LEWES, John Steel

Known as: 
Jock
Rank: 
Lieutenant
Unit / Base: 
8 Commando
'Special Air Service'
Regiment/Corps: 
Welsh Guards
Service: 
Army
Number: 
65419
Born: 
Sunday, December 21, 1913
Birthplace: 
Calcutta
Died : 
Tuesday, December 30, 1941
Killed in action or died of wounds
Age: 
28
Cemetery/Memorial: 
Lieutenant John Lewes was second in command of 'L' Detachment, Special Air Service Bde. He had previously served in No.8 Commando which embarked for the Middle East as part of Layforce. Lieutenant Lewes had taken part in Operation Squatter on 16 November 1941 where he commanded 1 Troop and also a raid on Aghelia airfield setting off on 6 December 1941.
On 26 December 1941 he led a patrol from Jalo being transported by the Long Range Desert Group for an operation against an airfield at Nofilia. They were dropped 27 kilometres short of the airfield and attacked that night. After the raid as they made their escape they were spotted by enemy aircraft on the 30th and were subject to an intense period of bombing and straffing. He was wounded in the knee and an artery severed. He died before the bleeding could be stopped. Son of Arthur Harold and Elsie Steel Lewes, of Hanworth, Middlesex. M.A. (Oxon.): Christchurch College. President O.U.B.C., 1937.
 
"The loss of the soldier, a founding member of the elite unit, was deeply lamented by David Stirling, the regiment’s first commanding officer. “Jock could call himself more the founder of the Special Air Service than I,” he wrote in a letter to Lewes’s father.  His invention of the Lewes sticky bomb, an explosive device shaped like a tennis ball, destroyed hundreds of Luftwaffe aircraft, accounting for more German planes than those shot down by the RAF in North Africa. A statue of Lewes, an Oxford graduate and rowing blue, was unveiled by the Duke of Cambridge at the SAS headquarters near Hereford in 2008. "  
 
Sources
CWGC.
Casualty Lists / National Archives file WO417/2.
The SAS and Long Range Desert Group Roll of Honour (includes full details).
Extract from an aricle in the Daily Telegraph 4th Dec.2001.
 

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