Flying officer and raconteur who enjoyed relating how he came close to accepting the Japanese surrender in Singapore
For Norman Wilson, the Second World War reached an unlikely climax in Singapore, when a Japanese officer attempted to hand him his sword as a symbol of the surrender of Imperial Forces on the island.
Flying Officer Wilson was only 22. He had arrived there as the pilot of a Sunderland flying boat three days before Lord Mountbatten, the supreme commander of Allied forces in southeast Asia, was scheduled to accept the formal end of hostilities there.
“We were transported ashore by a Japanese crew boat,” recalled Wilson, who was the first Allied officer to arrive at the Seletar flying boat base since the occupation of the British colony in 1942. He was met by the Japanese officer proffering his sword. “Stupidly, I refused,” said Wilson. “I told him to report to the docks where Lord Mountbatten would shortly arrive.”
Later in life Wilson, a great raconteur and public speaker, told fellow members of Billericay Rotary Club in Essex that he had rather regretted not accepting the formal surrender. The Japanese officer was rumoured to have been a leading admiral. Mountbatten took the surrender on September 12, 1945, almost a month after Emperor Hirohito had announced Japan’s capitulation. Wilson then took part in the victory flypast and was later promoted to flight lieutenant.
He had been flying with 209 Squadron from a base in what was then known as Rangoon in Burma and was in action almost to the end of the war. His squadron had been attacking enemy shipping in the South China Sea. On August 11, Wilson and his crew sank a freighter and a supply barge.
He is believed to have been one of the last wartime pilots to have flown the powerful Sunderland, which the Germans nicknamed the “flying porcupine” because of its defensive firepower.
He was, however, fortunate to survive. Five months before events in Singapore, he had been the second pilot in an aircraft operating out of Mombasa in Kenya, when the navigator dropped a smoke bomb inside the aircraft while they were in the air. “It detonated and filled the plane with dense smoke,” he recalled. “In the cockpit we could not see the control column let alone the instruments.” He tried to see ahead by sliding open a window, which “miraculously” sucked the smoke out of the aircraft. “By then we were flying straight and level just 5ft above the water.”
Wilson’s troubles were still not over. As they landed, the swell hit the starboard wingtip, causing one of the propellers to thrash up spray. “Instinctively, I grabbed the wheel and applied full power,” he said. “Luckily, the aircraft responded and took to the air at an incredible nose-up, wing-down angle.”
After the flypast in Singapore, 209 Squadron was given the task of repatriating Allied prisoners who had been held in the notorious Changi jail. One of Wilson’s passengers was an American who was in urgent need of medical attention. The British pilot took him to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, flying 1,650 miles at about 50ft because the patient could not cope with altitude.
Wilson did not know what became of the man until the 1990s, when he was in the United States for a Rotary event. He was approached by a young man, who said: “Norman, if you hadn’t flown my grandfather out of Changi when he weighed just four stone, there would not be 32 members of my family alive today. We all thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”
Norman Hugh Wilson was born in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, in 1923, the son of Ethel Wilson (née Warren) and her husband, Herbert, who was a motor body works foreman. His mother died when Norman was eight. He had two elder brothers, Douglas and Alan, who also became pilots.
He was educated at Bablake School in Coventry, where the family moved shortly after he was born. As a boy, he enjoyed cycling, but flying was his passion. At the age of 15, he joined the Air Defence Cadet Corps and became a founding member of 8F (City of Coventry) Squadron. He left school in 1939, joining the WG Armstrong Whitworth aircraft company and studying aeronautical engineering at Coventry Technical College.
The war soon brought grief to the family. Norman’s brother Douglas, who had joined the RAF in 1934 and flew Wellington bombers, was shot down and killed over northern Germany in March 1940. Later, the family endured the bombing of Coventry, when much of the city was destroyed on the night of November 14, 1940.
Wilson volunteered for the RAF on his 18th birthday, but was not called up until 1942. He was posted to Kenya in 1943 and remained in the RAF for more than four years. Afterwards, he returned to Armstrong Whitworth and became a test pilot before joining the management of the company, which later became part of the Hawker Siddeley Group. He often quipped that he had a company plane long before he had a company car. In 1965 he moved to the engineering company John Tan, becoming chairman of John Tan South Africa and managing director of Tan Opperman. He was also chairman of the Institution of Industrial Managers.
Shortly after the war Wilson had married Alice Mead, the sister of the family’s housekeeper in Coventry. They had a daughter, Heather, who became one of the first female members of the London Stock Exchange: she died in 2009. After Alice died in 1984, Wilson met Brenda Spiers, who was looking after her disabled mother on a cruise. They were partners for nearly 40 years. She survives him.
Wilson had moved to Billericay in 1970 and become a popular figure in the local Rotary Club. Over the years, he held every office in the club and led a team on visits to the United States. A generous and jovial man, he enjoyed good food and wine and the company of friends — and had a passion for the American film star Hedy Lamarr.
At the age of 87, after a long search, he finally found the grave of his brother Douglas, who had been buried in a village churchyard in northern Germany before his body was moved to the Becklingen military cemetery on Lüneburg Heath, where the Germans had signed the final surrender in 1945.
As for his own war, he said: “My story is not one of great heroics, just of what happened to a typical volunteer doing what he was told for the war effort.”
Norman Wilson, wartime aviator and businessman, was born on April 19, 1923. He died on April 15, 2022, aged 98