Leonard George Weller (Len to his nearest and dearest!) was born on the 1st of September 1915 in Edmonton, north London, the son of Arthur and Marian Weller (nee Powell) and worked as a toolmaker before the war.

By the time he joined the RAF in 1940, he had married Dorothy Nerush in October 1938 and they had an infant daughter.

After training as a wireless operator/air gunner, Len was eventually posted to 106 Squadron in early 1943.

At 00:40 in the early morning of the 14th of February, the wireless operator in Pilot Officer Lewis Burpee’s crew, had completed his second tour of operations, after a six-hour trip to Lorient. Then, at 18:30 the same day, the crew set off again on a ten-hour operation over the Alps to Milan, with a new wireless operator on board - Len Weller.

This was the middle of a very busy period for Lewis Burpee, his crew and 106 Squadron in general.

A further ten operations would follow in the next four weeks, and Len flew on all of them. By the time the crew were transferred to 617 Squadron in the spring, he had been commissioned, so he now outranked his skipper! 

On the 'Dams Raid'  AJ-S took of at eleven minutes past midnight on the morning of Monday the 17th of May, but never even made it as far as the German border. While still over Holland and approaching the gap between the heavily defended airfields at Gilze-Rijen and Eindhoven, the aircraft strayed off course. Burpee climbed slightly, probably in an effort to determine its exact position, but was then caught in searchlights and hit by flak.

AJ-S crashed on the edge of Gilze Rijen airfield, six miles south west of Tilburg. Its mine exploded on impact, demolishing a large number of buildings and doing damage estimated at 1.5 million guilders (£665,000).

The aircraft's last minutes were seen by a Luftwaffe airman based at Gilze Rijen called Herbert Scholl who when interviewed after the war, was of the opinion that AJ-S was in fact not hit by flak at all - but rather, was dazzled by a searchlight beam hitting it horizontally, with the pilot trying to fly even lower, but then hitting some trees. 

Len’s body was one of only three that were positively identified by the Germans before it was buried in Zuylen Cemetery, Prinsenhage, near Breda -- Lewis Burpee and Gordon Brady were buried alongside, while the other four shared a communal grave.

After the war the bodies of all seven were exhumed and reburied in Bergen-op-Zoom CWGC War Cemetery.

In July 1942, Lewis Burpee had married Lillian Westwood and in May 1943, she was expecting their first child. After Lewis’ death, Lillian travelled across the Atlantic to meet her in-laws for the first time and to have her baby in Canada. Their son, also called Lewis Johnstone Burpee, was born on Christmas Eve 1943, and in May 2018, he unveiled a memorial to his father’s crew on the airbase where AJ-S crashed, now home to the Royal Netherlands Air Force.

The memorial is made up of a large piece of the crankshaft from one of AJ-S’s engines which had seven pistons, one for each of the crew.

https://dambustersblog.com/2015/06/04/dambuster-of-the-day-no-109-leonard-weller/

For further information: https://dambustersblog.com/2015/05/25/dambuster-of-the-day-no-106-lewis-burpee/