Raymond (Ray) Gilmour - 1911-1944
Raymond (Ray) Gilmore Mellsop
Obituary
Flight Lieutenant R Mellsop was killed in active service Over Burma. Raymond was the younger son of Margaret and the late Lionel Mellsop of Waiuku. F.L. Mellsop was 32 years. Educated at Pukekohe School and Kings College. For some Years he was an active member of the Auckland Gliding Club. He joined the Royal N.Z.A.F. in June 1941 and left in September of the same year for Canada where he gained a commission at completion of his training. He was then posted to bomber squadron in England, from where he was sent to India.
NZ Herald
Obituary
Flight Lieutenant R Mellsop was killed in active service Over Burma. Raymond was the younger son of Margaret and the late Lionel Mellsop of Waiuku. F.L. Mellsop was 32 years. Educated at Pukekohe School and Kings College. For some Years he was an active member of the Auckland Gliding Club. He joined the Royal N.Z.A.F. in June 1941 and left in September of the same year for Canada where he gained a commission at completion of his training. He was then posted to bomber squadron in England, from where he was sent to India.
NZ Herald
Ray passed his matriculation exam in 1927, College senior Gymnastic Champion in 1928. A sport he was very passionate about. School Prefect in 1929, leaving school at the end of the year. He was fortunate in gaining employment in the Public Service in 1930, as the great depression of the 1930s was well under way. While with the Public Trust he had numerous transfers from Auckland, Palmerston North, Dannevirke, and Nelson and back to Auckland in 1941, all the while gymnastics playing an important roll, along with golf and tramping. Ray was only in Auckland for a short while in 1941, before being called for Air Force training.
The Second World War broke out in September 1939, Ray did not immediately volunteer for service in the armed forces because he was anxious to serve in the Air Force. He was still very interested in gliding but at the outbreak of the war he was older that the maximum age at which the Air Force would accept recruits. However he felt that in order to keep up the number of recruits required the authorities would have to raise the age limit sooner or later. So while waiting for that to happen he joined the Scottish Territorial Army Regiment and continued with it until the Royal New Zealand Air Force accepted him for training in June 1941. His initial training was at Blenheim Air Force Base until September of that year when he left for Saskatoon in the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan, which was the site of a very large training base for the Allied Air Force trainees. Many of the NZ Air Force recruits had their final training there, at least during the earlier part of the war. He passed out of the training school as a pilot, with a commission, i.e. Flying Officer.
From Saskatoon, Ray joined a Coastal Command Squadron of the Royal Air Force in England, flying Sunderland Flying Boats. After his tour of duty with that Squadron he was sent to India to join that country's Air Transport Unit. That posting saw him flying Hudson transport planes all over India transporting personnel, equipment and other goods for the armed services. Because of the heat in India and shortage of planes resulting in long flying hours, conditions were very rigorous. While on that assignment he contracted the disease of Meningitis and was thus hospitalised and very ill. I do not remember how long he was in hospital but when he recovered sufficiently he was sent, for some weeks to the high country of Kashmir to recuperate. The Air Force Medical Board decided that he should be discharged and sent home. He did not agree with the decision and after reassessment by the Board rejoined his squadron. It was surely a strange co-incidence that his mother, living in Hamilton, and one of her brothers living in the Kaikohe district, were both stricken with meningitis at and near the same time as Ray succumbed. None of then had had recent contact with each other.
Sometime about then Ray's squadron was detailed to assist in supplying Brigadie Wingate's force in Burma, which was operating in the dense jungle forest behind the Japanese line. That was a type of guerrilla warfare dependent entirely on the Air Force for their supplies including personnel. Landing strips, I doubt they would have merited the title aerodrome, were made in clearings in the jungle by dropping machines and men by parachute to clear and level a strip sufficiently to enable the supply planes to land and take off. I believe that those supply missions were all flown at night. We do not know what caused Ray's plane to crash when going in to land at the airstrip on 11 April 1944 but later we were given some information by one or two of his air force friends, who were serving with him in India, which had reached them from eye witnesses at the landing strip. The information seemed to indicate that a fault had developed in the mechanical parts of the aircraft because while circling the strip preparatory to landing, the plane instead of continuing to circle suddenly went in a straight line into a hill to one side of the strip.
