KEMP-LEWIS, Ronald Hugh

Stats:

rank: F/L
status: survived
airforce: RAF    (no: 88655 )
born: United Kingdom

added by: Kevin Charles

Born in 1916, Ron came of age in a world sliding toward conflict. By the early 1940s he had joined the RAF and trained as a reconnaissance pilot, eventually serving with No. 541 Squadron, based at RAF Benson, the heart of Britain’s photographic intelligence effort. In February 1943, at the age of twenty‑seven, he married Doris Mary Winmill. Their son, John Richard Kemp Lewis, was born in May 1945, just days after Victory in Europe.

Ron’s wartime service placed him at the centre of the Allied campaign in Northwest Europe. His sorties covered the strategic arc of the conflict: the bridges, rail yards, docks, airfields, and industrial centres that sustained the German war machine. His photographs, which came into my possession following his death in 2002 were taken at the time of liberation of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and the final destruction of German industrial capacity in the Ruhr. I have collated his photographs into an archive and am currently seeking a suitable institution willing to look after them. As this website is about the men who served I don't think it would be appropriate to upload them here.

The images in my possession show Rouen, Caen, Cherbourg, Le Havre, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Duisburg, Moenchengladbach, and the Dutch landscapes of Operation Market Garden. They reveal cities under occupation, ports under bombardment, rail networks shattered by Allied air power, and industrial complexes crippled by strategic strikes. They also show the quiet details: the geometry of fields, the curves of rivers, the scars of bomb craters, and the unmistakable outlines of Europe as Ron saw it from the cockpit.

After Ron was demobbed he worked at Speke Airport and then secured employment as a senior air traffic controller as Stanstead Airport. He lived in Brentwood Essex and for a short time ran the Railway Hotel in that town.
He never spoke of his wartime service but when I met him at his sisters wedding in June 2007 I asked him if he remembered what he was doing on "D Day". He said "taking a few snaps". And that was it.