ianwoodward9Not Lisbon but footage of a Pan Am Clipper arrivng at Singapore:
ianwoodward9This report, from 1941, is self-explanatory. I seem to recall that Spain refused to allow this service to cross its territory, with the result that a much longer route, via various locations in North Africa, was then developed. Is my memory correct and, if so, was it actually operated, does anyone know?
ianwoodward9Yes, an Empire boat is the most likely. Was it a regular or frequent flying boat service to Lisbon at that time?
A small point of detail – the writer of the cable was “I” or “eye”, rather than McGaffin. The only article I came across written by McGaffin (so far, at least) was about nine raids by British troops crossing the Channel in uniform on small boats,then travelling in German-occupied France on motorbikes armed with machine guns, to inflict harm on and generally harass German forces. Some raiders got as far as Amiens. He said that there was no public acknowledgment of these raids but he got it from a reliable source.
ianwoodward9Unsurprisingly, the very opposite was suggested in Berlin on the same day:
ianwoodward9You may well be right,Graham, but, when I wrote “It was suggested”, I meant that it was being suggested in Dublin at that time. Here is the start and the end of a 5 January 1941 article which is datelined “Dublin, Jan. 4”:
ianwoodward9I should have said, I think “McGaffin” is William McGaffin, who worked for Associated Press at that time. The “Humphreys” is likely to be William J Humphreys, who was staying in his hotel in London when the Associated Press office was hit by incendiary bombs (on the night of 29/30 December 1940, I think). The other AP staff member staying in the same hotel that night was Alfred E. Wall, who may have been the “eye” or “I” mentioned in the report in the previous post.
The roof and the top four floors of the five-storey building were destroyed. The fire brigade, having to deal with so many fires that night, were unable to attend. The AP staff went first to the Daily Mail building along the street and then to the building that housed the Press Association and Reuters. From its basement, they tried to get the story to their New York office but the censor prevented this. In the end, they telephoned the story direct to Western Union. The Canadian Press offices had been in the same building as AP, incidentally.
The story that Humphreys had been working on was about “planes over Ireland”. Around this time, the Irish government had protested about German bombs being dropped on Dublin (and elsewhere, I think) and about mines being laid in Irish waters, thus breaching their neutrality. It was suggested that the Germans wanted the Irish to join the Allied cause, in order to stretch British resources by having to defend a country which did not have the wherewithal to defend itself if it became a belligerent.
ianwoodward9This is a report (in “cablese”, as the report describes it) of a flight from Lisbon to Britain in late 1940 by three American journalists from Associated Press. The journey was made by a flying boat of BOAC, it would appear.
ianwoodward9The image below shows what was required to get cleared to fly to Lisbon in WWII.
Getting the right visas and permissions to travel was a recurring problem for Henry Taylor during his trip round Europe – and he had some very high-level contacts indeed who helped smooth the way. In some cases, for example, one country’s visa would have to be cancelled before another country would issue theirs. He spent a fair amount of time dealing with officialdom.
The clipping below is an extract from a Flight article entitled “Spreading Air News”, about the work of the RAF’s public relations officers and their counterparts at the Air Ministry. It was published on 2 December 1943.
Embedded, anyone?
ianwoodward9I’ve had a look through some of those WWII issues of “FLYING” magazine and they make for some interesting reading. That September 1942 issue was largely devoted to the British/Allied air effort and, with contributions from such senior people involved, clearly part of the P.R. effort.
It struck me that, if editor Ziff had sent Charles Brown some colour film for a feature that was published in the September 1942 issue, the colour photographs taken at Whitchurch in October 1942 were not intended for “FLYING” (at least, not for that special issue). They must either have been shot using colour film that Brown held back or someone on high saw the photos in “FLYING”, liked them and arranged some more colour film for Brown to use. The proximity of the dates (FLYING published in September 1942 and the Whitchurch photos taken in October 1942) suggest some kind of link.
ianwoodward9You guys are great. Thanks for the replies and for filling some of the blanks in my knowledge.
