Edwin Essery Swales was born on 3 July 1915 in Inanda, Natal, one of four children of Harry Evelyn Swales, a Heatonville district farmer, and Olive Miriam Essery. His father died in the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, leaving Olive to raise four young children alone. The family moved into the Berea, a leafy ridge suburb of Durban with views over the Indian Ocean. Edwin went to Durban Preparatory High School and then Durban High School, where he played in the second-team rugby XV and joined the 4th Durban Scout Troop. After school he took a job at Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas) and in 1935, aged 20, enlisted as a part-time soldier in the Natal Mounted Rifles. By the time war broke out he had risen to warrant officer second class - the rank known colloquially as sergeant major - and was already an experienced soldier in a small regiment with a long memory.

With the Natal Mounted Rifles, Swales fought through the East African campaign in Kenya and Abyssinia, and then north into the desert war. On 17 January 1942 he transferred to the South African Air Force. The rugby came with him: he turned out for Griquas during his pilot training at Kimberley, where he received his wings on 26 June 1943, and was a reserve for the Natal provincial side without ever actually playing for them. On 22 August 1943 he was seconded to the Royal Air Force while keeping his SAAF uniform and rank. He completed heavy bomber training and was posted in June 1944 to the elite RAF Pathfinder Force - specifically to 582 Squadron, part of No. 8 Pathfinder Group at Little Staughton in Huntingdonshire. Pathfinders normally accepted only pilots who had already completed a full bomber tour; Swales went in straight from training. He started flying operations on 12 July 1944.

On 23 December 1944, a few weeks after his promotion to captain, Swales flew as Number Two Pathfinder on a daylight raid against the Gremberg railway yards in Cologne. The Squadron Leader leading the operation was his close friend Robert Palmer, an RAF officer who normally flew Mosquitos with 109 Squadron at the same airfield. Palmer had completed 110 bombing raids when his Lancaster, with two engines on fire from anti-aircraft hits, finished its bombing run and went down. He became only the second Pathfinder pilot to receive the Victoria Cross. Eight of the 30 aircraft on the operation were lost. Swales saw his friend killed, completed the mission, and was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his role on the raid. The citation describing his coolness under fire would be gazetted exactly two months later - on the morning of the day he flew his last sortie.

Pforzheim was a German jewelry-manufacturing city near Karlsruhe whose industrial output had drawn RAF Bomber Command's attention late in the war. On the night of 23 February 1945, 367 Lancasters and 13 Mosquitos struck the target from a relatively low 8,000 feet. The bombing was concentrated and devastating: 1,825 tons of bombs in 22 minutes destroyed an estimated 83 percent of the city's built-up area - probably the highest proportion of any city destroyed in any single raid of the war. Some 17,600 civilians were killed. The historical reality is unsparing on both sides: Swales died trying to save his own crew at the end of a mission that killed thousands of German civilians, and any account of his Victoria Cross has to hold those two facts together. As Master Bomber, his job was to direct the marking and bombing over the target throughout the attack, requiring him to remain over the city long after most of the bomber stream had turned for home.

Lancaster III PB538 was attacked over the target by a Bf 110 night fighter. Cannon fire shattered one engine and holed the fuel tanks. The same fighter found them again and knocked out a second engine. Swales chose not to bail out over enemy territory; he turned the wounded aircraft west, nursing it across Germany and into northern France. As the weather closed in he ordered his seven crew to bail out one by one. All of them landed safely. Swales held the Lancaster steady long enough to give them that chance, then attempted to put the aircraft down on his own. It stalled and crashed near Valenciennes - west of Prouvy, 3 kilometers south-southeast of Denain in northern France. He was 29 years old. It was his 43rd operational flight, and the same day his DFC had been gazetted in London.

Swales was originally buried at the Fosses USA Cemetery. After the war his remains were reinterred at Leopoldsburg War Cemetery in Belgian Limburg, which lies northeast of Diest and gathers the dead from many Allied operations across this part of the Low Countries. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris of RAF Bomber Command wrote personally to Olive Swales. The South African National Museum of Military History in Saxonwold, Johannesburg, holds his full-size medals. His old school, Durban High School, displays the miniature set and the silver Lancaster model that A.V. Roe and Rolls-Royce commissioned for the families of all ten VC winners who flew Lancasters - tracked down after auction in London in 2004 and brought home through four months of negotiation. Edwin Swales VC Drive in Durban was renamed to honor the anti-apartheid figure Solomon Mahlangu in a contested municipal decision; the school's Swales House and granite memorial endure. His grave at Leopoldsburg is reachable on foot from the village station.