An exceptional post-war test pilot’s A.F.C., Second World War fighter pilot’s D.F.M. group of seven awarded to Squadron Leader G. E. C. “Jumbo” Genders, Royal Air Force, a 9-victory ace who was killed in a De Havilland D.H. 108 in May 1950 during experimental work for the Comet airliner

Air Force Cross, G.VI.R., the reverse officially dated 1949; Distinguished Flying Medal, G.VI.R. (754713 Sgt. G. E. C. Genders, R.A.F.); 1939-45 Star; Africa Star; Defence and War Medals, M.I.D. oak leaf; Air Efficiency Award, G.VI.R. (Flt. Lt., R.A.F.V.R.), mounted as worn, generally good very fine (7) £3000-4000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, Awards to the Royal Air Force from the estate of the late Eric Campion.

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A.F.C. London Gazette 1 January 1949.

D.F.M. London Gazette 7 April 1942. The recommendation states:

‘This airman has taken part in operations over Greece, Crete and the Western Desert with great courage and determination. In the course of these operations he has destroyed at least 7 enemy aircraft and damaged several others. He has set an excellent example to the junior pilots of his Squadron [No. 33].’

George Eric Clifford “Jumbo” Genders, who was born in Doncaster in 1920, enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in July 1939. Called up two months later, he undertook pilot training and was posted as a Sergeant to No. 245 Squadron in Northern Ireland. But in November 1940 he joined No. 73 Squadron and was embarked on an aircraft carrier for the West Coast of Africa, where, on arrival, he flew one of the Squadron’s Hurricanes over to Egypt. Then, having undertaken further training at No. 70 O.T.U., he was posted to No. 33 Squadron in Greece in early 1941.

Genders proved himself to be an exceptional fighter pilot from the start, bringing down a Bf. 109, and damaging another, over Larissa in Greece in mid-April 1941, following a surprise dawn attack on his airfield by elements of II/JG 77. Such was the speed and ferocity of the German strike that the other two pilots of his stand-by Flight were both shot down and killed. He later described the incident, his very first time in action, in a letter home:

‘I was at about 7,000 feet a few miles from the aerodrome when I heard over the wireless that enemy aircraft were circling the aerodrome, so I flew back quickly and saw seven or eight 109s at my own height. I climbed 100 feet and then dived among them. I aimed at one from behind at 250 yards and the pilot must have realised he was being fired at because he did a sharp turn to the left and, turning inside him, I hit his engine with a beam shot. The pilot then baled out and, seeing another 109 coming head on at me, I opened fire at him and then we had passed one another. I got under him and he over me. All the 109s were then coming at me from all directions, so I manoeuvred quickly and in doing so jammed one of the aircraft controls, but the enemy fighters must have been running short of petrol because they all went off home.’

Soon afterwards, during a German raid on shipping in Piraeus, Genders claimed three Ju. 87s, although there appears to be some confusion over the exact date of the engagement - most probably it was 24 April, when three Stukas were reported missing and not claimed by any other pilots. It seems possible, too, that he brought down the Bf. 109 of Hauptmann Franz Lange, Kommandeur of II/JG 77, on his way home from Piraeus.

His success continued apace over Crete. On the 3 May 1941, during a 25-strong enemy attack on shipping in Suda Bay, Genders claimed two Ju. 88s shot down and another brace damaged, statistics that won him the accolade of tenth most successful Allied pilot in this theatre of war (see Air War For Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete, by Shores, Cull and Maliziz).

Subsequently evacuated, No. 33 Squadron was reformed in Egypt, and afterwards heavily engaged over the Egyptian-Libyan border area, not least during Operations “Brevity”, “Battleaxe” and “Crusader”. For his own part, Genders shot down two Fiat G50s on 17 June, shared in the destruction of a Savoia SM79 on 22 November and damaged a Ju. 88 on the same date. And in between such combat successes, he flew on numerous ground-strafing sorties, once setting three enemy trucks alight with his very first burst of fire. A well merited D.F.M. was gazetted in April 1942, the same month in that he was commissioned as a Pilot Officer.

Joining No. 103 Maintenance Unit at Aboukir in May 1942, Genders went on to serve as a test pilot on many aircraft types, a posting that met with his approval:

‘It is a great thrill to put a fast fighter through the maximum speed test and to open the throttles fully for five minutes. In the diving test we can get to terrific speeds.’

Inevitably, however, some of these flights nearly ended in disaster:

‘I was once in the middle of a fast dive with a Hurricane when suddenly the cockpit hood blew off, the side of the cockpit was torn away and the fabric on top of the fuselage was stripped. Luckily nothing else went and I got her down safely ... [and, on another occasion] ... Once, in the Cairo area, when I had tested a twin-engined plane and was bringing it in to land, one of the engines failed. I had to throttle back the other engine. I shot over the airfield with the plane partly out of control and managed to pancake her down on a roadway in the middle of an Army camp. There were huts all round, so I was pretty lucky. One of the engines was torn off and left on a telegraph post and the tail unit was left on another. Fortunately, no-one was hurt.’

