Three pilots, three nations, one changing air war.
Today, the landscapes around Rye Harbour, Forest Row and Uckfield are peaceful corners of East Sussex.
Walk across the marshes towards Camber Castle, follow the old railway path beside Forest Row, or drive through Uckfield and there is little to suggest that these places once lay beneath an aerial battlefield.
Yet hidden within these landscapes are memorials to three Allied fighter pilots whose stories span four remarkable years of the Second World War.
Harry Raymond Hamilton came from Canada. John Dallas Crossman came from Australia. Eugène Georges Achille Seghers came from Belgium.
All three served with the Royal Air Force. All three fought in the skies over southern England. And all three are now commemorated in quiet locations across East Sussex.
Hamilton and Crossman were killed during the Battle of Britain in 1940, flying Hawker Hurricanes against the Luftwaffe.
Seghers survived that battle and continued flying through the war. Four years later, operating from RAF Deanland near Lewes, he faced a very different enemy: the German V1 flying bomb.
Their stories connect three Sussex landscapes and show how dramatically the air war changed between 1940 and 1944.
Rye Harbour – Flight Lieutenant Harry Raymond Hamilton
A short distance from the ruins of Camber Castle, surrounded today by the open landscape of Rye Harbour Nature Reserve, stands a stone memorial to Flight Lieutenant Harry Raymond Hamilton.
It is an isolated location.
Beyond the memorial are marshes, shingle, drainage channels and the flat landscape stretching towards the Sussex coast. Nearby stands Camber Castle, the Tudor fortress that once guarded a very different coastline.
In August 1940, however, the skies above this landscape were anything but peaceful.
The Battle of Britain was at its height, and East Sussex lay beneath one of the most fiercely contested areas of sky in southern England. The fighting that summer left a trail of aircraft crash sites and pilot memorials across the county — several of which I explored previously in Battle of Britain Over East Sussex.
Harry Raymond Hamilton was one of the men fighting in those skies.
Born in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1917, Hamilton travelled to Britain before the war and joined the Royal Air Force in 1936.
By the summer of 1940 he was a Flight Lieutenant with No. 85 Squadron, flying Hawker Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain.
Hamilton had already experienced considerable combat when, on 29 August 1940, his squadron was sent to intercept another large Luftwaffe formation.
During the fighting Hamilton was shot down.
His Hurricane, V6623, crashed close to Camber Castle on the marshes near Rye Harbour. Hamilton was killed. He was just 23 years old.
Today the site is marked by a memorial stone close to a group of trees within the nature reserve.
There is something particularly striking about finding his memorial here.
Hamilton had travelled from New Brunswick to Britain before the war. His final flight ended beside an ancient castle in the marshes of East Sussex, thousands of miles from the place where he had grown up.
And Hamilton was not the only young Commonwealth pilot whose Battle of Britain story ended in the Sussex countryside.
Just over a month later, another pilot from the opposite side of the world would be lost near Forest Row.
Forest Row – Pilot Officer John Dallas Crossman
The landscape around Forest Row is very different from the open marshes of Rye Harbour.
Here the countryside becomes wooded and enclosed, sitting on the northern edge of Ashdown Forest. The forest itself carries several reminders of the air war, including the Airman’s Grave featured in Bombers of East Sussex: The Last Miles Home.
Running through it is the Forest Way, the route of the former railway between East Grinstead and Groombridge.
Close to the path, beside Tablehurst Farm, another memorial marks the place where a Battle of Britain pilot fell.
John Dallas Crossman was Australian.
Born in Queensland in 1918 and raised in New South Wales, Crossman had been fascinated by aircraft from an early age.
In 1939 he travelled to Britain and joined the Royal Air Force.
His path into combat was remarkably rapid.
After training, Crossman joined No. 46 Squadron during one of the most intense periods of the Battle of Britain.
On 15 September 1940 — the date that would later become known as Battle of Britain Day — Crossman was involved in heavy fighting and was credited with probably destroying a Dornier Do 17 bomber.
Only fifteen days later, on 30 September, he was flying Hurricane V6748 when No. 46 Squadron encountered Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters.
Crossman’s Hurricane was shot down.
The aircraft crashed in flames at Tablehurst Farm near Forest Row.
Crossman was 22 years old.
Today a memorial stands close to the crash site, beside a route now used by walkers and cyclists.
Like Hamilton’s memorial at Rye Harbour, it is easy to pass through this landscape without appreciating what happened here.
