Sometimes it is the smallest items which tell the most. A few old newspaper cuttings, preserved for many years, reveal how greatly Derek Charles Carrott, of the Townsend crew of 405 Squadron, was missed by his family. He was the flight engineer and the only British member of the crew, all of the rest of
The Moore crew were all killed when their aircraft crashed at Gelsenkirchen in June 1943. James Parker McMillin was 97 Squadron’s Navigation Officer, and he had only stepped into the navigator role when the usual crewmember could not fly. Like so many other of these specialist officers, who had already completed their tours but still
Dr Olav Heinemann’s article “A Chance Encounter” contains a last section which mentions his grandfather Kurt Heinemann who was a navigator on a Luftwaffe bomber. We very much like the closing paragraph of the article: “While it appeared to me at first that I was solving the case of a bomber which had gone missing
Last summer, when lockdown was in progress in many parts of Europe, Dr Olav Heinemann of the University of Duisburg-Essen came across a stone commemorating an RAF crew in his local churchyard at Gelsenkirchen. His curiosity thoroughly aroused, he researched the story behind the stone and his article “A Chance Encounter” is printed in full
