One for K !

[Kyt]

Originally Posted by stokiebarker

Does anyone know how to see his air force personnel papers (I don't know what you call these). Also how did he receive his Military cross.

I have not been able to track down his service records. However, the main site that is digitising all available WW1 records haven't finished yet, and are so haven't reached the letter W. However, there is no guarantee that they will be available because only 30 or so percent of all WW1 records survived the Blitz in 1940.

British Army WWI Service Records, 1914-1920 - Ancestry.co.uk

He never received the Military Cross. There is no evidence of it in either his CWGC entry nor in the London Gazette. The link in the post #2 is rather erroneous.

[Kyt]

London Gazette
Date: 25 March 1921
Issue number: 32270
Page number: 2436

Re Lieutenant S. C. WELINKAR, R.A.F., Deceased.
Pursuant to the Statute 22 and 23 Vic., c. 35.
NOTICE is hereby given, on behalf of Mrs. Luxumibai Welinkar, of The Palace, Gwalior, Central India, that all persons having claims against the estate of S. C. Welinkar, late of 82, Northgatemansions, Regent's Park, London, formerly of Jesus College, Cambridge, a Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force (who died on the 30th day of June, 1918), are required to send particulars, in writing, of their claims to the undersigned before the 30th day of April, 1921, after which date the said Luxumibai Welinkar will distribute the assets of the said deceased
among the persons entitled thereto,' having regard only to the claims of which she shall then have received notice.—Dated the 18th day of March, 1921.

[Kyt]

Royal Air Force AIR POWER REVIEW

http://www.raf.mod.uk/rafcms/mediafi...19F19FE2D2.pdf

An excellent article on Indians and the RFC/RAF. The following is a section relevant to this thread

The Royal Air Force and the ‘Indianisation’ Debate, 1918-1921 The first Indian military aviators

All of the Indian Army officers that participated in the First World War in the air were of European rather than Indian descent. Nevertheless, a small group of Indian military pilots did take part in the air war – as officers of the Royal Flying Corps and later the RAF, rather than the Indian Army. The prevailing policy of the War Office prior to the First World War was to deny commissions to applicants not of ‘pure European descent’, on the grounds that ‘a British private will never follow a half-caste or native officer.’

A similar stance was also adopted by the Admiralty.However, the pressure of war led to a gradual loosening of this policy on the part of the War Office, and the first Anglo-Indian candidate (W O’C Evans) was admitted to Royal Military Academy, Woolwich during November 1916.

In the same month, Jeejeebhoy Piroshaw Bomanjee Jeejeebhoy became the first Indian to enter the Royal Flying Corps, being was commissioned in the General List ‘for duty with [the] RFC’ with the rank of temporary Honorary Second Lieutenant on 6 November 1916.

Lieutenant Jeejeebhoy’s active career with the RFC would appear to have been brief. Papers preserved in The National Archives show that Jeejeebhoy fell ill in January 1917 whilst training at the RFC’s Oxford School of Instruction and he was suspended from training to convalesce. A medical board concluded in May 1917 that he was ‘permanently unfit for further service’, and an entry in The London Gazette of 29 May 1917 duly announced that ‘Temp Hon 2nd Lt Jeejeebhoy Piroshaw Bomanjee. Jeejeebhoy relinquishes his commission on account of ill health.’

Jeejeebhoy was to be the first of at least five Indians that are known to have served in the RFC and the RAF.Although the factors that lay
behind their recruitment are unclear, surviving papers suggest that driving force behind the acceptance of at four of the candidiates is likely to have been Sir Sefton Brancker. On his return from India, Brancker served as the RFC’s senior representative in Whitehall for much of the First World War, holding the posts of Director of Air Organisation in the War Office between March 1916 and February 1917 and Deputy Director General of Military Aeronautics between February and October 1917. As such, one of the then Brigadier General Brancker’s responsibilities was the selection and commissioning of RFC officers; and in a paper presented to the Air Council in September 1918, he referred to ‘four Indians whom I had trained about two years ago in the Royal Flying Corps’.

A second Indian applicant, Shiri Krishna Chunda Welinkar, applied for a temporary commission in the RFC on 22 November 1916. At the time of his application Welinkar was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge.

According to a handwritten note made on his application on 6 February 1917, Welinkar had been ‘Recommended by Brig Gen Brancker & approved for officers cadet wing RFC’. Unlike Jeejeebhoy, Welinkar did not receive an Honorary Commission; rather, he enlisted formally in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry on 13 February 1917 and he was posted to No 6 Officer Cadet Battalion, RFC as a cadet on the same day.

Welinkar was appointed a Temporary Second Lieutenant (on probabtion) on the General List (RFC) on 24 May 1917 and confirmed in this rank on 22 June.45 Although his progress to the front line was impeded by injuries incurred in two flying accidents in the UK, he was passed fit for general service by a medical board in February 1918 and was subsequently posted to the Western Front. Whilst serving with No 23 Squadron at Bertangles he took off at 9:45am on the morning of 27 June 1918 to participate in an offensive patrol. He failed to return from this sortie, his Sopwith Dolphin last being seen heading east while engaged in combat with a German two-seater near Peronne.

