Mora, Cyril

Cyril Michael Mora was born in Christchurch on 29 April 1921 and was the son of John and Bridget (nee Ryan) Mora. 

During World War Two he served as a radio operator with the Royal New Zealand Air Force. He received his training at the Wireless School in Montreal, Quebec and then the Bombing and Gunnery School in Jarvis, Ontario, before travelling to England to serve with 75 Squadron.

He was on-board a Stirling bomber on the night of 26 April 1943 when it was shot down by an enemy fighter over Holland.

Cyril managed to parachute from the plane and crashed through a greenhouse roof on landing. A local Dutch family took him in after he knocked on their door and helped him contact the Dutch Resistance and well-known Dutch resistance leader, Anton Schrader.

The six other crew members also parachuted out of the plummeting aircraft but were captured by Germans.

Cyril was then smuggled back to England via a series of routes, which included a 16-hour journey over the North Sea, crammed into a launch with ten other escapers travelling through a minefield and past armed trawlers.

After the war Mora married Margaret Helming and moved from Christchurch to New Plymouth, where he worked as a watersider at Port Taranaki. He had eight children. He also ran a billiard parlour on Currie St and hosted a radio series on National Radio called “The Eagle’s Feathers” which aired once a week between 1959 and 1960.

In 1988 Cyril received the serial plate from the downed bomber, which had been recovered by a Dutchman who was a boy when the aircraft crashed near his village. He managed to track down Cyril and returned the serial plate to him, 45 years after the plane went down.

In 1989 Cyril returned to Holland for a reunion and met the man who had helped him escape, Anton Schrader, and renewed their friendship. Anton's work with the Dutch resistance included setting up a pipeline for thousands of crews from Allied fighter and bomber planes, that were brought down by the Luftwaffe over the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, to be returned to Great Britain. In 1992 Anton and Cyril met again when Anton travelling to New Zealand and visited Cyril at his home in Lepperton.

Cyril died on 9 July 2000.

Books

The Dutch Resistance Revealed: The inside story of courage and betrayal, Jos Scharrer. Page 58.