John Everard Gurdon, DFC & Bar, (24 May 1898 – 14 April 1973), was a British flying ace in World War I credited with twenty-eight victories.
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Gurdon attended Tonbridge School in Kent. He joined the Army in 1916, attending Sandhurst in September of that year.[1]
Gurdon was commissioned into the Suffolk Regiment and was transferred to the RFC in May 1917. He completed his pilot training at Central Flying School and was sent to No.22 Squadron in 1918, flying Bristol F.2 Fighters.
Gurdon achieved all twenty-eight of his victories flying the Bristol Fighter aircraft, seventeen of them using the front gun. On 7 May 1918 he was involved in an historic engagement known as the 'Two versus Twenty'. Gurdon, together with his observer 2/Lt. John Thornton, in partnership with one other Bristol Fighter aircraft, piloted by Alfred Atkey with his observer Charles George Gass engaged twenty enemy aircraft. Gurdon and Thornton shot down three enemy aircraft; Atkey and Gass shot down five enemy aircraft.[2]
On 10 June 1918 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. In August he received concussion from an anti-aircraft shell near-miss. He returned to the Uk in September 1918 and reliquished his commission in December of that year.
His claim tally, in conjunction with his gunners, consisted of 13 and one shared destroyed, and 14 'out of control'.[3]
Gurdon married in 1921 and had three sons, one of which, Sgt. John Robert Gurdon, was killed in action in 1943 flying Wellingtons of No.166 Squadron. Another son, Philip Gurdon, flew Spitfires in Burma.
Despite being blinded in one eye after a car crash in 1935 and suffering a hip problem following an aircraft landing accident, Gurdon rejoined the RAF at the outbreak of war, serving as an instructor. He 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 invalided out of the service.
John Gurdon died on 14 April 1973 in Alassio, Italy.
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