Flight Lieutenant Robert James Reed, No. 50 Squadron RAF
Australian War MemorialRobert Reed was born in 1914 in Boulder, a suburb in the Western Australian goldfields bordering on the city of Kalgoorlie. The son of James and Ellen Kingston Reed, friends called him “Rob”.
While little is known of his early life, it is clear that Robert Reed was dedicated to becoming a pilot. In 1936, over 1,000 applications were received for pilot training at Point Cook in Victoria. From this field, 86 candidates were selected, 45 of whom would go on to immediate training. Robert Reed was part of this final group.
At the time, this was the greatest number of Australians to take part in air training as a single group. The Minister for Defence, Sir Archdale Parkhill, explained that “the increased intake was due to the additional numbers of officers required for the new units included in the three-years’ programme of development of the Royal Australian Air Force.”
The expansion of the RAAF saw it increase personnel from fewer than 1,000 in 1935, to 3,500 in 1939.
Robert Reed graduated from Point Cook at a special parade on 29 June 1937. He was one of the 25 graduating students who went to England to take up short service commissions in the British Royal Air Force.
He embarked for the United Kingdom a month after graduating, on 26 July 1937.
With the start of the Second World War, the small number of Australian air crew was destined to expand rapidly. Realising that it did not have adequate resources to maintain the Royal Air Force in the impending air war, the British government put forward a plan to its dominions to jointly establish a pool of trained aircrew who could serve with the Royal Air Force. After several weeks of negotiations, Australia signed an agreement on 17 December 1939. The scheme was known in Australia as the Empire Air Training Scheme (or EATS).
Throughout the course of the war, almost 27,500 RAAF pilots, navigators, wireless operators, air gunners, and flight engineers would join Royal Air Force squadrons or Australian squadrons based in Britain.
For Robert Reed, who was already in England with the RAF, the threat was more immediate.
After rapidly overwhelming France, Germany planned to gain air superiority over the RAF and incapacitate Fighter Command. Shifting its attacks to RAF airfields and infrastructure, the Luftwaffe soon began also targeting factories involved in aircraft production. The Royal Air Force was called upon to fight in what would become known as the Battle of Britain.
Flight Lieutenant Reed joined No. 50 Squadron, based at RAF Station Lindholme. The squadron had re-formed in 1937, equipped with Hawker Hind biplane light bombers. It started to convert to the Handley Page Hampden monoplane medium bomber in late 1938 and was still equipped with Hampdens when the war began. Part of 5 Group in Bomber Command, the squadron flew its first bombing raid in March 1940 against the seaplane base at Hornum on Germany’s north-western coast.
The following month, in an attempt to attack German warships returning from the invasion of Norway, the squadron took part in the largest British air raid of the war to that date, with a total of 83 bombers attacking the German fleet.
On 10 September 1940, two Hampdens took off just before 8 pm to bomb barges at Ostend harbour in Belgium. The crew of one of the aircraft could not locate the target because of dense cloud; instead, it bombed a target of opportunity – rolling stock in a railway marshalling yard – on the return leg. The Hampden, piloted by Flight Lieutenant Reed, failed to return. Nothing more was heard from the crew.
The aircraft was believed to have been shot down and to have crashed into the North Sea, and all involved were presumed to have died:
They were;
- Pilot Officer Peter Roylance
- Sergeant Reginald Halls
- Sergeant William Johnson
- and Flight Lieutenant Robert Reed, who was 26 years old.
The crash site was later discovered in Belgium, and Reed’s remains interred at Oostende New Communal Cemetery, where they lie today under the epitaph, “Too far away thy grave to see, but not too far away to think of thee, Rob.”
About a month before Robert Reed’s death, in August 1940, as the United Kingdom prepared for an expected German invasion, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a speech referring to the ongoing efforts of the Royal Air Force. His speech contained the now famous line: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
Pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain have been known as “The Few” ever since; particularly on the 15th of September, which is commemorated as Battle of Britain Day.
On 10 July 1947, King George VI unveiled a memorial to “The Few” in Westminster Abbey. Twenty-four Australians known to have lost their lives in the Battle of Britain, including Robert Reed, were represented at the ceremony. The Archbishop of Canterbury delivered a sermon of dedication, saying that “for three months England, her enemies and the world hung upon the actions of those young men. It seemed then, as it seems now, that they alone stood between the people and the abyss.”
- AWM Honour roll https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/R1717304
