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This site is dedicated to my father, Robert Hampton Thompson.
The site
acknowledges his aircraft, RAAF Catalina No A24/8 (right)
in which he and his crew were shot down over the Bismark Sea on January
21, 1942. A record of the engagement and subsequent actions was described
in a story written by second pilot Paul Metzler in 1963. A transcript can
be found in
Recollections of a Catalina Pilot
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Robert Hampton Thompson survived the war but died when I was eighteen. I
never really knew him as a person; he was always Father, the authority
figure. And I never got to ask about his family.
I started looking for his story in 1982 in an attempt to gain some
insight. I eventually found he had a small but significant effect war on
the effort in WW2, spent time as a POW in Japan and I found his family in
Western Australia.
Over the years access to data has become easier and the initial research
has grown to cover as many relations as I could find.
It is still growing and I suspect it always will.
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