Developments
A quick update - the RAF Museum are very interested in establishing some form of archive based on this thread (plus recollections of the Valiant & Victor &, for that matter, other platforms involved in this sort of thing) from all involved in those ops (their exact wording is 'delighted to accept hard copies' of recollections).
As well as collating the snippets off this thread for archiving, if anyone wishes to produce a 'what I did in the V-Force' memoir for archiving in this (no matter how dull and boring it might seem to you), please PM me (to establish my bona fides) and we can take this forward via e-mail (obviously, I shall need to ensure there are no outbreaks of Walter Mittyism so that we don't fill the archive with gash material) - end result will be that I will collate hard copies of everything and send it on to the archive. I will have to ask those who've contributed above and who want their material to be included to send me their names and a quick outline of what they did in the V-Force, since the Pprune 'handles' probably won't be of much help to future historians.
Also, if I might take advice from any members of the V-Force Association here represented - would the association be amenable to drawing upon a wider basis of recollection than just Pprune users?
I have yet to manage to discuss with the publisher I mentioned (conflicting schedules, soon to be resolved), but am pursuing this.
The end result, therefore (I hope) will be a meaningful archive of personal experiences on the V-Force from air and ground crew, stored for access for future generations at the RAFM archive department, coupled with a published history based around these memories. To do this, of course, I need a spot of help in the form of the recollections above and beyond those here - so over to you (please!)...