Rear foglights should be banned…..they cause more accidents than they prevent.

Why wasn’t there a complete and single “Mosquito-Force” instead of the bomber force? They were fast, deadly, accurate and had a low loss-ratio. Why instead send thousands of bombers out to carpet-bomb german cities instead of pin-point attacks on military targets?

If you are talking about military targets being factories deep inside Germany the reason is that it simply wasn’t possible.

The only real precision night bombing system was Oboe (which was carried by the Mosquito) but its range was limited to the Ruhr and more importantly the number of aircraft that could be guided by it was limited to only a few rather than the hundreds of heavy bombers of the Main Force. For these reasons Oboe was used mainly for target marking.

Essentially I would tend to agree with your argument that Bomber Command would have been better deployed against military targets but not because it was ‘wrong’ to target German civilians, after all the effect on industrial output due to the impact of bombing on the workforce was something that the British were surprised to learn following the bombing of Coventry. The irony is that Bomber Command probably did as much ‘damage’ to British war production as it did to German war production but that is not saying that it didn’t make a major contribution to the war effort.

All this with hindsight of course.

Actually that is a very good point; I hadn’t really taken much note of the date of the magazine…

…published five days after the most significant event of the war.

When these advertisements were purchased the US was still neutral but British purchasing of US built aircraft was at its peak so this US manufacturer would want to keep their profile as high as possible in Britain.

The other night the BBC1 TV newsreader used the phrase ‘this so-called technological marvel’ when referring to the recent problems with the Large Hadron Collider.

Surely it still is a technological marvel?

I couldn’t believe the sneering attitude of the BBC about a project that has much British involvement and is something we should be proud of. In a country that is desperate for more young people to choose science as a career is this helpful?

Lodge Plugs now trade as Morgan Advanced Ceramics and in 2005 moved from their wartime site but are still based in Rugby. During the war they operated a shadow factory in Olney, Northamptonshire that has recently been converted to flats but it still carries the painted ‘Lodge Plugs’ sign in a welcome act of industrial preservation (see photo).

http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/288591

There is an interesting quote on their website, from President Roosevelt no less:

…before and during the Battle of Britain, when the R.A.F. had to work its out-numbered planes around the clock and the Spitfire and Hurricane engines got punishing treatment, the British developed a new type airplane spark plug…

Since early in 1943 virtually every United States Flying Fortress has taken off from British bases with these plugs in each of its four engines. It would be impossible to estimate how many thousand United States bomber crews may since then have owed their lives to these spark plugs, but the performance record of the plugs speaks for itself.

Good call on the Baka Creaking Door!

Except solid fuel rockets…..so no fuel tanks! 😮

Vegetable…..wood?

My guess would be Germany 1944/45, possibly jet or rocket related, shortage of strategic materials and all that?

Isn’t the RNHF effectively ‘privately’ run?

Do any of us really notice the difference when watching aircraft of the RNHF display, as opposed to watching aircraft of the BBMF?