed killed. It later emerged that he had been captured alive but badly wounded, and was lost while trying to escape. His body was recovered and buried, then reburied as an unknown soldier. For years he was listed on the Groesbeek Memorial among the missing with no known grave. His grave at Jonkerbos War Cemetery now carries his name. Tracey Bowers, the JCCC caseworker, called him “a proud Yorkshireman whose life was cut short during the final months of the World War 2”. The sixth man, Private Sidney Allen, was 19. He grew up in Saltash, Cornwall, working in HM Dockyard alongside his father, and enlisted in February 1944. Serving with the 7th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, he fought through Normandy, the liberation of Brussels and Operation Market Garden before the battalion joined Operation Veritable, the offensive to clear the Reichswald Forest. He was killed near Cleve on 15 February 1945 and recorded as missing. He has now been rededicated by name at Reichswald Forest War Cemetery in Germany. “For more than 80 years his family did not know exactly where he lay,” said JCCC caseworker Nicola Nash. What stands out is where two of these breakthroughs began. In Pte Allen’s case, it was research submitted by a member of the public that established he had first been buried at Materborn alongside other soldiers killed in the same action. Because he was the only man from his battalion in that engagement still listed as missing, the grave could be identified as his. LCpl Smirthwaite’s case was examined by the MOD and the National Army Museum after submissions from a member of the public and an officer of the Royal Netherlands Army. The Netherlands runs through these stories. At Venray, the airmen’s families met local people who have adopted the crew’s graves, and a Royal Netherlands Army officer helped bring LCpl Smirthwaite’s name back. With Remembrance Sunday a month away, the families of six men who died for Britain and its allies now have a named grave to visit, which the Commission will care for in perpetuity.