EVERY morning Willie Thomson makes a daily pilgrimage to a war memorial to those who lost their lives on a World War ll aircraft carrier.

Known as Tommy, the 87-year-old former Royal Navy pilot will never forget his fallen comrades.

Yet, for a hero who won a Distinguished Service Cross medal for sinking a German U-boat in 1944, it was his exploits after the war that have marked him out as extraordinary.

In fact the pensioner, from Ardrossan, Ayrshire, has a part of Antarctica named after him following a daring mission by explorers in 1947 to map the frozen south.

His exploits have literally put the great-grandfather on the map because after his polar adventure a 780ft headland on the west coast of Graham Land was resurveyed in 1948-49 and named Thomson Head.

After the war Tommy signed up as a pilot for a survey team at Base E, Marguerite Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula.

He flew his Auster aircraft - which he named Ice Cold Katy - along with biologist and co-pilot Bernard Stonehouse and surveyor Reginald Freeman, who also acted as navigator.

Everything had gone smoothly until, on September 15, 1947, Tommy and his two-man crew were sent ahead on a scouting mission in their Auster to find a safe landing spot for a larger American twin-engined aircraft which was going to take aerial photography.

As he looked out of the window of his flat on Ardrossan shorefront at the snow-capped peaks of Arran's Goat Fell, Tommy recalled: "Our job was to go to this particular location and see if the big American was going to be able to land there.

"You see, sometimes the snow could be umpteen feet deep. I could tell just by putting down the skis of my smaller Auster that the bigger plane would have just sank right in.

"We found the place and it was fine. But then we had to wait an age before the American plane arrived - we later found out it took off two and a half hours late.

"When it did eventually come overhead, I set off a red smoke flare and it was like blood over the snow. But the damned American aircraft just flew on."

Tommy and his two companions waited in vain for the Americans to come back, before deciding they had better return to base themselves.

He said: "I took the Auster up to 7000ft to be above a 6000ft glacier but suddenly we started going slower and slower as there was a tremendous wind coming from the other direction.

"Then snow came and the engine started going putt putt putt. I decided the best thing to do was to turn around and try to get to base by going down the side of the glacier to get to sea ice.

"To my horror, there were icebergs ahead and the visibility was so poor we could only see down, not in front."

Once he had made his way through the icebergs, flying almost blind, Tommy decided to land on the sea ice and spend the night there hoping for the storm to clear. But then disaster struck.

He said: "There must have been a little bit of ice jutting out that we couldn't see, because it took off my right ski.

"Then the Auster rolled over slowly and we finished up on our backs. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt, although Reg did injure his shoulder.

"All that we had was a small 'pup' tent, one sleeping bag, one inner bag and a tin of pemmicam - concentrated fat and protein - between the three of us."

However, when the weather cleared they decided to try and cover the 60 miles to base across the most unforgiving terrain in the world on foot.

And the first day after treating themselves to a bit of pemmican the size of a 10p piece, they travelled 10 miles.

The three-man team were pleased with this progress but the snow came and they made a laborious advance, sometimes sinking up to their thighs.

Then they were hit by a ferocious gale which saw them huddling together in the small tent for three days.

"The snow piled up to such an extent that it almost brought the tent in on us," added Tommy.

"The gale was a mixed blessing however, because when it abated it had almost scoured the sea ice and we were able to set off once again," Willie recalled.

"The next day we saw a seal basking in the sun near a blowhole in the ice.

"Reg had an ice axe with him and he started to creep up on the seal but then he came back and said that because he had hurt his shoulder he didn't know if he was strong enough to kill it before it went down the blowhole.

"By this time I was so angry - angry because I had broken the plane, angry about all sorts of things. So I took the ice axe and went up behind the seal and nearly took its head off. "We cut it up and Reg decided it would be a good idea to have the liver.

"I asked him to cut a bit of the meat for me and I bit into it and chewed it and, do you know, it tasted like mulligatawny soup.

"Shortly after that we thought we could hear something and then thought: 'No. It can't be.' "And there it was - an aircraft circling some miles away. We only had one flare left and the others wanted to set if off right away.

"I said for them to wait because I knew when the pilot would be looking in our direction and that is when I set it off. "It was the American pilot Jim Lassiter and when he came in with these big skis it was as if he had been sent from heaven.

It had been eight or nine days since we first crashed and we were utterly exhausted."

Once he had finished his Antarctic adventure Tommy returned home to be with his young wife, Nan, and to swap his Biggles days for a career as a teacher.

This eventually led to a chance reunion with a sled dog from his former Antarctic base.

Tommy explained: "There were about 90 huskies at our base, but my favourite was a lead dog called Darky.

"Anyway, in 1952 I was teaching in Harwich when the Empire Exhibition was held in London and I took the children.

"There were exhibits representing all the countries in the Commonwealth and one included a lot of huskies behind wire mesh.

"I couldn't believe my eyes, because one of them was Darky."

Today, Tommy's almost daily routine involves his walk to the memorial to the 379 who lost their lives when aircraft carrier Dasher sank after an explosion on March 27, 1943, while sailing between Ardrossan and Arran.

Tommy served on the Dasher's sister ship, the Fencer, in the North Atlantic.

Because he helped escort supply ships destined for Russia safely through the U-boat infested waters, Tommy also received a medal which was ordered to be minted by the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to recognise the heroism of British sailors and airmen who took part in that campaign.