I think we can agree that this aircraft belly-landed (from the state of the propeller blades) and I think we can also agree that there are two areas that must have been damages after it belly-landed, the area to the rear of the cockpit and the fin. It also seems to have been around long enough for most of the cowlings and access panels to have been opened or removed for one reason or another.

I’m not so sure about the suggestion that it is a range target. If it didn’t happen to crash-land on the range it would have had to be dismantled transported and then carefully reassembled on the range, and the wings look correctly refitted to me.

What sort of weapon would it make a good target for? It wouldn’t make a good ant-aircraft target and wouldn’t any old truck make just as good a target for ground-to-ground weapons? It would serve best as a strafe target for fighter-bombers but wouldn’t there be airfields littered with abandoned Luftwaffe fighters available for this purpose, maybe that’s what it is?

Whatever damaged it doesn’t seem to have hit it too often; to me range targets always seem to fall into two categories, untouched or those that look like a colander!

The damage to the cockpit area looks like a small explosion has occurred inside but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of fragments piercing the light-alloy fuselage. What sort of weapon could have caused that? I did think it could have been done by a grenade but maybe plastic explosive is more likely to cause that effect.

The booby-trap suggestion is interesting; the cockpit looks quite like it has suffered a ‘controlled explosion’ (apart from the occupant). I have heard of battlefield corpses being booby-trapped, who knows?

If it is a body in the cockpit it will have had to be propped-up against or attached to something and I don’t know what that could be but whatever it is it would have to have been done quite deliberately.

I think the ‘body’, if that is what it is, holds the key to this; everything else can be reasonably explained one way or another but that is the one thing that seems out of place.

Could the film be ‘Attack on the Iron Coast’?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxyyDKCgULs&feature=PlayList&p=F137FE31B12E4352&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=108

What’s an ‘ATGB’? I only ask because if they’re worth £250,000 I wouldn’t want to throw one away without knowing! :diablo:

I don’t think it’s a propaganda photo in any official sense because an official photographer would be likely to have made a much better job of it – this one says snapshot to me.

I agree it isn’t a very ‘professional’ job. I thought it could be a Russian propaganda photo; I’m no expert but Russian propaganda tends to be cruder both in a technical sense and also in (what was acceptable) subject matter. I think also the Russians employed propaganda units at a more local level in the field such as producing ‘field newspapers’ at a divisional level.

I don’t know what it is about it but it reminds me of posed photographs of knocked-out tanks.

As has been suggested the stripping of the airframe for parts could have occurred after a simple belly-landing accident much in advance of the ‘combat’ damage (and without the body of the ‘pilot’ of course). Later on as the battle-lines change a propaganda unit finds the wreck and ‘dresses’ it suitably as a combat loss.

From the other point of view would a modeller, and a very good one at that, bother to create such a diorama at considerable time and expense just so that a single ‘fake’ photo could be produced and sold on eBay? Not likely is it?

I’ll go for “In Which we Serve” (this can get pretty expensive)…

It probably wasn’t ‘In Which We Serve’ as that doesn’t feature a climactic end mission…..I thought of it because it does feature a captain and conversations with his son.

There was another (fairly low budget) film featuring a St Nazaire type of raid but it was not black-and-white.

I seem to remember that in that film some men were killed in training as the commanding officer was pushing them too hard. Sounds a bit clichéd…..so that’s probably where a script-writer would have had his son ask ‘how many soldiers he had killed that day’!

…arm doesn’t look real at all – probably 1:24th scale – my 1:24 Lotus 72D (Emerson Fittipaldi) has a similar arm casting.

Can’t believe we’re at the stage where we’re identifying parts from the ‘donor’ kits! 😀

I’d say it was real, possibly ‘posed’…..but it isn’t a model.