Philip Sidney Burgess was born in Portsmouth on 19th September 1922, the son of Willis and Marie (nee Taylor). But both his parents died when he was very young, so when aged four, he and his brother Carroll were adopted, but by different families. Philip was adopted by his aunt, Gertrude Lewis, in Folkestone, Kent. When she died in 1938, he was then adopted by the Rowland family in the same town. Carroll was adopted by the Brookes family.

Philip was educated at the Harvey Grammar School in Folkestone and volunteered for the RAF soon after his 18th birthday, travelling to Canada for part of his training. He was commissioned in May 1942, and after further training was promoted to Flying Officer shortly before being posted to 61 Sqn in January 1943, a few months after he turned 20.

Although he arrived with a crew in which he was the bomb aimer, he really wanted to be a navigator, so he joined a crew captained by the New Zealander, Flt Sgt Ian Woodward, in which the wireless operator was Charlie Williams (See his Story on For Evermore), starting as bomb aimer but then becoming navigator.

By the end of March when Woodward and Williams had completed their tours, Philip had flown on approximately seventeen operations. Both he and Charlie Williams agreed to join the crew being put together by Flt Lt Norman Barlow which would transfer to 617 Squadron for the planned secret mission.

When they arrived at RAF Scampton, there was a shortage of aircraft which meant that crews could not be certain exactly when they would be training, nor of the route they would be instructed to undertake.

However, if you were the navigator, like Philip, it was sometimes possible (indeed expected) for him to make minor variations during a flight. He explained how he had done this in a letter to his girlfriend, Edna Mitchell, on 15th April:

“We came over Guildford last Sunday [11th April] at 4.30 p.m, just did a couple of circuits over the house – we couldn’t shoot the place up properly as we had a ‘Group Captain’ (Probably Gp Capt Charles Whitworth, Scampton’s station CO) on board as a passenger, and we weren’t supposed to be over Guildford anyway. We were supposed to go to Haslemere but I thought it would be better to go to the home town as it was so near. We are hoping to get down that way again in the near future and do a real shoot up of the place.” This letter is now in the RAF Museum On the Dams Raid.

Norman Barlow and his crew had been assigned to the Second Wave, detailed to attack the Sorpe Dam, and were due to take off one minute after Joe McCarthy. However, McCarthy had a mechanical problem, so Barlow’s AJ-E was the first aircraft in the air on Operation Chastise, leaving the ground at 21.28. Because they were under strict instruction to maintain radio silence, nothing more was heard from them but at 23.50, the aircraft crashed near Haldern, 5km east of Rees, killing the whole crew.

It is more than likely that AJ-E hit one of the high-tension power cables which stretched across the fields in the locality, although it is also possible that the aircraft had already been hit by flak. The furiously-burning aircraft came to rest in a small meadow on the edge of a copse and the crews’ bodies were taken to Dusseldorf North Cemetery but after the war, they were reburied in Reichswald Forest CWGC War Cemetery.

Yet to turn 21, Philip Burgess was probably the youngest officer to take part in the Dams Raid.

https://dambustersblog.com/2014/03/05/dambuster-of-the-day-no-66-philip-burgess/

For more information and further details of the crash:

 https://dambustersblog.com/2014/02/21/dambuster-of-the-day-no-64-norman-barlow/