Not sure how appropriate this request is, but knowing how expert so many contributors are on this thread, maybe someone can help?
As mentioned earlier on in the thread, my father, Major Harold Pettinger, after a 'interesting time' in the Western desert and then the first wave of the Chindits, was then in charge of supplying the Chindits in Burma by air using Dakotas. He spent a fair amount f them in the air, sometimes visiting the airstrips in the jungle behind enemy lines.
At the end of this operation in December 1944, he was posted to Western India to prepare for a similar operation against Japan, though this was cancelled. There is then a gap in his otherwise quite detailed memoirs until his repatriation in May 1945. This gap did not bother us, until recently an old friend of his mentioned , in passing, 'did your Dad ever tell you about Yalta?'.
It seems that the old friend had, some years ago, visited the Livadia Palace where the Yalta Conference took place in Feb 1945, where there is a museum dedicated to the conference. The displays are all written in cyrillic, apart from the names of the UK and USA participants, and the old friend had noticed my fathers name written as being an adjutant to someone at the conference. When, later, the friend mentioned this to my father, he reluctantly acknowledged that he had indeed been at the conference, and told an anecdote about an unauthorised foray into the town with his Russian counterpart, but revealed nothing else.
The friend assumed that we all knew about this, but in fact my father had said nothing. The time gap in his memoirs would coincide with the Yalta conference, but we have been unable to verify my father's attendance, nor what or why he might doing there. The Livadia Palace museum does not reply to our enquiries (unsurprisingly, in view of the political situation in Crimea), and my fathers old regimental museum knows nothing. The extensive Yalta Conference files at Kew are not digitised, so are available only to a personal visit once one has registered as a researcher. We have applied for my fathers official military record, but these have not yet arrived.
Does anyone here have any idea how we might check if my father actually WAS at Yalta in 1945, and why?