98-year-old Northampton veteran supports campaign to honour World War Two reconnaissance unit with monument in Royal Gardens

A World War Two veteran from Northampton is supporting a campaign to honour his reconnaissance unit that fed key intel straight to Churchill's war room.

Lending his voice to the existing AA810 campaign, George Pritchard, 98, who now lives in Northampton, is one of only four surviving members of the Photo Reconnaissance Unit (PRU), and the sole survivor of his 21-man intake.

PRU missions flew over enemy territory in France, Germany and beyond. Armed only with cameras, the light aircraft took photographs of enemy movements and fortifications at great risk to their own lives. The images were then fed directly back to London.

After all they did, George said that he wants more people to know about the PRU and the AA810 campaign, which seeks to build a monument to the unit's 'immense' contributions to the war in the Royal Gardens or at Westminster.

The war began for George in 1940, when the Germans bombed his factory.

He said: "I was told to go home because I couldn't work overtime. So I ended up sat with my parents in the garden, drinking tea. Then we suddenly saw some planes appear in sky and they started dropping bombs over my factory.

"Being a youth, I hopped straight on my bike and tried to get down there. But I was stopped before I could get there. They said 'where do you think you're going, then?' I said 'To the factory. I work there.' Then they said 'You used to work there'.

"The factory was basically gone, and all of my friends inside had been killed.

"So then I thought I'd get my own back and joined the RAF when I turned 17."

George himself flew many missions over places like Saint Nazaire, a dry dock in France housing German U boats. That was later the site of a furious commando raid which destroyed the dry dock so severely that it was not repaired until the late 1980's.

George said: "I had never thought about it after the war. It was only in recent times when I heard about the AA810 campaign that I started looking back on it. I've got a list of 3,150 people that were in the unit and when I look down it I see people I knew who were killed or crashed or whatever.

"If they were captured by the Germans, they were hung with piano wire or shot on the orders of Hitler for being spies.

"So this is about getting that proper recognition for all the work that they did."

The campaign has also received support from Northampton South MP Andrew Lewer, who is helping to connect the cause with Northampton schools.

Anthony Hoskins, a member of AA810 who has recently taken the campaign to the Commons, said: "We're very pleased to have George on side for what we're doing. He's the classic example of a humble veteran. He sees the war as just something he had to do.

"We're talking about men who were flying unarmoured, unarmed and unable to defend themselves.

"While Bomber command lost the most men numerically, at about 40 percent, proportionately the PRU lost the second most of any aerial unit in the war, losing almost 50 percent of the roughly 1400 that flew with them.

"Only carrier-based torpedo dive bombers lost more and they were discontinued in 1941 because of those high losses.

"Because the PRU flew alone or, like George, as a pair in the Mosquito, if they went down in Germany or on a sea crossing, they were often never recovered. So this monument is a chance to remember not just the work they've done, but also their names, as many did not get graves."

Anthony hopes that the AA810 campaign will be able to get the PRU monument built by 2024, which will coincide with the first flight of the soon-to-be restored 'Sandy's Spitfire', which the campaign recovered from a Finnish mountain back in 2018.

Anyone who would like to learn more about the PRU or the AA810 campaign can visit their campaign website or the page for Sandy's Spitfire or find them on social media.

The campaign can also be reached at [email protected], particularly for people whose family members served in the PRU.