Sergeant William D Stone

William Donald Stone, son of William Henry and Kitty J Stone, of Hythe, Kent, enlisted into The Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) and then volunteered for airborne forces.

Sergeant Stone successfully completed his parachute training at RAF Kabrit, Egypt, and was then posted to 11th Parachute Battalion, and took part in Operation Market Garden (Arnhem).

Sgt Stone is assumed to have drowned on the night of 18/19 November 1944, aged 26, during Operation Pegasus 2, whilst being ferried across the river Rhine, in a kayak, by 1/Lt Douglas Wilcombe of 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), 101st US Airborne Division. Their boat overturned, and both men were never seen alive again. The Sergeant had been taken prisoner and transferred to Apeldoorn from where, on 26 September, he was put on a train bound for Germany. With a number of others he escaped, and was hidden by the resistance. For many years the identity of the paratrooper that had drowned with the American lieutenant remained a mystery. The only clue was in Leo Heaps’ book ‘The Grey Goose of Arnhem’, where he described how the soldier in question had a missing finger ‘which bled profusely’. It is now known that Sgt Stone had his left index finger blown away on the LZ on 18th September 1944 (Battle of Arnhem, Roll of Honour, 5th revised edition, 2011). He is commemorated on the Groesbeek Memorial to the missing.

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