Danny your excerpts from Peter Smith's Vengeance of Bud McInnis's (?) unofficial and rather tardy "F540" are fascinating. Once again they contradict your own recollections (and kudos to you for highlighting that). So the MkIV was in India? So where had they gone 6 months later when you were on the scene? Repatriated? Hardly likely surely? They were surplus to requirements in the UK, target-towing being the last resort for any type that had no other use.
I see that FD240 is quoted both as a MkIV and a MkIII, presumably a typo. Why didn't he put all this down officially at the time as OC the Flight? I suspect that you would know better than anyone else, but perhaps he shared the contempt for Brit Bureaucracy that other 'Colonials' had?
The invasion exercise on the west coast of India (north of Bombay), presumably to better simulate the west coasts of Burma and Malaya, remind us that in 44/45 no-one knew how long the war against Japan would go on for, and that those two invasions would most probably have been mere preludes to the big one, the invasion(s) of Japan itself. The cost in lives would have been counted in the millions if it wasn't for the dropping of Fat Boy and Little Man. Terrible as they were, they brought the war to an end, and thus saved far more lives than they took...
Walter, the frustration that you must have felt after such a prolonged journey and illness to get to Egypt, only to be held in a transit camp while the crucial Battle of El Alamein raged so close to the west, is palpable. Such is war of course, long hours of boredom interspersed with moments of stark terror. No doubt they are yet to come! ;-)