On Tuesday 5th November 2024 at 12pm, Mark Russell will share the story of Squadron Leader Alfred "Freddie" Lammer DFC and Bar. This talk will be hosted in-person at the RAF Museum's London site and virtually via Crowdcast.

Born in Austria, Squadron Leader Alfred ‘Freddie’ Lammer, DFC and Bar, was the only stateless person awarded the Battle of Britain clasp as one of Churchill’s Few. This lecture will look at his RAF career, from his beginnings as a committed anti-Nazi living in London in the 1930s and his experience as a stateless person looking to fight Nazism, to his training and operational career in the RAF. He was commissioned and trained as an air gunner, a rarity among air gunners, being too old for pilot training (and hence older than many of his squadron peers) flying first with Coastal Command in Defiants, then became one of the first Airborne Interception (AI) operators, flying night fighter operations in Beaufighters against German and Italian bombers. Credited with six kills, he served in both the UK and North Africa, then returning to the UK to train further AI operators before being demobbed in late 1945. The lecture draws on records at The National Archives, Lammer’s own unpublished memoir, diaries and log book, as well as the recollections of his son. The resulting picture of the career of ‘The Masterly Manipulator’, as he was known, provides insight into both the training and operation of the much-maligned Defiant, the development of the early night fighter force and then into the wholly new art and science of airborne radar interception, in which the RAF arguably led the world.

Since graduating with a history degree, Mark Russell has worked in professional services. He completed the MA in Air Power: History, Theory and Evolution at the University of Birmingham in December 2017. His dissertation looked at whether the RAF was a ‘learning organisation’ in the period 1925-1935, with special reference to how its ‘Air Exercises’ helped to develop and test tactics and technology. He continues to work in professional services, but has published articles and reviews on a number of diverse RAF-related topics for the RAF’s Air and Space Power Review, the RAF Historical Society Journal. He has published a range of articles in The Aviation Historian on armaments and is currently completing articles on the He115 in RAF service and on 333 Squadron Royal Norwegian Air Force’s operations from Fife 1943-45. He presented a paper on ‘Females in fast jets’ at the RAF Museum’s September 2023 conference.

Lunchtime Lecture (London): Squadron Leader Alfred Lammer: The Masterly Manipulator