Reginald Arthur Butler was born in Egham in 1894, the eldest son of Arthur Bayne Butler and Elizabeth Mary Tubbs. His family ran a books and stationery shop in Egham High Street, and they lived on Runnemede Road. He had one brother, Cecil James, and two sisters, Marjorie and Lona Muriel.
From an early age, Butler prepared for a maritime career, training for two years at the Incorporated Thames Nautical Training College, HMS Worcester, at Greenhithe. He then served three years at sea as an apprentice before obtaining a Second Officer’s certificate and serving aboard various H.M. ships. Later, he transferred to the Royal Engineers and subsequently to the Royal Air Force (RAF). At the outbreak of war he was just 20 years old, and he was assigned to the 55 Squadron RAF, as a gunner-observer aboard de Havilland biplanes.
On 20 July 1918, Butler took part in a bombing raid on the Mauser weapons and munitions factories at Oberndorf and Neckarstadt in Germany. Flying behind pilot Lieutenant Christopher Young, his aircraft dropped 24 bombs. The German defensive anti-aircraft (FLaK) units responded with 445 heavy shells and German fighter aircraft attacked beginning at about 08:30. Tragically, Christopher Young was fatally shot and killed immediately; Reginald Butler managed to jump from the falling aircraft into the treetops near Fluorn-Winzeln in the Black Forest, but lacking a parachute, he fell and died. His body was discovered on 1 August 1918 by a local brush-wood collector and buried at Oberndorf cemetery on 2 August. Later the British government’s policy of concentrating war-dead in key gravesites meant Butler’s remains were re-interred at the Niederzwehren Military Cemetery near Kassel.
In the forest near the crash–site, local residents erected a wooden cross, the so-called “Englishman’s Cross”, which was maintained and renewed periodically. In the 1950s the Robert Moser glider-pilot group of the German Air Sports Association replaced it with a granite stone bearing a commemorative plaque in Gothic script, and volunteers still maintain this small memorial. Back home in Egham, Butler is commemorated on the town war-memorial in St John’s Church and is listed in Egham Museum’s HistoryPin collection.
The publication and translation of research by German local historians Emil Moosmann and Dieter Mönch, in collaboration with the Oberndorf City Archive, has kept Butler’s story alive. In 2012 Egham resident Barrie Reynolds responded to a request for help in tracing his relatives. While no connections were found initially, a great-niece has since come forward and welcomed the sharing of her family’s memories. With her permission, Reynolds added Butler’s story to the Imperial War Museum’s Lives of the First World War archive.
Barrie Reynolds reflects on this story:
“The remarkable thing in all of this is the common humanity of people who, starting in one war and continuing through another, continued to respect and maintain the memorial at the place where an enemy and total stranger had died.”
On this centennial of the Armistice, we remember Lieutenant Reginald Arthur Butler: a young British air-man from Egham whose life was cut short in the skies of war, yet whose memory is honoured across nations, in wood and stone, in Britain and Germany, by communities united in remembrance.
Visit
You can find Lieutenant Reginald Arthur Butler memorial in the Black Forest Germany near the town of Fluorn-Winzeln.
Park the car on Zollhausstrasse (K5526) near Fluorn-Winzeln in the Black Forest and walk 10 minutes to the monument. (Car park possibility at coordinaat: 48.294331442106646, 8.444224599731726) 78737 , Germany
