Wing Commander Guy Gibson was just 24 when he took charge of the famous Dam Busters operation to blow holes in German reservoirs.
Between stints serving as a Second World War pilot, he spent periods of leave at 32, Aberdeen Place with his wife Evie.
It was at the flat that he wrote his account of the raid Enemy Coast Ahead, and where Evie received the telegram in 1944 notifying her of his death.
Born in Simla, India in 1918, Gibson moved to England with his mother aged six and went to school in Cornwall, Kent and Oxford.
At first rejected by the RAF for his relative lack of height, he was accepted in 1936 and took part in his first air attack on Germany in September 1939.
Operations ranged from minelaying against German forces to attacks on troop barges in occupied ports across the Channel that could have been used to launch an invasion.
In July 1940, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for gallantry, and by September that year had flown on 37 raids.
Promoted to Flight Lieutenant, he transferred to Fighter Command, developing techniques for intercepting German night bombing raids – and shooting down four German bombers.
By April 1942 he was a Wing Commander in charge of 106 Squadron, overseeing its transition to the new Lancaster bombers. Under Arthur Harris of Bomber Command, Gibson’s squadron hit multiple targets in France, Germany and Italy, including docks, factories, railyards, ships and towns.
It was his next command, 617 Squadron that saw him and his pilots train for a daring low-level raid against six dams on reservoirs in the German industrial heartland, the Ruhr.
It was a seemingly impossible mission to drop experimental canister-shaped bouncing bombs designed by Barnes Wallis from 60 feet above the water while flying a heavy Lancaster – calling for great piloting skill and precise aiming.
Strategically and tactically, the raid was only a partial success, but a brilliant technical and operational achievement.
Of the six dams, the Möhne and Eder were badly damaged, enough to cause temporary industrial disruption, flooding coal mines and losing hydro-electric power.
But the cost was eight Lancaster aircraft, the lives of 53 air crew – 40 per cent of those who set out – and about 1,600 civilians including French, Belgian, Polish and Soviet prisoners of war.
However the raid’s success also lay in its huge propaganda value and boost to Allied morale, with Gibson awarded the Victoria Cross and hailed by Winston Churchill as the “dam buster” and “one of the most splendid of our fighting men”.
By now a celebrity, Gibson accompanied Churchill to North America and did a lecture tour.
But although he was selected as Conservative parliamentary candidate for Macclesfield, in 1944, he itched to return to action and persuaded Bomber Harris to let him fly again.
After a successful raid on a ‘soft’ target over Germany on the night of September 19, 1944, Gibson crashed in the Netherlands. He was flying an unfamiliar aircraft the De Havilland Mosquito, with Jim Warwick, a navigator he did not know.
Both men died.
Some found Gibson arrogant, others hardworking and straightforward, but Johnny Johnson, who flew on the Dam Busters raid, recalled how his commander took the first attack to assess the defences and drew flak from each crew as they embarked on their run.
He said: “To me that is the essence of good leadership, always from the front.”
Gibson was immortalised as a war hero in the 1955 film Dambusters starring Richard Todd and is buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Steenbergen Neetherlands alongside Jim Warwick.
