The background to the RAF, Bomber Command and the Pathfinders’ war
On 9 May 1943, a 1409 Squadron Met Flight crew were shot down over Holland. This was a rare occurrence as normally Mosquitos flew too high and too fast to be intercepted. Both crewmembers, Peter …
Following on from the interesting and detailed German eyewitness reports of The Loss of the Robertson Crew, published at the end of January 2022, we have more German eyewitness reports of another 97 Squadron crew, …
Further to our post yesterday about Frederick Jones, a pilot with 635 Squadron, and his earlier time in training (see Frederick Jones, 635 Squadron, & Heaton Park) we have now located the end of war …
Winston Johnson’s wartime service was as a navigator/specialist wireless operator. He was involved in top-secret work, some of it with 109 Squadron, a founding Mosquito squadron of the Pathfinders. On 31 January 1945, Winston was …
Although the bombing campaign had received very positive publicity during the war, post-war the tide of public opinion began to turn against the campaign. By extension, this would come to mean that the aircrew themselves. …
We have just added some interesting and unusually detailed German eyewitness reports of the loss of the Robertson crew after the Nuremburg raid of 27/28 August 1943. Lancaster JA958K crashed at Bubenreuth, near Erlangen, around …
On Thursday and Friday this week we remember the 50 Pathfinder aircrew who were killed in crashes in England on Thursday and Friday 78 years ago. The crews had just returned safely from that night’s …
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: …
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 …
Coming up to the anniversary of the famous raid on Hitler’s V1 weapon site, we started thinking about what we have in the Archive which is related to this night. It was not difficult to …
