The Lost War Diaries of Roy Lane

This is the story of an exceptional young man whose war-time experience was long, considerable and so unusual as to be almost unique.

Roy Lane joined the RAF in 1938 as soon as he was old enough. He trained to fly Hurricanes - single-seater fighter-planes. His war-time journey took him from the Battle of Britain via McIndoe’s pioneering plastic surgery to the Merchant Ships’ Fighter Unit and the so slow-moving Atlantic and Arctic convoys. In 1942 he commanded a small RAF base at Archangel on the White Sea. Posted to India in 1943, he volunteered to become the Air Liaison Officer attached to Brigadier Bernard Fergusson’s Chindit Brigade. Its secret mission, ‘Operation Thursday’ would take it hundreds of miles on foot through the jungle-covered mountains of North-West Burma to the hoped-for turning point in the land war with Japan.

Roy, the eldest, had two brothers Richard and Peter who also became airmen and a sister, Diana, who joined the WAAF later in the war. The family home was in Southampton, soon to be very much in the front-line of the war with Germany.

Roy’s letters from Burma urged his family to keep them to supplement the material he was gathering for ‘my book’ in his diaries. His five war diaries were last seen in the late 1960s in the bottom a wardrobe in Southampton. Searching for them uncovered much that was unknown, unexpected and sometimes extraordinary. Private letters, official correspondence, newspaper cuttings and personal recollections reveal moments of high drama - a family house destroyed by a bomb; a plane crashing in flames - good times; friends and family, some long lost.

The ‘logic of war’, the context, is explored to explain why there and why then? The interplay of fate and chance brings the story to its cruel conclusion.