Also the prototype was equipped with a supercharger but it was the USAAC that asked for it to be removed

It was the turbocharger, not the supercharger, which was removed from the P39. Ditto for the RAFs P38s. In both cases the supercharger remained but, having been designed as a second stage supercharger (with the turbo being the first stage) it was less than efficient when used on its own. I’d imagine a two stage Merlin with the first stage removed would probably be similarly challenged.

With the turbo the engine had a full throttle height of over 20,000 ft. and pushed the P39 prototype (admittedly flown at less than its operational weight) to 390 mph – not bad for Spring 1938. With the turbo deleted full throttle height fell to as little as 12,000 ft.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a properly-sourced explanation for USAAC’s decision to delete the turbo, but it would be true to say that GE turbosuperchargers were not, at that time, the most reliable or fully developed pieces of kit.

NiallC

My files are 1,000 miles away at the mo, but . .

Any idea which two 263 Sqn Whirlwinds were written off between 12 and 16 February ?

P7108 was badly damaged late on the 13th when it overturned after swinging off the runway at Fairwood Common on landing. Jim Coyne slightly injured. Although thought at the time to be a probable write-off, it was sent to Westland CRO, repaired and returned to service.

I can’t think of another one, other than that I seem to recall that P7112 had some sort of incident requiring contractors repair at around this time.

Any idea who 263’s Adjutant was between these dates ?

From Nov 41 and right through Woodward’s period of command the Sqn. adjutant was Flt. Lt. Eugene Owens (previously Camp Commandant at Predannanck).He appears in a few shots of squadron personnel – easily recognised as being quite a bit older and a little rounder than the pilots.

Any idea which Whirlwind Warnes was flying and where near Hull it was damaged ?

This incident rings no bells with me at the moment,but, as a non-op flight (very non-op in this case) it wouldn’t be recorded in detail in the ORB. Failure of tailwheels to extend (or collapse of the oleo after landing) was somewhat common with Whirlwinds. If just the rudder and tailwheel doors were damaged the incident is often not even reflected on the Form 78. If, as was common, the resultant impact fractured the sternframe casting and lower rudder hinge casting, requiring contractors party to repair, usually it is shown as Cat AC incident on the aircraft record card. I’ll check to see if there are any candidates when I’m back with my files.

Any idea who this American can be, do you know if he did face a Court Martial?

I’m reluctant to suggest a candidate in the absense of any other info, but the only one who seems to fit the bill is PO Norman Crabtree (US in RCAF). He remained with the squadron for some time after this period and retained his rank, so presumably did not face CM (if indeed it was him). Irrespective of what he said to the senior officers a 263 pilot who could not hold his drink must have been a severe embarrassment to the squadron. It’s something they appear to have trained quite conscientiously to prevent.

NiallC

Phillip

There’s good news and bad, but compiling an authoritative Roll of Honour or Book of Rememberance for a station – particularly one with such a long and varied history – is a major task and there’s little available online that will help.

The CWGC Debt of Honour Database will not be much help, initially at least, since although it does give units you cannot search on them. It also is of course no help with fatalities during peacetime years or with many fatalities of non Commonwealth personnel.

Fortunately during the wartime years Driffield was largely a bomber base. Fortunately because it means you can use Bill Chorley’s superb series Bomber Command Losses of WW2 as a starting point. There are 6 volumes covering losses for each year between 39 and 45 plus Vol 7 covering OTUs and Vol 8 covering HCUs and other miscellaneous Bomber Command Units. I’d normally hesitate to suggest using secondary sources for a project like this, but this series (along with Ross McNeill’s similar work on Coastal Command) is as good as it gets and will allow you to build a fairly authoritative list for the period in which I’d guess at least 75% of all Driffield related fatalities occurred. You may well wish to double check the resulting list at the CWGC site just in case an error might have slipped in. You can also double check individual Australian personnel losses (for say 462 and 466 Sqns) at the Australian Archives site and Canadian ones (425 et al) at the Canadian Virtual War Memorial.

