Now Boys,...Behave yourselves ...Check the triangular fin and you will find a HALIFAX !!
The squadron markings (I guess) are DY*F plus nose art,and are all probably traceable.I'd have thought it unlikely that a POW would give away squadron identities....name ,rank, and number only and all that .So maybe all is not what it seems !!
Lets all keep guessing.
Cheers
Tw,
Well done that man! Have a baboon.
The mystery is that searching by pilot name and aircraft type I ought to be able find the raid on which it was lost, but (and I've just confirmed the dates with the guy holding the sale), there were no Halifax losses on offensive ops that night. Nothing from Martin Middlebrooks 99% definitive list of losses and nothing on the MOD hosted Bomber Command Sqdn war diaries.
The auctionnner realised whilst on the phone to me that the map in the log-book from he had deduced 'Berlin' was in fact the rail route taken by Taylor as a captive.
I too am now looking at the a/c codes in the hope that the pilot modelled his own airframe but the chap at the auctioneers has placed the model in storage and cannot tell me the airframe's serial number. Interestingly, he has read me some exceprts from the log-book (not the official one but a log-book provided to POWs as an unofficial diary) and the pilot stated they were shot down by a fighter over Hungary. If so, the Halifax was operating close to its max range and there are no ops vaguely near there for several days either side of the loss date (22nd Aug and not later as stated in the article above). Interstingly there was a Halifax operating for SOE about that time which was lost, and in that case the pilot might obscure details of where he was and when.
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OK, DY are the codes for 102 Sqdn who at the time of the loss were at Pocklington operating Halifax IIIs. However, what I can find on the web so far is not helpful as 102 were apparetly not taking part in ops during these dates or suffered no losses between the 20 and 28th August. The only losses recorded on the web (found so far) for Halifax DY-F are earlier airframes including LW337, shot over Berlin (yay!), by flak(oh), all killed (ah) and several months previously (bother) and another DY-F (s/n W7864) downed by night fighter on 9.11.42. Also, although it is not a complete list, one 102 Sqdn website does not record an E Taylor as a member....
Hey ho.
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