SCHOOL pupils have been listening to war stories from veterans to help them with their studies.

The youngsters, from St Oswald’s Primary School, in Fulford, York, visited RAF Linton-on-Ouse to meet present-day pilots and to learn from 1940s crews about the RAF’s role during the Second World War.

But ten-year old Alex Press surprised hosts with a war story of his own.

During the war, Alex’s great grandfather, George Camamile, worked as the barrack warden at Linton and his family lived in nearby Newton-on-Ouse.

In June, 1944, a Halifax Bomber, J-Jonnie, was returning to Linton when it developed engine trouble at 800 feet.

The captain, Pilot Officer N L Craig, tried to make a forced landing in a field but lost control and his aircraft crashed into a row of cottages on Back Lane in Newton. One of them was the home of Mr Camamile. It was 4am and his family were fast asleep. Amid the commotion, Mr Camamile leapt out of bed and rescued his nine-day-old baby son and 18-month-old daughter by sliding them to safety down the plane’s wing.

Luckily, his daughter, Joyce, (Alex’s gran) was sleeping in her parent's bedroom. Her own room was destroyed in the crash.

The cottage was only slightly damaged but in the end one lived Jane Storr, an elderly woman, who only survived because she fell out of bed when it was upturned in the maelstrom. The bedstead landed above her to give protection from the debris raining across her bedroom. Flight Sergeant E S Neill survived the crash and when the ensuing fire was brought under control, he helped firefighters to find Mrs Storr alive in her demolished cottage. She had been buried for almost an hour under two feet of masonry and large chunks of aircraft wreckage.

The Halifax Bomber was from Linton’s 426 (Thunderbird) Squadron which took off at 11pm for a raid over Mayenne in France. The target was a rail marshalling yard, in keeping with many of the post D-Day sorties which sought to disrupt road and rail communications used by German reinforcements which were attempting to reach Normandy.

Six of the eight crew members were killed but miraculously no civilians. In 1994, a memorial was erected in Back Lane to the crew’s memory.

Alex said: “I wanted to tell the pilots at Linton about how my great grandad rescued my gran. “He must have been very brave.”