Sergeant Les Miles

Les Miles was a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner who served with 86 from January 1942 to July 1942, when his Beaufort successfully made the trip to Malta. Les was on the same course as Atkinson, Taylor and Twelvetrees at 5 OTU at RAF Chivenor and can be seen in the group photo on the home page. Please let us know if you recognise anybody in any of these photos. A tabular summary of Les's service record and operational history can be found at the bottom of this page.

The photos below are from earlier courses that Les took. As usual click on the thumbnail to open the image in a new tab.

Below are two photographs from Les's time as a POW, believed to be Campo Concentrate No. 35 in Italy.

The last is a scan of Les's Goldfish Club membership certificate

The remainder of the text on this page was kindly supplied by Paul Miles.

Lesley Miles flew in Beaufort torpedo bombers as a wireless operator/air gunner with 86 Squadron, first in Britain then in Malta, where some reports have the crew absorbed into 39 Squadron. His aircraft was shot down over the Mediterranean and the crew taken prisoner in August 1942. He later made the forced march known as the Lamsdorf death march, from the Lamsdorf POW camp (now Lambinowice in Poland), across Germany to near the French border.

Les was born on 9th of February 1920 in Northwich, the son of George and Elizabeth Miles, and lived up until the war in Winsford, Cheshire. He worked in the local Post Office. He married Mabel Morrey in July 1941, and the couple had a son, Paul Miles in 1946. Post-war they became shopkeepers in Northenden, on the outskirts of Manchester. Les later became a travelling salesman, to augment his income, and the family eventually sold the shop and moved to Timperley in Cheshire. The family emigrated to Australia in 1965 and Les became a stores clerk in the Queensland State Government, retiring at 62 years of age. He and Mabel retired to Miami on Queensland's Gold Coast, where Mabel died in 1988 aged 67. Les remained on the Gold Coast until shortly before his death at 90 years of age on 15th March 2010.

Les was very much a physical man; a dancer, a golfer, a bowler, a tennis player, a billiards and snooker champion. A strong constitution and a pragmatic outlook plus sheer good luck allowed him to survive the war. He survived three serious plane crashes, including one in which he was the only survivor. He survived four days in an open lifeboat, capture and transport to Germany, and life in a POW camp. And finally he survived a march across Europe in one of the worst winters, through a hostile local population, with increasingly desperate guards. Many men who survived the camps did not survive that march of almost 800 km in appalling conditions.

Like most men of his generation, Les Miles said very little about what he had seen and done in those years. He counted himself lucky and got on with his life, putting the war behind him. In his eighties, at the request of his family, he discussed his war experiences and gave what specific details he could remember. At 89 years he still lived independently, drove his own car and remained mentally acute. Shortly before his 90th birthday, he was afflicted with an aggressive melanoma but declined treatment, choosing to let nature take its course.

The following are specific memories he recounted.

Training

He described gunnery training in Scotland, where the targets were towed by Polish pilots. The Poles were very angry at being given menial work when the Germans were occupying their country. They were hostile to the trainees and made gunnery practice as difficult as possible.

Operations

He remembered being part of a large group searching for a German battleship in the Channel. Extensive cloud cover hid the ship from view and the search failed.

Crashes

He described filling a vacant spot on a training flight with a crew he did not know, and the aircraft crashing into water near the airstrip. He said WO/Gunners swapped position on each flight, and the wireless position was normally safer than the gun turret. He was allocated the gun turret on this flight, and was able to escape the aircraft through the turret cover which had broken up on impact. The other crew were trapped inside as the plane sank and all died.

He was in the second of 3 planes in a raid on St Peter Port, Guernsey on 17/1/42. The aircraft suffered engine failure on the return to base and crash landed. This appears to have been his first flight with what became his regular crew; P/O Peter Roper (RCAF), Sgt G. Codd, and Sgt E.N Checketts (Les called him Ben). The crew were finally shot down in August 1942 after transfer to Malta, attacking a convoy in the Mediterranean. Les described struggling to access an inflatable dinghy and transferring to it as the plane sank. He described 4 days in the open boat, then being dumped in heavy surf and struggling to get ashore, where the locals fed them, gave them clothes, and passed them to the Italian military.

POW

He described being held in an old monastery, which he thought was at Padula in Italy. A card sent home gives an address of Campo 35. They were moved out and handed to the Germans, who put them in rail wagons for the trip north. He remembered men tearing boards from the floors of the wagons so as to drop out on the tracks on steep inclines when the train slowed down. They were unaware that the Germans had a flat bed wagon at the rear of the train with a machine gun crew on it. P/O Roper's crew all reached the internment camps intact but eventually were sent to different camps and lost contact. POW records show Les in Lamsdorf (344), Pete Roper and Sgt Codd in Sagan/Belaria (L3), Ben Checketts in Kunau (8C).

He described the "40 holer" toilet block where the toilets were long open benches with holes spaced along them, and the horse-drawn sewage tanker which one day overturned, spreading its contents across the open assembly area. The Russian advance forced the Germans to evacuate the camps and march the men west in winter. He remembered sleeping in barns or in open country, stealing root crops from fields at risk of a beating or worse, and how the guards abandoned them one night near the French border, where the advancing Americans eventually found them. His war was over.

We can only admire the airmen of that time, both those who survived the war and those who were lost to it. We mourn their passing.

More photographs of Les

Les's service record and operational history