Nor was this challenging appointment devoid of combat experience. Far from it. Among the projects assigned to Genders was a specially modified Spitfire V. The latter was stripped of all extraneous equipment and armed with only two .50-inch machine-guns, in order to reach sufficient altitude to engage the Lufwaffe’s Ju. 86Ps, hitherto unmolested reconnaissance aircraft that had pressurised crew quarters. No such luxury prevailed in Genders’ stripped-down Spitfire, where the temperature sometimes ‘dropped to 67 degrees below zero - 99 degrees of frost!’, or for his fellow pilots, Flying Officer G. W. H. Reynolds, D.F.C. and Pilot Officer Gold, the whole shortly to become known as “The Three Musketeers of Strato” for their gallant deeds ‘ten miles above earth’. Genders fought his first high altitude engagements in late June, damaging Ju. 86Ps on the 26th and 27th of the month, but it was not until 6 September that he was able to share in the actual destruction of such an aircraft. This extraordinary achievement, however, nearly ended in disaster. Genders’ takes up the story in a letter home to his parents (dated 10 September):

‘ ... On my way back to shore my engine failed so I had to bale out over the sea. I did this at 1000 feet and the parachute opened quite quickly, but I did not have time to get any sensations of the descent, as I had to get the release gear ready for when I hit the water. I do not think I went under the water. I got rid of the parachute harness as quickly as possible and then blew my Mae West up. We do not fill our Mae Wests on the ground as any air in them expands to about six times its volume at very high altitudes, and this would explode the thing.

When I had blown the Mae West up, I discarded my helmet, shoes and socks, but to have got my flying kit off I would have had to have taken off my Mae West, and, as this is put on like a jacket, I do not think I would have got it on again, so I had to keep my flying suit on. When I was in the water, I realised I was in an awful fix. I was ten or more miles from the coast and I thought my only hope was for a searching aircraft to find me. I learned later that 12 aircraft searched for me and I saw five of these. Two of them had come fairly near to me but they had not seen me although I splashed about as much as possible.

After the aircraft that were looking for me disappeared, I became very despondent. But I thought of one of your sentences in a letter, ‘God who has protected you for so long will continue to do so’. I decided I would try to swim to shore even if it took me several days. I was on my back with the Mae West supporting my head, and I did a kind of back stroke with my arms and scissors kick with my legs. The swimming kept me warm but my movements seemed very slow and I soon became tired, my arms particularly. I wondered if it was a hopeless task and then realised nothing is impossible to God, and I recollected hymn No. 10 we had at a service I attended at Athens. I seemed to get renewed strength after that and continued swimming all the afternoon and night. At about 8.30 in the morning I saw telephone posts on shore, and I finally got to land about 10 o’clock. I had been in the water 21 hours.

Two natives who were shooting sea birds came up to me. I undressed and dried in the sun. One of the natives lent me one of his undergarments to wear whilst my shorts and shirt dried and we talked to a coastguard camp about two miles away. I phoned up my C.O. to tell him I was O.K. and asked for transport, and then I had some food. The first thing I ate was a small piece of bread and cheese. I had hardly swallowed this when I felt sick, so I went outside and got rid of four or five pints of sea water, plus the small piece of bread and cheese. I then went back and had a hearty meal of boiled eggs and home-made bread ...’

Granted a week’s sick leave, Genders was back in action at the height of the Battle of El Alamein, bringing down a reconnaissance Ju. 88 on 21 October. This was to be his last claim.

Having accumulated a fine wartime record as a test pilot out in the Middle East, Genders attended the Empire Test Pilots’ School at Cranfield in January 1946. Subsequently posted as a Squadron Leader to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in May, he continued his good work, and was rewarded with an A.F.C. in the New Year Honours of 1949. Latterly he was employed in testing the D.H. 108, the swept-wing research aircraft without horizontal tail surfaces and Britain’s first supersonic jet, also known as the “Flying Wing”, in order to assist ongoing research into the development of the Comet airliner.

Only three such aircraft were ever built, one claiming the life of Geoffrey de Havilland, son of the famous aircraft manufacturer, when it exploded over the Thames Estuary in September 1946, and the other two, on being released into service, their respective R.A.F. pilots. Tragically, Genders was one of the latter, having got into trouble over Hartley Wintney in Hampshire on 1 May 1950. An eye-witness described how he saw the D.H. 108 ‘whirling head-over-heels and then windmilling, wing-tip over wing-tip ... like a sheet of paper caught in a sharp, unsteady breeze’. Another witness saw Genders bale out at around 200 feet, but ‘instead of falling clear he stopped several feet from the plane, and swung round apparently attached to it’.

Sold with a quantity of original documentation, including the recipient’s Flying Log Books (3), covering the period April 1941 to November 1943, with opening endorsement ‘First Log Book was lost in Greece’, followed by summary of hours flown, units and locations; December 1943 to August 1948 and September 1948 to May 1950, all of them with multiple ‘R.A.F. Central Depository’ stamps, dated 5 June 1950; Buckingham Palace forwarding letter for the A.F.C.; a selection of wartime letters written by the recipient on active service to his mother and father; several excellent wartime photographs; and a copy of the biography by Pauline Shacklock, Eric Genders, Legendary Fighter Ace and Test Pilot (1998). A rare and emotive collection encompassing the career of a gallant fighter and test pilot.