A fine Second World War Navigator’s D.F.C. group of five awarded to Flying Officer O. J. Pritchard, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, who completed over 60 sorties in Path Finder Force Mosquitos, half of them as “Target Marker”

Distinguished Flying Cross, G.VI.R., reverse officially dated 1945; 1939-45 Star; France and Germany Star; Defence and War Medals, good very fine (5) £1600-1800

D.F.C. London Gazette 20 July 1945. The original recommendation states:

‘Pilot Officer O. J. Pritchard, Navigator to Flight Lieutenant Skitch, teams up well with his pilot, sharing the same natural disposition to do all that he humanly can to succeed at all costs. He displays complete mastery over the problems of intensely accurate navigation with which OBOE navigators are faced, and his results show him to be a craftsman of no mean order.

Pilot Officer Pritchard has now finished his first operational tour in Bomber Command; he has a total of 53 sorties, 31 of which were as a target marker. He is most deserving of the award of the Distinguished Flying Cross.’

Oliver John Pritchard, who was a resident of Sevenoaks in Kent, commenced his wartime career with assorted training courses in Southern Rhodesia in September 1943, and in January 1944 he qualified as a Navigator “B”. Returning to the U.K. for an Air Observers’ Advanced Navigation Course in June 1944, where he gained his first flying experience in Mosquito aircraft, he was posted to No. 109 Squadron at Little Staughton that September. And on the 4th, having teamed-up with Flight Lieutenant Skitch as his pilot, he completed his first sortie, against Steenwijk, the first of four successive visits to that target in a week.

The remainder of his time with No. 109 was no less hectic, for, as confirmed by his D.F.C. recommendation and Flying Log Book, he completed another 49 sorties by mid-March 1945, more often than not as “Marker”. However, what his recommendation does not take into account is the fact Pritchard went on to participate in another 10 operational outings, including strikes against Munich and Osnabruck. And of the more heavily defended German targets, his Mosquito visited Cologne on no less than four occasions, and twice went to Dortmund, Duisberg and Mannheim.

Pritchard ended his wartime career flying “Manna” operations to The Hague in May 1945, and his R.A.F. career in November 1946, after a stint as an instructor.

Sold with the recipient’s original Flying Log Book covering the period September 1943 to November 1946; Buckingham Palace forwarding letter for the D.F.C., and one or two post-war air crew reunion programmes / menus, one of them signed by several veterans.

See Lot 1146 for his father’s awards.