70 Years Later B-17 Gunner Returns To England

[Subdeacon Joe]

And dies quietly there.

 

 

Rector toured Battle of Britain Bunker, an underground command center where fighter airplane operations were directed during D-Day. After climbing back into the sunlight, he told Jowers he felt dizzy. She grabbed one of his arms, and a stranger grabbed the other.

There, just outside the bunker where Winston Churchillfamously said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” Rector died quietly.

“He walked out of that bunker like his tour was done,” Jowers said.

Sandy Vavruich, Rector’s daughter, said it’s how he would have liked to die, even though he sadly never did make it to RAF Snetterton Heath.

“He couldn’t have asked for a better way to go,” she told Florida Today. “It was quick and painless. He had just gotten to see two planes, and he passed away between them.”

Before repatriating his remains to the United States, a small service for the fallen hero was planned in Britain. It did not remain a small service.

“They just wanted something very simple. And when I found a little bit of background out about Melvin, there was no way we were going to just give him a very simple service,” Neil Sherry, the British funeral director in charge of Rector’s service, told ITV London News. “I wanted it to be as special as possible.”

Though Jowers expected no more than four people, word of Rector’s war record reached the American and British armed forces. The U.S. Embassy donated a flag to drape over his coffin, and the room filled with servicemen and women and London historians who had never met Rector but wanted to pay their respects to their spiritual brother in arms.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR3CpfQJ3-4

[Sedalia Dave]

:FlagAm: :FlagAm:

[Charlie Harley, #14153]

He finally slipped the surly bonds of earth. Well done.