Thanks for your comments, Bill.

Yes, ops not only in the Far East but also elsewhere like the Middle East are just not as “immediate” in the mind of the average person. It’s one thing to look skyward and imagine that very sky filled with aircraft, ours and theirs, but with distance comes a general vagueness and a drop off in interest. And there is less surviving material for faraway places.

I mentioned that Gordon Clegg wrote to each next-of-kin of the 18 airmen shot down on 29 Feb ’44. Here is one of those letters, sent to Capt H.L. Davis, Royal Indian Navy — father of BZ962 rear gunner Michael Ludlow Davis, a casualty. (It’s from the RCAF personnel file of Michael Davis…who had joined the RCAF at 18 after being shipped off for safety to an uncle in Canada to continue schooling).

Yes, the correspondence is essentially a form letter, but it was a gesture that would have had great value. My 91 year old mother still recalls receiving her version of Clegg’s letter, for example, and that it somehow helped her in 1944 to know that her husband — still only missing, later pronounced deceased — was remembered by those on his squadron.

Another correspondence in the M.L. Davis RCAF personnel file is an enquiry from his father in Bombay regarding the return of Michael’s personal gramophone records. In passing, Capt Davis mentioned that “C.G. Clegg” did not identify himself by rank or squadron in his letter of condolence. Good point — and something a career military man of Capt Davis’ stature would have recognized immediately.

Regards,

Matt