The bombing war and Germany
Today sees the publication of a new article which contains a fascinating conjunction of two accounts, one from the British viewpoint, one from the German viewpoint, of the shooting down of a Mosquito of 109 Squadron on 14 January 1944, eighty years ago. Mosquitos were difficult aircraft to shoot down, […]
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, lost in the same month as the Robertson crew. This was the Kenneth Brown crew […]
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 16 miles (25.5 kilometres) north of Nuremburg. Five of the crew were killed immediately, including […]
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 […]
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 […]
During the war, public opinion in Britain and the Dominions was firmly on the side of Bomber Command. However, there was also some determined criticism of Bomber Command’s campaigns, not least by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, who argued the case against area bombing in the House of Lords. (Note: […]
This public information poster was printed in Berlin in 1940. The designer was Sander-Herwig. Note the RAF roundel on the wing of the aircraft, and the bomb in the skeleton’s hand. The poster is a forewarning of the later demonisation of the RAF bomber crews as terrorflieger, ‘the terror fliers’, […]
On 11 February 1942, the prestigious German battleships the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau and the Prinz Eugen broke out of the westerly French port of Brest and sailed east, up the English Channel, in a break for the security of the German-controlled waters beyond it. Amongst the RAF aircraft scrambled to attack […]