Chelsea Pioneer Cemetery and Cenotaph
Pilot Officer John Donald Bates
431 Sqdn, Royal Canadian Air Force,
20th February 1944, aged 19.
Son of Thomas H. Bates and Janey Pearl Bates, of Farm Point, Province of Quebec.
Commemoration at the Berlin 1939-1945 War Cemetery, Brandenburg, Germany.
See also The Chelsea Cenotaph Story published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 28 and Announcements and Commemorations.
Berlin 1939-1945 War Cemetery, Brandenburg, Germany
The Berlin 1939-1945 War Cemetery is in the district of Charlottenburg, 8 kilometres west of the city centre, on the south side of the Heerstrasse. The site of the cemetery was selected by the British Occupation Authorities and Commission officials jointly in 1945, soon after hostilities ceased. Graves were brought to the cemetery from the Berlin area and from eastern Germany. The great majority of those buried here, approximately 80 per cent of the total, were airmen who were lost in the air raids over Berlin and the towns in eastern Germany. The remainder were men who died as prisoners of war, some of them in the forced march into Germany from camps in Poland, in front of the advancing Russians. The cemetery contains 3,594 Commonwealth burials of the Second World War, 397 of them unidentified. In addition, there are 266 post war graves of men of the British Occupation Forces or their dependants, or of members of the Control Commission.
See also the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. 
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