Flight Lieutenant Wallace McIntosh, who died June 4 at 87, joined the Royal Air Force to escape acute poverty and survived 55 bombing operations. By the end of World War II he had shot down eight enemy aircraft and was recognized as the most decorated gunner in Britain’s bomber forces.

On the night of June 7, 1944, McIntosh was the rear gunner of a Lancaster on a mission to attack targets near Caen in Normandy.

As the aircraft crossed the coast of France, a German Junkers 88 fighter attacked, forcing the pilot, Wing Commander John Grey, to take evasive action by “corkscrewing” under the direction of McIntosh another gunner.

The combined firepower of the two gunners set the Junkers ablaze and sent it spinning to the ground. A minute later, a second Junkers closed in; there was an exchange of fire, which ended in the German aircraft exploding.

The Lancaster crew pressed on to complete a successful attack on their target. On the return flight, they were attacked by a Messerschmitt night fighter. Once again the two gunners opened up, and the enemy aircraft fell away on fire, crashing into the sea.

When news of this triple success reached the headquarters of Bomber Command, the C-in-C, Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris, telephoned his base and asked: “Who the hell were those guys?”

A few days later McIntosh received a handwritten note of congratulation from Harris, a rare accolade.

Wallace McIntosh was born on March 27, 1920, in a barn in Aberdeenshire in Scotland, during a blizzard. After a few days his teenage mother — an unmarried servant — gave him to her parents, who brought him up as a migrant farm worker. They were once reduced to living in a shed.

McIntosh did not learn about Christmas until he was 7 and never celebrated a birthday until he joined the RAF. But he could steal, kill, and skin a sheep before he was 12; he could snare anything that could be cooked; and he could pull salmon from a river with the skill of a master poacher. He left school at 13.

Young Wallace recognized that the war offered an opportunity to escape poverty, he and joined the RAF in 1939 as an airman. On one occasion he tried to engage a lowflying German bomber with his rifle.

On his ninth operation he shot down his first enemy fighter and probably destroyed a second. After 32 operations, at a time when Bomber Command losses were at their highest, McIntosh was rested and awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal.

Immensely proud of being commissioned in June 1943, he returned to no. 207 the following February for a second tour of operations, flying as the rear gunner in the squadron commander’s crew.

On the night of May 3, one of the four engines of his Lancaster caught fire on takeoff, but Grey pressed on, flying at low level on three engines to the target at Mailly-le-Camp.

They arrived to find most of the bomber force circling the target while German night fighters were starting to create havoc. Due to radio problems, the instructions from the Master Bomber were not heard, and 28 of the 173 bombers were shot down. McIntosh’s aircraft was attacked, and he shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 110.

In another raid over France, his Lancaster lost two engines after being attacked, and the crew prepared to bail out. As they flew lower, they observed an American bomber in the water and circled it to transmit its position until a third engine started to fail. Grey managed to make an emergency landing in Kent just as the third engine conked out.

After the war, McIntosh remained in the RAF, dropping supplies from Dakotas to feed cattle in remote areas during the severe winter of 1947. He found it difficult to settle in a peacetime air force, however, and left the following year to work as an agricultural salesman in Aberdeenshire.

His biography, “Gunning for the Enemy” by Mel Rolfe, was published in 2003. When the Bank of Scotland recently carried out a survey asking people to name “Great Scots,” McIntosh was chosen among such illustrious names as David Livingstone and Robert Louis Stevenson.