Surviving the Most Dangerous WWII Job: The Incredible Story of an Irish Airman's 31 Missions

The Perilous Role of a Rear Gunner

If ever an Irish airman had reason to foresee his death, it was young James Patrick O’Dwyer when he left his native Cahir in 1943 to join Britain’s Royal Air Force for the later years of the second World War. Not only did he become a member of 101 (Special Services) Squadron, which had the RAF’s highest casualty rates of the war by far. He was also a rear (or tail) gunner, the most dangerous job on a plane.

O’Dwyer and his colleagues were on the front line of an intelligence war, much of which was fought back in Bletchley Park, a country estate north of London. There, another man with Tipperary roots – Alan Turing, whose mother was from Borrisokane – led the team of cryptographers that unlocked Germany’s Enigma code.

The 101 Squadron, meanwhile, was specially equipped bombing teams that doubled up as intelligence gatherers. Their crews always included a German-speaking radio operator, who listened in on enemy communications, passing on important information while jamming broadcasts.

This work meant the planes – Lancasters typically – needed three large and very visible aerials, marking them for close attention from the Germans, who called them Dudelsäcke (“bagpipes”).

But if the aircraft in general were a target, rear gunners were especially so. They sat in a Perspex bubble – for maximum visibility – between the tail fins: sitting ducks for enemy gunners who knew the plane as a whole was vulnerable if they were taken out.

We can presume that unlike his fictional near namesake in Shane MacGowan’s The Body of an American, the Jim O’Dwyer who joined the RAF on his 18th birthday was not a big man. His job was a short straw in more ways than one. “Tail-end Charlies”, as rear gunners were known, had to be small to fit their cramped quarters.

The role was bleakly immortalised in Joseph Heller’s antiwar satire Catch-22, thanks to the painful death of Snowden. Snowden is a “waist gunner” but dies in the back of the plane from injuries the sight of which causes the adjacent “tiny tail gunner” to pass out repeatedly: a vision the book’s haunted protagonist replays over and over.

Catch-22 takes its name from the plight of fighter pilots who can be excused from dangerous flying missions only if found insane but are disqualified from insanity by their rational desire to quit. The book’s anti-hero eventually strips off all his blood-soaked clothes in protest.

As his life slips away, Snowden complains only of the cold. That was another of the many hardships rear gunners faced. Their turrets were unpressurised, freezing and noisy. The gunners were also separated from their parachutes and had the plane’s longest escape route.

Overall, 101 Squadron suffered 1,176 fatalities during the war, more than twice the number lost by the RAF’s Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. Despite which, the by then 19-year-old O’Dwyer survived his full tour of 30 missions, squeezed into a three-month period in the autumn of 1944, and did an extra mission for good measure.

It was a fraught period in the war, including such famous battles as Operation Market Garden (inspiration for the film A Bridge Too Far). As quoted by the London Times, an archivist at the bomber command centre called O’Dwyer’s tour of duty “one of the most condensed ... I’ve ever seen”.

After it ended, according to the Times, he was transferred to the safer environs of an air-traffic-control unit for the remainder of the conflict. He then settled in England, rejoining the RAF during the 1950s and later working for a transport company. He married twice and had two children.

Discretion was a requirement of his wartime work but according to the RAF’s Facebook tribute, O’Dwyer remained reticent long afterwards, and “only during the final decade of his life did he open up slightly when pressed (and bribed) with a Guinness or two”.

He did, however, make the news briefly in September 2024, thanks to man less famous for silence, Nigel Farage. Farage was O’Dwyer’s local MP, then protesting against the withdrawal of universal winter fuel payments for pensioners.

The war hero from Tipperary was temporarily a hostage to political PR, featuring in photographs with a “fuming” Farage in The Sun and elsewhere. But he survived that too, to celebrate his 100th birthday last April.

As a veteran of 101 Squadron, O’Dwyer would surely have been the only member of an elite unit to reach a 101st birthday. In the event, having passed one great milestone, he fell just three months short of another. He died in late January, 108 years to the week after Yeats’s famously doomed airman, Maj Robert Gregory.