Chugalug,
Your Post set me furiously checking my log and the "
Vengeance !" entry by "Red" McInnis/McInnes (?). He says he had FD225, FD240 and FD275. All these would be Mk.IVs.
Those I took over on 9 Apl '45 were all FBs (Mk.III):
..........................First Appearance......Last Appearance (
in my Logbook)
FB966......................11 Apl '45...............15 Nov '45
FB975......................19 Apl '45........ ........5 Oct '45 *
FB977......................28 Jan '46................4 Mar '46 #
FB986......................16 Nov '45...............12 Mar '46 #.....(my favourite)
until
FD100......................30 Oct '45.................9 Mar '46 #
and nearly had a cardiac arrest ! (FD100 - a Mk.IV !!! ?) until I checked with "
Vengeance !" and much to my relief found:
(
FD100-FD117 and all FBs are Mk.IIIs, all other FDs are Mk.IV - Peter C. Smith: "
Vengeance !")
Note * - would be the one written-off (head-butted by a Barracuda at Sulur). FB986 must have been the replacement for it. What happened to FB966 ? No idea.
Note # - these would be the last three flown to Nagpur for scrap on 12 Mar '46.
So when did "Red" have his IVs replaced by the IIIs ? No idea.
...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?...
Too right ! He hadn't written a word of F540 for any of his six month's Command. Group were foaming at the mouth (as I found only after he'd gone). He dropped me 'in it' and no mistake. Perhaps the box of (not very good) cigars he also left were by way of mollification. Never were F.540s written up so fast - or with such little regard to truth or the use of such vivid imagination !
Your:
...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...
One look at the distances involved shows what a terrible undertaking a seaborne invasion of Japan would have been. It would have had to have been mounted from Okinawa (400 miles to the South), and land based bombers from Shanghai (say) would be 500 miles from landfall in Japan and 1,000 miles from Tokyo. What did we have ? Lincoln - Range: 2,930 mi (4,714 km) with maximum bomb-load 1,470 miles [Wiki] and B-29 - Range - 5,000 mi [Google], plus carrier-based aircraft.
When we did get ashore, the Japanese Home armies would certainly have fought to the last man and the last round. Mercifully (even allowing for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims), it was not to be.
Danny.