I hadn’t noticed that there were two slightly different shots of the BOAC/KLM DC-3 and I didn’t know that there two subsequent volumes of “Camera Above The Clouds” (some more things to look out for).
The link to “FLYING” magazine is very useful and I’m looking forward to reading the article. As I’ve said before, I really welcome contemporary reports.
If the RAF Museum holds Charles Brown’s archive, what is holding them back from restoring the ‘lost’ photos or negatives? Is it a lack of money? Is it a lack of staff with the requisite skills (or knowledge)? Or is it just a lack of interest?
ianwoodward9Thank you, longshot. It never even crossed my mind that those two photos might have been taken by Charles Brown.
I mainly associate him with air-to-air photography, though I did know he took ‘ground’ photos. Somewhere on the shelves, I have the “Camera Above The Clouds” book of his photos and it always struck me as rather odd that, given the book’s title, some of the chosen photographs were taken on the ground, not in the sky.
I had a look at some of the other images on the link you posted and noted particularly the colour shot of BOAC York G-AGJA. Over 55 years ago, I was given a some press photos and the like by people who sought to encourage my youthful interest in aviation. These photos included a couple of ‘Charles E. Brown’ photos, complete with his handstamp on the reverse. One of these is a very similar shot of G-AGJA. It is in black & white but taken from almost exactly the same angle. In the same colour of ink as his handstamp, his reference number is also stamped on the back: ‘5987 – 7’.
Anyway, it does indeed seem that the two colour photographs at Whitchurch (the BOAC/KLM DC-3 and the BOAC Ensign) were taken on the same day. And, like you, I wonder which other aircraft Charles Brown photographed that day. It would seem strange that he went out to Bristol, took just two photos and travelled back home.
Does the Royal Air Force Museum hold all of his photographs?
Is the holding limited to his photographs/negatives or do they also hold his papers, files and other documents?
The precise subject matter of the two photographs (part of the aircraft, not the whole) suggests to me that he had a specific commission to fulfill that day. He was , as I recall, a self-employed, commercial photographer and I wonder if those photographs were taken for a particular organisation or with a particular end use in mind. Do we know if they were subsequently published and, if so, when? (Perhaps, in the months after they were taken -say, November 1942 to January 1943?)
ianwoodward9Below is a colour photograph of BOAC Ensign G-ADSU “Euterpe”. It was sent me recently by my son who ‘pinched’ it from a website, so I’m pretty sure that many (if not most) of you will have seen it before. It was apparently taken at Whitchurch on 15 October 1942.
The light that day, the colour tones in the film used and indeed the framing of the shot (i.e. only the nose and front fuselage of the subject) reminded very much of the photo of BOAC/KLM DC-3 G-AGBE, as shown towards the start of this thread (Post # 5, in fact). The location and approximate date of that photo were confirmed by longshot as “Whitchurch, ca. 1942”. The presence of the BOAC Whitleys in the background seemed to suggest the latter half of 1942.
Two questions came into my mind:
[1] Could the two photos have been taken on the same day (viz.15 October 1942)
and, if so, ……
[2] were any other similar colour photos taken that day?
Does anybody know?
ianwoodward9Henry J. Taylor again; there were some “aviation gaps” in his itinerary as described in previous posts. I’ll try to fill those now.
How did he get from Stockholm to Berlin, after he returned to Stockholm from his trip to Helsinki?
“Sitting in the co-pilot seat, I flew to Berlin with Count Charles Gustav von Rosen, the famous Swedish aviator” adding that, “He flew this ship like a dream”. Most of Taylor’s description of the flight is to do with the prearranged waypoints where the Count had to undertake certain turns, manoeuvres or other means of identification in order to be cleared with the air defences to the next waypoint. They flew into Templehof. Taylor is no more specific than that.
What of his onward flight from Berlin?
