Far East Mosquito
Hi All,
My Mums uncle who passed away a few years ago was a navigator on Mosquitos flying from India and I think Burma, and Dakotas after the war ended. We don't know very much more, he was a modest man in general and never seemed keen to talk about it much. He trained in Canada. The only times I remember him talking about his time in the east was when I was a lad and making an Airfix Mosquito - he showed me where the radio set was mounted and commented that one day a cannon shell had passed through the one in his plane, fortunatly without exploding or he wouldn't be around, and later he showed me his circular slide rule and explained how to use it. Anyway, his log book has turned up and I am hoping to get a look at it later in the year. I am not sure what I will find out, time, route, aircraft serial, crew presumably, but would a navigators log be likely to record much about the kind of mission? I believe it would have been a fighter/bomber version of the Mosquito he would have been flying in so presumably railways and bridges would have been regular targets but does any one know more? Post war we know from correspondance that he flew in Dakotas on routes between Rangoon, Bangkok, Saigon, and possibly KL and Singapore as well as internal flights within Thailand transporting local VIP's. Prisoner repatriation out of Thailand may have been part of it.
Anyway, I will find out more detail when I see his log but would be interested to hear anything about what his day to day life would have been like, types of target etc. I guess it was fairly hazardous, I know the Mossies initially had a high accident rate on top of enemy action and the terrain would not have helped.
I have always thought that he was probably a very good navigator, both to have been posted to Mosquitos and simply not to have got lost - I guess a lot of time would have been over featureless jungle, likely poorly charted and with few if any electronic nav aids.
Many thanks to anyone who has any info that would fill in some of the background.