George Bennions
RAF officer (1913-2004)

George Herman Bennions, DFC (15 March 1913 – 30 January 2004), nicknamed "Ben", was a British flying ace who served with the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. He was credited with having shot down at least twelve aircraft.
Early life
George Bennions was born on 15 March 1913 in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. His parents, Edward and Mary Bennions, both worked in the pottery industry. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1929 as an aircraft apprentice at RAF Halton and qualified three years later as an engine fitter. In 1935 Bennions married Avis Brown who died in 2000 and they had three daughters. Their son died in infancy.
Bennions trained as a pilot and in January 1936 joined No. 41 Squadron RAF in Aden as a sergeant pilot flying the Hawker Demon fighter. The squadron returned to England later that year to be re-equipped with the Hawker Fury, and again in 1940 with the Supermarine Spitfire.
“George Bennions” enters the record as rAF officer (1913-2004). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what George, Bennions and officer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5536900. VIAF identifies the subject as 254999578. The Library of Congress control number is nb2012016345. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1913, 2004, 1929 and 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “George Bennions” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.