RAF West Malling over the Channel. The three surviving aircraft were rescued only when the fight was joined by Hurricanes from No. 111 Squadron. The remainder of the unit returned north to RAF Prestwick on 25 July due to the ineffectiveness of the Defiant against single-seat fighters. No. 29 Squadron flying Bristol Beaufighters arrived for its first tour of duty on 27 April 1941. One of the Squadron's pilots, Guy Gibson VC, later officer commanding 617 Squadron on the Dambusters Raid, said of the station "Of all the airfields in Great Britain ... we have the most pleasant". A regular and long-standing inhabitant,
Dave Shannon for the Dambusters memorial at Woodhall Spa near RAF Scampton. His wife Ann died in 1990, and he married artist Eyke Taylor in a civil ceremony at Camberwell, London, on 19 July 1991. On 8 April 1993, shortly before a planned fiftieth anniversary reunion of surviving Dambusters, Shannon died at Denmark Hill, London, following a stroke, and was buried beside Ann at Clifton Hampden, Oxfordshire. The last of the nine pilots who took part in the first wave of the dams raid, he was survived by his second wife and his daughter by Ann. On 17 May 2008, the sixty-fifth