My Dad: The first pilot to land in France during the D-Day landings

Here, his daughter Penny Plimmer, from Woodmancott near Micheldever, talks about his service. 

After a very busy war including Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, fighting in Africa and Italy, Storrar was put in command of Air Force despatch during the D Day landings. 

This involved him flying into France and leaving important papers with the resistance during that campaign. Roland White’s book, entitled “Mosquito”, chronicles his time. 

As Commanding Officer Transport Command Air Despatch, Wing Commander Jas Storrar had just claimed the prize of becoming the first British pilot to land in France after D-Day. 

The unit had been formed four for months to ferry important documents and orders to frontline commanders on the continent in surplus Hurricanes, using converted drop tanks as containers. 

Storrar’s afternoon hop to Normandy to an airfield with his wingman which had been hastily constructed by Royal Engineers in the three days (as good as any in Britain) since the landings was for Air Despatch to deliver important papers.

The son of a Chester vet, Storrar lied about his age to join the RAF in 1938, hoping to fly for a bit before pursuing a career with the family practice.

Rated as ‘exceptional’ during training, he was an ace before his 19th birthday. By the end of the Battle of Britain this larger than life young pilot had ten kills and his first of two DFCs to his name.

On the same day that Jas Storrar flew into Paris in June 1944 Hitler leaned over a map of France and exclaimed,  “We will hold Paris.  Why should we care if Paris is destroyed”. 

Storrar was instructed to land nearer to the centre of Paris to deliver vital papers for the Resistance which would be quicker as they were anticipating a bloody showdown with the German Forces still occupying the city.

Until he discovered that the little Issy-les-Moulineaux airfield just a couple of miles southwest of the Eiffel Tower was also uncomfortably close to a neighbourhood Gestapo outpost.

Although German soldiers remained in the area it was a member of the Resistance equipped with the codeword required to prove his identity, who first reached the British pilot.

Abandoning the Hurricane, Storrar was smuggled away from the airfield to a safe house with his important documents while the capital’s survival hung in the balance. 

For the next five days Paris existed in a terrible vacuum between preservation or imminent destruction.

Coming out of hiding, he needed no encouragement to join in the celebrations of the liberation of Paris. Afterwards the young airman few home out of Issy-les-Moulineaux with the luggage compartments of his Hurricane stuffed with perfume and champagne taken from the Germans.

Although Storrar was the first pilot to land in Brussels after Belgium’s liberation two weeks later, the appeal of courier flights was fading fast, this young man transferred back to Fighter Command in search of action.

He went on to become the commander of the Mosquito fighter wing in the bombing of the Shell Building, which was the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. 

Then to confirm that Jersey had really been liberated by doing a low flying by-pass in command of a Canadian airforce squadron– to see if they would encounter enemy fire.

This was a very few of his many other heroic experiences too numerous to mention here. After the war he went to Edinburgh University and then became a veterinary surgeon in Chester.

Penny Dixon, Woodmancott