Many years ago I had a letter published in the Lincolnshire Lancaster Association’s journal pointing out that PA474 was not in fact used in the making of “Guns of Navarone” but this incorrect fact continues to be published in various journals.

I felt the Lancaster sequences were the worst executed part of “Force 10 From Navarone”. It is not very likely that a group of soldiers would find a fully fuelled Lanc on an airfield (particularly in Italy) ,climb into it and take off without any prior experience of flying the type and with no assistance from any ground crew. They should have rewritten this sequence to have them hijacking a (real) Dakota avoiding the need for stock footage and poor model shots. Alastair MacLean seemed to have a thing about the Lancaster . In the book of “Where Eagles Dare” the opening sequence features the commandos parachuting from an RAF Lancaster rather than a Ju 52 and the sequence also talks about the Lancaster’s windscreen wipers struggling to cope with the snow. Hardly surprising since Lancs don’t have windscreen wipers.

I have a special interest in ‘Mosquito Squadron’. I wrote a book called ‘Planes on Film’ which has a chapter on ‘633 Squadron’ and includes a section on ‘Mosquito Squadron.’ All published accounts state that dummy guns were fitted to all Mosquitos used in the film. However all the other Mosquitos had the dummy guns attached to a curved piece of wood which was attached to the perspex nose cone of the B35 by drilling two holes and using nuts and bolts. Some of the surviving Mosquitos used in 633 and Mosquito still have these small holes in the perspex to this day. In the case of RS712 owned by Kermit Weeks the two holes are currently filled by small nuts and bolts and this can be seen in photos. So how did they fit dummy guns to RR299 without drilling holes in the wood since she was a T3 with a solid nose? I have no idea . It is possible that RR299 never had dummy guns as they were too difficult to fit. She was always kept in the background as she had a different nose and windscreen from the other Mossies.

Very sad news. I believe the Ju-52 which crashed was the very same one that was used in ‘Where Eagles Dare.’

Purple Smoke

I’ll have to give this a watch at some point this weekend!

Incidentally does anyone know what aircraft were used to drop the purple smoke to highlight where the artillery were to fire in one of he battles the British tank column fought?

I think it was implied in the film that the Shermans fired purple smoke rounds from their main guns. in 1977 a book was published to tie in with the documentary (‘The Arnhem Report’) by Iain Johnstone and I still have it on my bookshelf.