William Barrett Hacking

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Date of death
Auxiliary Units role
Special Duties Civilian
Details

He died 3 July 1944 at home. Quote from Rye Magazine; "On 4th July 1944, in the late evening at about 11pm, the weather was, as I remember, quite appalling, blowing and raining hard. We were sitting in our Morrison Shelter listening to bombs passing over. Then there was another throbbing, away in the distance, it suddenly exploded, then silence. This to us was different, we had never heard a bomb do that before. The majority of the towns people were to find out the following morning that this bomb had literally flown directly into either * Farm House, or the ground in front of it with one fatality, Major Hacking, (in fact a soldier manning a gun emplacement by the house, was also killed) the low altitude of the bombs flight may have been due to weather conditions or a failure of its flight mechanism".

He is commemorated by Commonwealth War Graves Commission as civilian war dead and is buried at Rye Cemetery.