Otago Boys High School student Geoff Chambers was an outstanding young swimmer with huge potential, never realised because of his tragically early death.

The Evening Star newspaper reported that Chambers in his first season of swimming competition won the Otago junior breaststroke championship, the New Zealand title and broke the New Zealand record three times.

In the following national championships, “retention of the form he has shown of late will assure him of victory and the would give Otago a clean sweep of the division.”

But this was 1936, and war was looming. Chambers moved with his family to Wellington, became a clerk with the Public Trust office as a teenager but soon enlisted.

He trained at RNZAF Levin in 1941 and months later was flying in Wellington bombers with No 70 Squadron RAF in north Africa.

On  5 March 1942, just before 11 at night, his aircraft ( a Wellington bomber) took off from an airfield in Egypt and was last heard of just before 3.00am.

The burnt-out wreckage and two bodies, whose graves were lost in the chaos of war, were later found by the army near Bomba on the north Libyan coast.

Pilot officer Chambers was 21.

As he has no known grave, he is commemorated on the Alamein Memorial, on the Public Trust Office Roll of Honour, and on the war graves websites of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the New Zealand War Graves Trust, where there is a photo of his name on the memorial. [Terry Snow, NZWGT]