Flying Officer Philip Wyatt Ryan, No. 467 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force
Australian War MemorialPhilip Ryan was born on 1 January 1922 in Beechworth, Victoria, to Frederick and Alice Ryan. He had a sister, Beryl, and their father was a solicitor.
Philip was educated at Xavier Preparatory School and Xavier College, before studying at Melbourne University. After leaving school, he worked as a clerk with the Bank of New South Wales.
On 24 April 1942 Philip Ryan enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, aged 20. He trained as a pilot, and in March 1943 received his flying badge and was made sergeant. He embarked for overseas service from Brisbane on 20 April 1943, arriving in the UK in June. As part of the Empire Air Training Scheme he was one of almost 27,000 RAAF pilots, navigators, wireless operators, gunners, and engineers, who joined Australian and British squadrons in Britain throughout the course of the war.
In England, Ryan received further specialist training, and that September he was promoted to flight sergeant. In April 1944 he was commissioned as a pilot officer, and on the 6th of June he was posted to No. 467 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force. As part of Bomber Command, the squadron flew the four-engined Avro Lancaster heavy bomber.
On the night of 7 July, Bomber Command launched a major raid on German flying bomb storage sites in France. Ryan, now acting flying officer, was the pilot of Lancaster “PO-U”, which took off shortly before 10.30 pm.
Cloud cover meant that the bombers had to fly low to see the target, and 31 Lancaster bombers were shot down by enemy fire. One of those aircraft that never returned to base was Ryan’s Lancaster, which crashed at the town of Courgent, about 95 kilometres south-west of their target. There were no survivors.
Those killed with Flying Officer Philip Ryan were Australians Warrant Officer Clifford Jones – Flight Sergeants Verne Cockroft, Leonard Porritt, and James Steffan – and Sergeant William Killworth, along with British Sergeant George Hayes.
The airmen were buried by the town’s people in a moving ceremony, and after the war the remains of Flying Officer Ryan were identified and reinterred there next to his crewmates.
He was 22 years old.
For years afterwards, the people of Courgent held annual ceremonies at the cemetery in honour of the killed airmen, and a monument was erected there in 1951.
- AWM Roll of Honour https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/R1716407
