Wellington---The last surviving pilot from World War II's legendary Dambusters' mission cancelled plans to sell his medals Tuesday after a wealthy British peer intervened, the auction house handling the sale said.
New Zealander Les Munro had planned to sell his medals, logbooks and other memorabilia to raise funds for maintenance of the Bomber Command War Memorial in London, estimated at 50,000 pounds ($75,000) a year.
But the sale, scheduled for Wednesday, was called off after Lord Michael Ashcroft agreed to donate 75,000 pounds towards the memorial's upkeep, auction house Dix Noonan Webb said.
It said 95-year-old Munro had agreed to donate his medals to Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology, which in turn would donate an additional 10,000 pounds to the memorial's maintenance.
"I am content that I have achieved my goal of doing all I can to ensure that the men of Bomber Command who lost their lives in WWII will be remembered with pride for generations to come," he said in a statement.
Munro said he had been astonished by the response to his plan to sell the medals and was pleased they would be staying in New Zealand.
Munro piloted one of the 19 Lancaster bombers that left a British airbase on May 16, 1943, on a top-secret mission over Nazi Germany's industrial heartland in the Ruhr Valley.
They were carrying the revolutionary "bouncing bomb", which skidded along the water's surface once released and were used to attack three dams.
The mission, immortalised in the 1955 film "The Dam Busters" starring Michael Redgrave and Richard Todd, destroyed two of its targets and damaged a third, drowning 1,600 people and forcing the Nazis to divert significant resources to rebuilding.
The Bomber Command Memorial opened in 2012 and is dedicated to the 55,573 aircrew who died in WWII.
Maintenance of the limestone pavilion, which features bronze statues of a bomber crew returned from a mission, is handled by the RAF Benevolent Fund.
AFP
