pulse1 (your #7644),
Best of luck with your attempts to lure your old-timer out of his lair, perhaps he could be encouraged by the wealth of new contributors which has just cropped-up !
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MPN11 (your #7651),
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And, yes, we will get round to the rest of the bloody wars eventually.>
As with Smudge, no time like the present ! (any one of us could stumble under a bus at any time).
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Geriaviator (your #7652),
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Did you really go from dainty Airspeed Oxford to monster Beaufighter? >
In 1954 they were still going from Oxfords straight onto the Meteor (the Typhoon of its time). Most survived.
(On the PM front, things have gone haywire, will leave it a day two to settle down, D.)
Now your #7658,
The first paragraph of Jack Stafford's memoir tells it exactly as it was in Britain (and all over the Empire, I would think) at the victorious end of the Battle of Britain. Just about every red-blooded fit young man in the land with School Cert and in the age limits (17½ to 23) rushed to volunteer for RAF aircrew.
After that he seems to have had a very hard time. Surely the training given in NZ would have been on the same lines as in the UK: a fortnight in a Reception Centre, where admittedly we were kicked around from pillar to post, and then onto an ITW for six weeks of what I remember as the best-run Course of any of the many I went through in later years. I remember nothing like the brutal treatment they got from that sadistic Flt.Sgt. (what were the officers doing ? Were they blind ?)
There is a possible partial explanation: I would suppose that their training organisation was swamped by the numbers of volunteers as was ours; we smoothed the intakes out by sending home on (unpaid) "Deferred Service" all who wished, recalling them only when the Reception Centres were ready for them. But there were others with no home to go to (eg those from overseas who had paid for their own passages to the UK to volunteer): these had to be taken in at once and were worked to death as dogsbodies until a Reception Centre vacancy cropped up. Perhaps the same was true in NZ, and he was one of the unfortunates. But nothing can justify the experiences he described.
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Walter (your #7653),
Here you couldn't have a better example of one of the most useful purposes of this Thread - the correction of errors (all put in in good faith). So the Burma Beaufighter story given to us by our Beaufighter neighbours was an impossibility ? Both the crew were killed in the failed landing attempt, so the only way the story could have any basis was on radio messages from the Nav after his pilot was hit somewhere round Rangoon.
If he then went forward to give what help he could, he would've been out out of R/T contact, maybe his pilot regained sufficient consciousness to get the thing home, but not enough to get it down. We shall never know.
Then someone put in the heroic navigator bit, first as a wild guess, but you know how these stories gain momentum. The worst instance of these I remember was the Death that never Was in Burma. A 110 Sqdn VV landed at Khumbirgram with a hang-up on the wing, it fell off and exploded (both killed, of course). The story, which was widely disseminated, named F/Sgt Duncan (RCAF), whom I knew well from my time on the Sqdn, as the pilot when we got to hear of it in W.Bengal.
Even Peter c. Scott, in his "Vengeance !" (which is pretty well the bible for the VV) carried a reported version naming Duncan as the pilot. Turns out all were wrong, it was another name, Reg Duncan lived to a ripe old age in Canada.
Now to business. Pester us all you like, young fella ! That's what we're here for. Clearly your plan was to disappear from the rail gang, and we're all on tenterhooks to hear how you proposed to set about it.
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Jack (your #7654),
"Aye, aye, Sir " (on the double !)
603 (City of Edinburgh) were an Auxiliary Fighter Squadron before and after WWII.
Now, Jack and Walter: "
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now":
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The MOD announced that 603 Sqn would re-role to become a reserve RAF Police unit from 1 April 2013.> [Wiki].
Cheers to all, Danny.