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Auction: 18001 - Orders, Decorations and Medals
Lot: 5

'The Amiens offensive opened with a deafening artillery barrage from over two thousand guns at 4.20 am … For the R.A.F. it was to be one of the most important and complex days of fighting it had ever undertaken. The manner in which they threw themselves into the desperate events of the 8th [August 1918] is nowhere better illustrated than by the thick file of R.A.F. casualty reports … There is no other day on which casualties remotely approached those sustained this day … '

The Sky Their Battlefield, by Trevor Henshaw, refers.

The Great War campaign pair awarded to Lieutenant L. H. Forrest, Royal Air Force, late Royal Flying Corps, who was shot down, wounded and taken P.O.W. while serving as a pilot in No. 27 Squadron on the first day of the battle of Amiens in August 1918

British War and Victory Medals (Lieut. L. H. Forrest, R.A.F.), the first with one or two edge nicks and somewhat polished, nearly very fine (2)

Lionel Hugh Forrest was born on 8 May 1897, the son of Herbert Edward Forrest, a music instrument dealer. Educated at Bishop Vesey's School, Sutton Coldfield (1910-15), young Lionel was appointed to a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 47th Sikhs in November 1915. Advanced to Lieutenant in late 1916, he afterwards transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and qualified as a pilot.

Posted to No. 27 Squadron in July 1918, he flew D.H. 9s on bombing, strafing and reconnaissance missions. On 8 August - the first day of the battle of Amiens - his D.H. 9 was shot down during a low-level mission to attack a bridge at Voyennes, a fate shared by two of his fellow pilots. He may have been a victim of the enemy ace Leutnant Richard Wenzl. According to German records both he and his Observer - Lieutenant S. W. P. Foster-Sutton - were wounded.

Forrest was repatriated in mid-December 1918 and appears to have returned to his earlier appointment in the Indian Army in 1920; sold with a file of copied research.



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