By Chris Hardy

FORMER MONTROSE businessman Wallace McIntosh, one of the most distinguished RAF heroes of the second world war and who amazingly survived over 50 missions as a rear gunner, has died in Aberdeen. He was 87.

During his years in Montrose he became a well known member of the community although few people realised that he had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal to which was added a bar—the equivalent of being awarded a second cross—for his missions as a rear gunner.

It made him the most successful and decorated rear gunner in Bomber Command.

Mr McIntosh also held the record for the highest number of enemy kills—eight confirmed hits and one unconfirmed.

When the Bank of Scotland carried out a survey asking people to name Great Scots, ‘Wallace McIntosh-War Hero’ was chosen among such illustrious names as John Logie Baird, David Livingstone and Robert Louis Stevenson.

In a biography Gunning for the Enemy, published four years ago, author Mel Rolfe described how Mr McIntosh was born into grinding poverty.

Born in a barn near Tarves, he was a few days old when given by his young mother to her parents to bring up.

As a boy, he was trailed round Aberdeenshire and Perthshire in the 1920s while his grandparents sought farm work and shelter.

Leaving school at 13 he was determined to escape the constant struggle to survive.

He found work as a labourer with a potato merchant and worked as a gamekeeper on several estates in Perthshire before joining the RAF.

Gunning for the Enemy told the moving story of how the RAF finally accepted McIntosh after at first rejecting him.

He was trained as an air gunner and during his time with 207 Squadron in Lincolnshire he flew over 50 sorties in the second world war, mostly at night and in four-engined Lancaster bombers.

Although Bomber Command did not record details of ‘kills’ by air gunners, Wallace, who shot down eight enemy aircraft with one probable, is widely believed to be its top sharpshooter.

After he left the RAF in 1948 he went to work with Hydro Electric then as an agricultural salesman in Aberdeenshire where he met his wife Christina.

The couple went on to raise three children, Anne, James and Mary, before Mrs McIntosh died in 1989.

For most of his post-war career he worked with Barclay, Ross and Hutchison with stints in Montrose and Elgin.

Mr McIntosh was manager of the Barclay, Ross and Hutchison store in Montrose High Street for 12 years.

The company was taken over by Elbar Farm Services and in 1977 Mr McIntosh moved to their headquarters in Elgin as director of the ironmongery division.

After retiring in 1985 he did a sponsored 2000-mile tour of bomber stations to raise money for the Bomber Command Association and two memorials to the men of his squadron killed in action.

Mr McIntosh died on Monday in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary where he had been admitted four weeks ago with lung cancer.