Tom Derek Bowden

Tom Derek Bowden was born in 1921 in Surrey

Bowden was born in 1921 in Surrey, England, to a South London family. He married Eva Heilbronner.

He joined the British cavalry in 1938 and served in Mandatory Palestine with the Royal Scots Greys under Orde Wingate. In 1941, as an officer, he fought against Vichy forces in Syria and Lebanon and was badly wounded in the leg. He recovered with the Appel family in Tel Aviv and then volunteered for the Parachute Regiment.

He trained in Egypt and fought in Sicily, in Normandy and at Arnhem, where he was captured. The Germans found letters from a kibbutz in his gear and sent him to Bergen-Belsen for a month, where he was made to move corpses. He was then held in a prisoner camp near Hamburg until the war ended.

After the war he trained paratroopers in Yugoslavia. He then entered the country secretly through Cyprus and joined the Haganah as David Appel, fighting at Latrun and later in the Galilee. In 1949 Chaim Laskov asked him to set up a parachute school, and he wrote its training manual with the help of his secretary Eva Heilbronner.

He later returned to Britain. He died on June 10, 2019.