Arthur Reginald Webster Page, the eldest of two sons of a Royal Navy chaplain, was born in Deal, Kent, on 19 December 1923. His mother’s family, the Brewers, included many doctors who had benefited from 200 years of first-class medical training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
Young Page was trained at Haileybury and was destined for Barts when war broke out. During the winter of 1942-43 he trained at Lee-on-Solent, Wirral and Crail and undertook advanced flying training at Kingston, Ontario, crossing the Atlantic aboard the RMS Queen Mary. Page began his flying career in the Fairey Barracuda with three crew, but by August 1944 he had qualified to fly the more powerful American torpedo bomber Grumman Avenger and joined Victorious and 849 NAS in Ceylon.
The sturdy Avenger became a reliable workhorse of the Royal Navy, but not without its accidents: on 19 December 1944, while celebrating his 21st birthday with Ken Dorman, a friend who shared his birthday on the same day, Page landed only to find that an Avenger ahead of him had gone into a spin and crashed onto the deck, decapitating Dorman in his path. For Page, it was an ugly reminder of the misery of war and a birthday he would never forget.
Page took part in Operation Lentil, an air raid on oil installations at Pangkalan Brandan in North Sumatra on 4 January 1945, and in Operation Meridian, the raids on the oil refineries at Palembang in South Sumatra on 24 and 29 January. During the latter raid, Page’s aircraft developed engine problems and he was forced to return to Victorious early.
The attacks were successful and the plants’ aviation fuel production was reduced by three-quarters, but nine pilots were captured by the Japanese and subsequently beheaded in Changi Prison in Singapore on the last day of the war.
