Commander Anthony Shaw MBE Royal Navy

COMMANDER ANTHONY SHAW

            Born at Balfour, a small town bordering Lake Kootenay in British Columbia, Anthony Shaw’s remarkable career as a naval aviator began in Portsmouth Barracks as a Naval Airman Second Class at the age of 18 in 1942.  After learning to fly in America, his four deck landings in a Hurricane fighter onto the small escort carrier Vindex in the Clyde qualified him as a Fleet Air Arm fighter pilot.

            His first major front-line operation was in support of the Allied landings at Salerno in Italy in September 1943 where the only British air cover available was provided by five small and two large aircraft carriers.  Shaw flew Seafires – the navalised version of the famous Spitfire – from the small carrier Attacker, providing ground attack support for the army and protection from a much weakened Luftwaffe.

            Briefly back in England, he escorted a Russian convoy before returning to the Mediterranean for a secondment to the South African Air Force, dive bombing German positions near Arezzo in a Spitfire.  He was lucky to return from one sortie after a hit from a shell; “I was astonished at the damage – little of the underside of the wing was left and the main spar was fractured”.

            Rejoining the Attacker, one of nine carriers providing cover for the invasion of southern France in August 1944, Shaw was shot down by anti-aircraft artillery while strafing a motorised column somewhere near Avignon.  Flames quickly enveloping his cockpit, he was able to invert his aircraft and, after a struggle, fall out and open his parachute.

            Despite hiding in scrub, he was swiftly found by soldiers and captured.  He was treated firmly but not roughly, given that many of the local roads featured burnt-out German tanks and vehicles, victims of overpowering Allied air superiority.  His interrogators believed he was flying from Corsica, having not understood about aircraft carriers.

            Knowing that once he reached a PoW camp his chances of escape would vanish, Shaw managed surreptitiously to unbuckle leather straps holding the canvas cover of his lorry and in the dark drop over the side into a ditch.  Trying to make his way south through wooded country, the next day he took refuge in a field which suddenly became the site of an anti-aircraft battery and one of its soldiers virtually trod on him.  Captured a second time, his schoolboy German and French helped to establish a relationship with his two escorts, one a cheerful corporal called Konrad, the other a private called Kurt.  He surprised his captors by being able to play ‘Lili Marlene’ on a looted violin.

            Having walked a long way to a town called Grignan, he was about to be turned over to the official PoW organisation when, although hardly understanding what was being said, it became clear that his suggestion that the three of them should ‘disappear’ and wait for the Americans to arrive had started to bear fruit.  “How would we be treated?” he was asked, Shaw replying that they would be taken to America and put to work on a farm.

            They decided to enlist the help of the French.  Shaw’s aircrew lectures on escapology had suggested that one should approach a single person, preferably a woman, preferably working class, and, sure enough, they contacted the wife of a leading Resistance member who hid them in a cellar until the American army noisily overran the position.

            Shaw’s two colleagues were indeed shipped to a farm in America and later sent him postcards, one of which said that Konrad had been told by the SS to take this troublesome airman away and shoot him.  Shaw kept in touch for many years.

            A series of adventures saw him back with 879 Squadron aboard the Attacker where he flew numerous sorties during the Aegean campaign, the process of winkling German forces out of the Greek islands. In late 1944 he returned to UK having been appointed MBE for his ‘gallantry and devotion to duty’ and, deprived of his hard-earned leave, sent to Scotland to learn how to be a Deck Landing Control Officer, or ‘batsman’, the expert guide for the final seconds of a deck landing.  After working up with 899 Squadron Seafires, he and the squadron were embarked in the escort carrier Chaser and sailed for the Far East where they were used to ferry replacement aircraft to the large carriers of the British Pacific Fleet, several of which had had their air groups wrecked by kamikaze attacks.

            Shaw’s unusual career continued after his reluctant demobilisation from the RNVR in April 1946.  With a degree of chutzpah, he tried for a job at the Foreign Office but the doorman wouldn’t let him in.  On the pavement he met a King’s Messenger.  In conversation, he was promised an application form and to his considerable surprise obtained an interview and the job.

            He was posted to Hong Kong and with four colleagues was responsible for distributing – as a passenger – diplomatic classified mail around the Far East including the major cities of China and Japan, Bangkok, Rangoon and Saigon, often in uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous flying conditions.  In India he witnessed the terrible consequences of Partition.

            In March 1947 he returned to London and covered the cities of Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But then an opportunity arose to re-join the Royal Navy as a regular –always a lifetime ambition which he took up with enthusiasm, re-qualifying in Spitfires and spending two years in 813 Squadron flying the torpedo attack Firebrand aircraft off Home Fleet carriers. In 1951 he was appointed to the Empire Test Pilots School at Farnborough where he qualified as a test pilot, thereafter testing an extraordinary range of aircraft – jet and propeller-driven – and their weapons.  His entertaining autobiography The Upside of Trouble which appeared in 2005 recounts numerous life-threatening incidents – on one occasion landing a valuable prototype with one wheel stuck up which he managed to save with minimum damage but writing off the attendant ambulance, parked too close to the runway.

            He was commended by the US Navy for his work while flying as a member of an American squadron based at Atlantic City, going supersonic for the first time and   assisting the integration of the British inventions of the angled deck and mirror landing sight into American aircraft carriers.

            Later tours included a commission in the cruiser Gambia in the Far East, Lieutenant-Commander (Air) at Abbotsinch air station, conversion to helicopters, command of two squadrons and Lieutenant-Commander(Flying) or second in command of the air department in the carrier Hermes where, in the Far East again, he was  court-martialled for insolence towards his boss, the Commander (Air), during a professional argument, the rights and wrongs of which were established when the Admiralty quashed his conviction. 

            At the end of his flying, Shaw had over 4500 hoiurs in his logbook and over 600 deck landings by day and night.  He had piloted no less than 63 types of aircraft.  Promoted to Commander in 1968, an enjoyable duty was Defence Advisor to the British High Commission in Sierra Leone based at Freetown.  After working with Sea Cadets in London, he retired in 1974, taking up a career as a land agent in Scotland.

            His first marriage was dissolved.  He is survived by his second wife Elisabeth Shimmons whom he married in 1992 and the two sons of the first marriage.

Commander Anthony Shaw MBE, naval aviator, was born on September 5, 1923.  He died on November 21 aged 89