Two young men. One from Canada and one from Australia.
Both had travelled enormous distances to Britain. Both flew Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain. And within little more than a month, both had died over East Sussex.
But the war in the skies above Sussex did not end with the Battle of Britain.
Four years later it would take a very different form.
The Air War Changes
By the summer of 1944, Britain was no longer preparing for an expected German invasion.
Allied troops had landed in Normandy and the war was moving back into occupied Europe.
Aircraft had changed too.
The Hurricanes flown by Hamilton and Crossman in 1940 belonged to an earlier stage of the war. By 1944 RAF fighter squadrons were operating increasingly powerful versions of the Supermarine Spitfire.
But southern England was now facing an entirely new kind of aerial threat.
On 13 June 1944, shortly after D-Day, the first V1 flying bombs began reaching Britain.
Known variously as flying bombs, buzz bombs or doodlebugs, these pilotless weapons carried a large explosive warhead and could cross the Channel at high speed.
Once their engines stopped, they descended towards the ground and exploded.
East Sussex lay directly beneath some of their routes towards targets in southern England.
Stopping them required another defensive battle involving anti-aircraft guns, barrage balloons and some of the fastest fighters available to the RAF.
One of the airfields involved was hidden among the fields of East Sussex.
RAF Deanland – From D-Day to the V1
Wide landscape view showing the surviving airfield environment.
RAF Deanland was constructed near the villages of Ripe and Chalvington as an Advanced Landing Ground.
Its purpose was closely connected with the Allied invasion of Europe.
On D-Day, 6 June 1944, fighters operating from Deanland flew across the Channel to provide air cover over the Normandy beaches.
The airfield was deliberately basic.
Advanced Landing Grounds were intended to provide operational fighter bases that could be constructed quickly rather than the extensive permanent infrastructure associated with larger RAF stations.
Much of Deanland has since returned to the appearance of the surrounding countryside, although flying continues from part of the former wartime airfield today.
But only days after the Normandy landings, Britain faced the V1.
Deanland’s fighters became involved in the campaign to intercept the weapons before they could reach populated areas.
Among the pilots flying from here was an experienced Belgian who had already fought in the Battle of Britain four years earlier.
His name was Eugène Seghers.
Uckfield – Flight Lieutenant Eugène Seghers
Unlike Hamilton and Crossman, Eugène Georges Achille Seghers survived the Battle of Britain.
Born near Ghent in Belgium in 1910, Seghers reached Britain in 1940 and joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve.
After converting to Hurricanes he joined No. 32 Squadron.
On 24 August 1940 his Hurricane was shot down by Messerschmitt Bf 109s. Seghers bailed out into the sea and survived.
He continued fighting.
During the following years he served with several RAF units, became a squadron commander and received both the Belgian Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
By the summer of 1944 he was attached to No. 91 Squadron.
The aircraft he now flew was very different from the Hurricane in which he had fought in 1940.
No. 91 Squadron operated the powerful Spitfire Mk XIV, one of the fastest operational Spitfire variants and an aircraft well suited to chasing the V1.
On 26 July 1944, Seghers took off from RAF Deanland in Spitfire RM743 on an Anti-Diver patrol.
A V1 was heading towards the Uckfield area.
Seghers intercepted it south of the town.
The memorial that now stands at Uckfield records that cannon fire failed to destroy the weapon. As the V1’s engine stopped and it began its final descent, Seghers attempted to deflect it.
His Spitfire came into contact with the flying bomb.
The V1 exploded.
Both the aircraft and its pilot were destroyed.
Seghers was 34 years old.
He had survived being shot down during the Battle of Britain, continued flying through four more years of war and lived long enough to see Allied forces return to continental Europe.
His final mission ended above Uckfield.
Today his memorial stands in the grounds of the Highlands Inn at Ridgewood, beside one of the main roads into the town.
Traffic passes only a short distance away.
Uckfield itself has grown considerably since the war, yet the memorial provides a physical connection with a moment when the town lay beneath the flight path of one of Germany’s new weapons.
Conclusion
Hamilton, Crossman and Seghers came from three different countries and fought in very different stages of the air war, but all three are now remembered in the East Sussex landscape.
Their memorials are modest, easy to overlook, and still closely connected to the places where their stories ended.
Find the locations
The locations featured in this article can also be found on my public Sussex Photography map.
Discover more from UK Landscape Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.