As briefly mentioned in an earlier post, it was a Lufthansa service from Berlin to Lisbon via Stuttgart and Lyon in ”a giant Junkers Ju.90, a great lumbering, four-engined, thirty-two passenger ship with immense wings, dull green and black”. He left the plane at Lyon.
How did he get to and from Vichy?
He “reached Vichy in a little French plane” in mid- November 1941. It was very foggy: “We circled Vichy for about an hour and made as many tries as we could for the landing-field …. Suddenly, he put her down”.
He left Vichy four or five days later for Lyon and, at noon, “picked up the southbound Lufthansa International plane for Marseilles and Barcelona”, a two-hour flight, he says.
Then?
The next day, he flew from Barcelona to Madrid; “We took off at nine o’clock” and “Landed on the immense field at eleven o’clock in the morning”.
How did he get from Madrid to Gibraltar and back?
“The United States Navy has a plane in Madrid for our naval attaché “, Commander Ben Wyatt. Wyatt had to go to Gibraltar to interview the survivors from the Ark Royal that had been sunk in the Strait. The attaché’s plane had “red, white and blue stripes on the tail” and a “Whirlwind engine”. They flew to Malaga, arriving at “an old military airfield on the outskirts of town” and went by car to Gibraltar. He was there for a couple off days. The pair returned by the same route and “landed in Madrid in the dark”. This is now late-November.
Then?
On the next day, he “got a Spanish plane to Lisbon that afternoon”, arriving at Cintra. He stayed overnight in Estoril.
The next morning, he rose at 4.00 a.m. and went to Cintra to fly back to England. “We took off at dawn. This time we stopped at Oporto”. It seems to have been the same BOAC/KLM crew as the last time he last flew to Whitchurch; whether it was the same aircraft is a different question.
The final stage of his European trip was to return to Lisbon for the Clipper flight home.
ianwoodward9Thanks, longshot. Contemporary documents so often carry a certain power in themselves and Mr Uttley’s statement is no exception.
ianwoodward9With the 70th anniversary of the start of the Berlin blockade fast approaching, this is a great time to visit that city. I wonder if our aviation publications will choose to cover the anniversary and, if so, if they will find anything new to say, given the many books on the subject.
It really depends what you mean by “shortly”.
The Shrader book (mentioned above) and “The Berlin Blockade” by Ann & John Tusa are solid history books and, in paperback, relatively cheap. If time is short, you may not get through them in time (the former is over 300 pages of text and the latter over 500) but they are comprehensive.
Dudley Barker’s “Berlin Air Lift – An Account of the British Contribution” (prepared by the Air Ministry and the Central Office of Information”) was published by HMSO in 1949. It is much shorter in terms of text length (about 60 pages, including those with illustrations). It has the limitation indicated by the sub-title but carries the power of a (relatively) contemporary document. [My copy, bought second hand, bears the stamp of the “Daily Worker Library” which gives it an extra frisson for me). [A few years back, on-line, I found a PhD thesis that set out to assess the British contribution within the overall context; I can’t recall the details but it was for the University of Buckingham, as I recall.]
In late November 1988, BBC Radio 4 marked the 40th anniversary with a programme entitled “Blockade”. I don’t know if it can be found through the BBC website (perhaps through their Genome project rather than the BBC i-Player).
I still have a soft spot for Robert Rodrigo’s 1960 book “Berlin Airlift”, having had the book for so long, but it has over 200 pages of text.
If time is indeed short, I’d probably suggest Arthur Pearcy’s “Berlin Airlift”. It has less than 150 pages and, with photographs on most pages, the text is readily digestible. It has an aviation bias, as one might expect from an Airlife publication, but covers the basics of the events well enough. It is also on glossy paper, which shows off the photos well, so you will end with – well, not quite a coffee-table book (it’s not a tome) but – something you can look through again (and again?) long after you’ve read it and returned from Berlin.
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