All the crew of the aircraft were killed but twenty or so soldiers who were being ferried into the strip survived. The crew were buried on the spot and the graves marked, but some years later when War Graves Commission staff were frying to locate the graves in order to mark them permanently or remove then to an established War Graves Cemetery they could not be found, such was the growth in the jungle in the intervening years. Ray had been promoted to the rank of Flight- Lieutenant but did not know of his promotion because the Official notice, while dated a day or two before his death, had not reached his superiors.
The Second World War broke out in September 1939, Ray did not immediately volunteer for service in the armed forces because he was anxious to serve in the Air Force. He was still very interested in gliding but at the outbreak of the war he was older that the maximum age at which the Air Force would accept recruits. However he felt that in order to keep up the number of recruits required the authorities would have to raise the age limit sooner or later. So while waiting for that to happen he joined the Scottish Territorial Army Regiment and continued with it until the Royal New Zealand Air Force accepted him for training in June 1941. His initial training was at Blenheim Air Force Base until September of that year when he left for Saskatoon in the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan, which was the site of a very large training base for the Allied Air Force trainees. Many of the NZ Air Force recruits had their final training there, at least during the earlier part of the war. He passed out of the training school as a pilot, with a commission, i.e. Flying Officer.
From Saskatoon, Ray joined a Coastal Command Squadron of the Royal Air Force in England, flying Sunderland Flying Boats. After his tour of duty with that Squadron he was sent to India to join that country's Air Transport Unit. That posting saw him flying Hudson transport planes all over India transporting personnel, equipment and other goods for the armed services. Because of the heat in India and shortage of planes resulting in long flying hours, conditions were very rigorous. While on that assignment he contracted the disease of Meningitis and was thus hospitalised and very ill. I do not remember how long he was in hospital but when he recovered sufficiently he was sent, for some weeks to the high country of Kashmir to recuperate. The Air Force Medical Board decided that he should be discharged and sent home. He did not agree with the decision and after reassessment by the Board rejoined his squadron. It was surely a strange co-incidence that his mother, living in Hamilton, and one of her brothers living in the Kaikohe district, were both stricken with meningitis at and near the same time as Ray succumbed. None of then had had recent contact with each other.
Sometime about then Ray's squadron was detailed to assist in supplying Brigadie Wingate's force in Burma, which was operating in the dense jungle forest behind the Japanese line. That was a type of guerrilla warfare dependent entirely on the Air Force for their supplies including personnel. Landing strips, I doubt they would have merited the title aerodrome, were made in clearings in the jungle by dropping machines and men by parachute to clear and level a strip sufficiently to enable the supply planes to land and take off. I believe that those supply missions were all flown at night. We do not know what caused Ray's plane to crash when going in to land at the airstrip on 11 April 1944 but later we were given some information by one or two of his air force friends, who were serving with him in India, which had reached them from eye witnesses at the landing strip. The information seemed to indicate that a fault had developed in the mechanical parts of the aircraft because while circling the strip preparatory to landing, the plane instead of continuing to circle suddenly went in a straight line into a hill to one side of the strip.
All the crew of the aircraft were killed but twenty or so soldiers who were being ferried into the strip survived. The crew were buried on the spot and the graves marked, but some years later when War Graves Commission staff were frying to locate the graves in order to mark them permanently or remove then to an established War Graves Cemetery they could not be found, such was the growth in the jungle in the intervening years. Ray had been promoted to the rank of Flight- Lieutenant but did not know of his promotion because the Official notice, while dated a day or two before his death, had not reached his superiors.
Kenneth Mellsop. The Mellsop Family