Lieutenant Welinkar was shot down behind enemy lines and fatally wounded, dying some three days later.

Erroll Suvo Chunder Sen, a former member of Rossall School Officers Training Corps, applied for a commission in November 1916, only to
be rejected as being under the minimum age. In April 1917 he re-applied, and on 24 April he was also awarded a commission as a Temporary Honorary Second Lieutenant in the RFC, being requested to report the School of Military Aeronautics at Reading on the same day. On completing his training he too was posted to the Western Front.

While serving with No 70 Squadron, a fighter squadron equipped with Sopwith Camels and based at Poperinghe, he took part in an offensive patrol on the morning of 14 September 1917. During the patrol, the engine of his Camel failed and he came to earth behind the German lines, being captured and held as a prisoner of war until the Armstice.

Second Lieutenant Sen was repatriated to the UK on 14 December 1918. Perhaps the best known of these early Indian aviators is Lieutenant Indra Lal ‘Laddie’ Roy DFC. In February 1917 a friend of the Roy family approached Brancker directly in order to acquire whether Roy – then a pupil at St Paul’s School and a member of the latter’s Officers Training Corps contingent – could enter the RFC.

Brancker referred this letter to the staff officer then responsible for recruitment, who in February 1917 invited Roy ‘for an interview on the subject of his admission to the Officers Cadet Wing Royal Flying Corps’. Roy submitted a completed application form in the following month, and this was approved on 26 March 1917.

Roy’s career as a fighter pilot began in October 1917 when he was posted from the School of Aerial Gunnery at Turnberry to No 56 Squadron, then at Estrée-Blanche, in October 1917. He met with little success, and after being injured in a crash on 6 December 1917 Roy was posted back to the UK. Here, he retrained as an armament officer and it was in this role that he was posted to No 40 Squadron at Bruay in April 1918. He was cleared by a medical board to resume flying on 13 May 1918, and a brief period in the UK for refresher flying training Roy returned to No 40 Squadron on 19 June 1918. Six days later he flew his first patrol with the commander of the squadron’s C Flight, Captain George McElroy, and ‘under the latter’s tutelage he was to undergo a remarkable transformation’, being credited with nine enemy aircraft destroyed during the next month.

Sadly, Lieutenant Roy’s career was cut short when he failed to return from a sortie on 22 July 1918; a report from the squadron suggests that his Royal Aircraft Factory SE5a fighter may have been ‘shot down in flames at 8-50am in combat with Fokkers near CARVIN. The award of a Distinguished Flying Cross to Lieutenant Indra Lal Roy, ‘A very gallant and determined officer’, was announced in The London Gazette on 21 September 1918.The above, the commissioning of the fifth Indian pilot to serve with the RFC, Hardit Singh Malik, would appear to have been due to the intervention of the Director General of Military Aeronautics, Major General Sir David Henderson. A student at Balliol College at the beginning of the war, Malik sought immediately to join the British Army but once again fell foul of the latter’s ‘pure European descent’ criteria. After graduating in 1915 he was rejected once again, but was accepted by the French Red Cross as an ambulance driver.

Whilst in France, he applied and was accepted for the French Air Service; on learning his, his former tutor at Oxford ‘wrote to Major- General Henderson…saying that it was disgraceful for an Indian to be denied the opportunity of joining the RFC, while the French were willing to offer him a commission.’ Henderson would appear to have intervened on Malik’s behalf, for a notice in The London Gazette of 26
April 1917 records that ‘3rd Cl[ass] Air Mechanic Harding Singh Malik’ was commissioned as a temporary Honorary Second Lieutenant for duty with the RFC on 6 April 1917.53 After training, Lieutenant Malik went on to fly as a fighter pilot with Nos 28 and 11 Squadrons on the Western Front and No 141 Squadron in the UK.54

[liverpool annie]

Thought this maybe of interest ....

The young men — Hardit Singh Malik, an Oxford graduate from Rawalpindi; Indra Lal Roy from Dacca and living in England from the age of two; S.C. Welinkar from Bombay; and Errol Suvo Chunder Sen from Calcutta — were initially denied commissions as until then no Indian could become an officer in the military services. However, exigencies of war forced the authorities to grant them wartime commissions and thereby history was made.

They together created many firsts. Roy in his final phase shot down nine enemy planes in 11 days of operational flying, being the first and the only Indian to earn the title of "ace" and also being the first Indian to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) before being killed in action. Malik was the first Indian Oxford graduate to become a combat pilot and the first Sikh officer to be permitted to wear a turban as headgear. He was also the first among the four to be commissioned, and served till the end of the war; later, on return to India he joined the ICS. He died in 1985. Sen flew and in a dogfight crashed in enemy territory, was taken prisoner of war and survived. Welinkar was also shot down on the Allied side of the lines and died of his injuries in the field hospital near the front.

The Hindu Business Line : Flying high

EDIT ...... I meant to say K ... that that is a very informative piece and actually gives good details on Errol Suvo Chunder Sen .... (you probably already have the book in my post ... but just in case anybody else wants it !! )