Anyone see the three Airspeed Oxfords ‘ bombing’ the Chinese town in The Inn of The Sixth Happiness on Film Four this afternoon ? All shot in North Wales with Chinese extras from Liverpool ! Dunno where the Oxfords came from though or what they were supposed to represent !

Seems as though the team involved in the Anzio P40K recovery know about stabilisation once the wreck is exposed. Can we expect this with the Harlech Lightning ?

Fascinating programme and for me a great slice of local history. When the Broughton factory was built in 1939 the assembly hall was the largest building of its type in the world, soon surpassed by Boeing’s Seattle plant amongst others. Hawarden, the name of the airfield, was nearly abandoned due to constant flooding problems. Lancaster PA474 was built at Broughton, and postwar Vickers sold the factory to De Havillands…

Not bad. But why do the BBC keep useing the same old film, the Heinkel He111 with the stepped cockpit and the Arado Ar96 being shot down. There must be better film around, is it just poor researcher’s

Dave

Dave, this was an ITV Production. Highlights for me were the interviews with the veterans, as ever. Some howlers with the archive though….Spanish Civil War Heinkel appears yet again, Tupolev SB2 gets pasted on June 22nd 1941, Arado 96 meets its end yet again as you spotted. Yes there is plenty of original BofB footage around for a programme of this duration without having to resort to the 1969 movie. The wartime colour footage of VZ coded Spitfires was definitley post BofB. Maybe it’s down to cost, but the researcher should have been on the ball.
Hope the TV crew’s notebooks and mobile phones were confistcated before they entered Hawkinge !

I don’t recognise that red stripe marking either.

That’s a virtue of aeroplanes…they’re recyclable. Wonder how future scrappies will manage with a Boeing 787?

There’s film over on the Pathe Website of Army manouevres with RAF participation in 1941. Apart from laying smokescreens one of the Blenheims featured in the film actually has a siren fitted in order to demoralize the enemy. It sounds like an American police car siren of the same period.

I remember a conversation I had with Ray Holmes years ago when he mentioned being intercepted by two 262’s over Germany while flying a Spitfire 19 from Benson. He coolly described trying to shake them off by slowing down so they would overshoot, but not before one of the jets opened up on him. He could hear the thud of the thirty mills over the sound of the Spitfire’s Griffon and through his helmet. He glanced over his shoulder to see the jet racing at him and the blue flames of the cannon barrels winking as the German pilot tried to take him out. The 262 rocketed over the top of him, then in the best tradition of air combat, the sky was completely empty. Ray found a friendly cloud to hide his unarmed Spitfire in and later landed on an Autobahn !