The background to the RAF, Bomber Command and the Pathfinders’ war
Jan Nieuwenhuis sent the following message late yesterday: “Today late this afternoon, we again placed candle lights in front of all the war graves at the Texel War Cemetery…” With grateful thanks to Jan Nieuwenhuis and all who have helped in this year’s remembrance. Jennie Mack Gray writes: I have […]
This detail from a photograph shows part of the funeral procession for 405 Squadron members, mostly Canadians, who were buried on 22 December 1943 at Cambridge City Cemetery. At the rear are Bill Bessent (nearest the camera) whose twin brother Bob was amongst those killed, and the one surviving uninjured […]
Photograph, possibly taken in November 1942, of a Remembrance ceremony at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Great Gransden, Cambridgeshire. The lych gate in the picture is still there today. The central figure is the exiled King Peter of Yugoslavia, in RAF uniform, with his mother Queen Marie standing beside him. The Yugoslavian […]
The Library on this website has a new article, by Mikkel Planthinn, about the Danish Shoulder Flash, worn on the RAF uniform to indicate that the wearer was from the Allied country of Denmark. Denmark was invaded by German troops on 9 April 1940 and would remain occupied until liberation […]
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 Hall and William Woodruff, survived by using their parachutes. Woodruff was captured more or less […]
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 […]
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 photograph from which his image has been taken. It is a huge photograph and our […]
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 posted overseas to the BLA, the British Liberated Area, where he remained until 18 May […]
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. Read the Full Article: Post-War Criticism of Bombing War
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 […]
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 operation to Berlin when a series of fatal accidents occurred due to dense fog, difficulties […]
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 […]
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 come up with three items, all in Special Collections. The three aircrew concerned were Arthur […]
The wound stripe, which was an unusual emblem on RAF uniforms, was a small gold band or pair of gold bands worn on the left sleeve. The airmen who wore these stripes had recovered from serious injuries incurred during their operational duties. Read the Full Article: RAF Wound Stripes