大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Maddy Bridge, Charlotte Sawford and Alexandra Jamieson from Swavesey Village College on behalf of John Leslie Fitton.

John Leslie Fitton flew Beaufighters in the Second World War in 1944. Before the war he was a medical scientist at the Evans Biological Institute in Runcorn, but in 1943, at the age of 21 he voluntarily went over to Canada to train to be a fighter pilot. He started fighting after being in Canada for a short while in 1944. He did low-level flying to stay away from the radars and would attack lots of ships along the coastline.
He often went over to Italy to bomb ships; he'd also go to Japan. One man he'd been with for two years was executed by the Japanese even though they were supposed to take prisoners of war. He also went to Malaya where he was living in a 'bamboo basher' deep in the jungle. This is where 'Operation Zipper' was carried out. This operation was storming a Japanese aerodrome and capturing it. They flew over tanks made of plywood and canvas and left them in the jungle. The mission had to be postponed as the tanks were quickly eaten by termites!

Fitton lost quite a few friends during the war, but him and his navigator both survived for the duration of the war. Apparently it wasn't easy to keep in contact with family. When he finally came home in 1945 he met his five year old daughter, Anne Fitton, this is the first time she remembered seeing him.

22 years after the war finished, Fitton and his wife Betty went for a holiday on the coast of Italy. There they met a German family; the father was called Heinz Scheimamn. The two of them got talking and discovered that they had been shooting at each other at the exact same air raid that Fitton had carried out 22 years before. Les (Fitton) said "let's call it quits, for you shooting at me at 6:00am when I came past, it was a long time ago, let's have another beer!"

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