EILEEN PAYS HER RESPECTS

Eileen is to visit the grave of Guy Gibson, the leader of the Dambusters, to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of his death. Eileen was one of the radar operators to track the Dambusters' daring raid on three German reservoirs, and is also a resident of Gibson's hometown, Penarth.

Gibson was killed on 19th September 1944 while on a raid, and is buried in Seenbergen, Holland. A Dutch family that has tended his grave since his death is to be presented with a commemorative Welsh miner's lamp in thanks.

Eileen is traveling out with Penarth's '617 group', which helps former servicemen and women. In recognition of Allied food-drops in the region, they will deliver two hundred chocolate bars, donated by Penarth newsagent Snells, to local schoolchildren.

Eileen's time as a radar operator overseeing the Dambuster raids, the D-Day landings and the Battle of Britain, is recounted in her book One Woman's War, available from Candy Jar Books.

http://www.candy-jar.co.uk/books/onewomanswar.html

WAR HEROES' REUNION

Eileen Younghusband, author of One Woman’s War, joined eighty of her fellow veterans at Bletchley Park this week to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of operations beginning at the site.  Now a museum, the code-breaking and intelligence operations conducted at the mansion are credited with shortening the Second World War by ‘two to four years’.

For many decades after the end of the war, employees of Bletchley Park were so tight-lipped about their top-secret work that Churchill labelled them ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled’. However, with a major new film on their operations soon to be released, recognition for, and interest in, the team that cracked the enigma cipher is at an all-time high.

Eileen herself joined the war effort when she was nineteen, in 1941, and served as a Filterer Officer on RAF bases across the country.  Her own story went untold for years, she, like her colleagues,  having signed the Official Secrets Act; it is now available in One Woman’s War, an autobiography that is a testament to the invaluable work of the WAAF in the fight against fascism.

EILEEN DOWN THE BAY

With Barack Obama, half the world’s press, not to mention several warships in town, Eileen decided to escape the chaos of the NATO conference and hit the beach. Clear blue surf, white sands and not a soul to be seen as far as the eye could see…

Well, not exactly. Cardiff Bay Beach is the annual transformation of the heart of Cardiff Bay into a fairground/urban beach the summer. With the world’s eyes on the city, this year the beach’s opening was extended another week, and Eileen joined publishers Candy Jar to sign copies of her book.