Young war hero finally laid to rest

Margaret Walsh, 88, from Tullamore, Co Offaly, will make the journey to Bergen in the Netherlands on Wednesday to see her brother RAF gunner Sergeant John Kehoe, who was shot down in November 1941, laid to rest with full military honours.

In doing so she will be fulfilling the dying wish of her mother Ellen who passed away in 1947 without seeing her son buried on consecrated ground.

The 19-year-old, known as Jack, was part of a four-man Hampden bomber crew shot down near the occupied Dutch coast on November 8 1941 while on a mission to northern Germany.

The bodies of two of the men who bailed out seconds before the impact, Warrant Officer Christopher Saunders and Sgt James D'Arcy, were recovered and buried at the time. But Sgt Kehoe and crewmate Sgt Stanley Mullenger, from Barking, Essex, were trapped inside the plane when it crashed into soft ground in a field at Berkhout in the neighbourhood of Hoorn.

The two men remained inside the wreckage when the Germans had the crater filled in, lost for decades in a field of potatoes and tulips.

But following a long-running campaign spearheaded by Mrs Walsh and her daughter Margaret Tracey, from Naas, County Kildare, the plane was finally excavated by Dutch air force specialists last year.

Mrs Walsh once hoped to be able to bring her brother back to Ireland for burial. But as the two men's remains were impossible to accurately separate after so many years they are to be buried in the same coffin alongside the bodies of WO Saunders and Sgt D'Arcy at Bergen General Cemetery.

Mrs Walsh, who will be accompanied by 16 members of her family, is planning to spend a few moments alone with the coffin to pay her respects before the ceremony takes place.

"I would like to say goodbye to him after all these years," she said. "It will be the finish of a long fight and it is all thanks to my daughter Margaret, she did all the work."