John Everard Gurdon

John Everard Gurdon, DFC (24 May 1898 – 14 April 1973), was a British flying ace in the First World War credited with twenty-eight victories.

From September 1916 he attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst,[3] as a "Gentlemen Cadet", and after passing out (graduating), he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment on 1 May 1917.

His citation read: On 10 July his aircraft was badly shot up, Gurdon being hit by a bullet in the left arm, and his gunner, Lt. J. J. Scaramaga, being killed.

He then translated Georg Paul Neumann's Die Deutschen Luftstreitkräfte im Weltkriege, an official history, which was published in English as The German Air Force in the Great War in 1921.

Despite being blinded in one eye after a car crash in 1935 and suffering a hip problem following an aircraft landing accident, Gurdon joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and was granted a commission "for the duration of hostilities" as a pilot officer (on probation) on 20 September 1940.

[18] He served as an instructor and managed to fly on several bombing operations unofficially as a front gunner on Wellingtons, but after a landing accident aggravated his existing hip problem he was forced to relinquish his commission on 29 September 1941.