If you don’t want to stump up the £100 or so needed to purchase all 7 volumes, you should be able to order them through your local library.

You will still need to track down:
1. Peacetime losses
2. Non Bomber Command wartime losses and
3. Losses on the ground through bombing or accident.

For these your only real course is to start with the Station Operations Record Book and its Appendices (if any) held at The National Archives at Kew. For Driffield the ORB for July 36 through Dec 41 is piece ref AIR 28/221 with the other wartime ones following on in chronological order. The Postwar ORB starts at AIR 28/1350. This will mention many, but almost certainly not all fatalities from the station, but will also allow you to build up a list of units operating from the station and appropriate date ranges (which I’d imagine you probably already have). You should be aware that Station ORBs are a mixed bunch. Some are excellent, but I know of one that describes in detail the content of an ENSA show on the station while not even mentioning a fatal accident that happened the same day.

Once you have the initial list of casualties and a list of units you then have to consult the ORBs for all those units for the periods in question. These again are at Kew with Squadrons being in AIR 27 and “Miscellaneous Units” (i.e AACUs , 10 ANS etc) in AIR 29. Unit ORBs will usually record fatal accidents, but you should be aware that they frequently spell aircrew names incorrectly. On occasion for multi seat aircraft they will simply record the aircraft identity or the name of the pilot and you will have to trawl through the “Detail of Work Carried Out” (in the ORB) to establish the names of the complete crew.

AIR 29 is not complete (i.e there are some “Miscellaneous Units” for which no ORB has survived) and is catalogued in a willfully perverse way. For example you might find in the catalogue an ORB titled just “No 57” and only when you scroll back through the catalogue to find a subhead will you discover that it is within a sub category called OTUs. You need to persevere with AIR29:-)

As a starting point I’d just do a search using the National Archives online catalogue on “Driffield” (limited to the AIR class) and also do searches on the specific units you already know of. That should give you a picture of what is available. You can either trek down to Kew to inspect the records themselves or ask them to provide copies in exchange for the national debt of a small African nation.

Pre war fatal accidents were also regularly reported in Flight, The Aeroplane and the Times (usually within a few weeks of the event).

Lastly, one other approach that I’ve found useful in filling gaps is this. Most RAF stations adopted one or more local cemetaries as their local cemetary. Next of Kin could request that remains be returned to them for local burial, but often did not and the option was not available for next of kin of non-UK airmen. They would then often be buried in the local cemetary. You may already know which cemetaries were used by Driffield. If not, searching on a few known Driffield casualties on the CWGC site should identify it/them. You can then get a cemetary report on the website which shows all burials in that cemetary which are under CWGC care. This can be useful in throwing up a few “mystery men” who may have died on or from the station. It will give you a name, date and, most times, a unit and service number from which you can then try and track down the circumstances.

As a practical matter you should bank on not getting this 100% right first time and, therefore, however you decide to present it (Book, display board, online etc) plan on doing it in such a way that you can easily add new names as new info comes your way.

Hope this helps and good luck.

NiallC

At the time of the issue of F.7/30 in October ’31 to ask for a 4-gun fighter capable of 215 mph was hardly conservative, but somewhat in advance of anything even near to entering service anywhere. The night fighting requirement – and therefore low landing speed – was inevitable: F.7/30 was intended to replace the Bulldog in the “Zone Fighter” Class. i.e. Day and Night operations, radio equipped and with enough endurance to fly standing patrols. This of course needs to be seen in its 1931 context of no radar, no proven sound locators, total reliance on ground observers and therefore no warning of enemy approach prior to its approach to the coast. The Zone fighter class (Siskin, Bulldog etc) was by far the most numerous single seater in the RAF at the time. The Other class, the “Interception Fighter” – day only, visual pursuit, no radio, short endurance – only ever equipped 3 Squadrons (Furies) and was a failure in its intended role.

The Air Ministry came close to insisting on a monoplane for F.7/30, but were advised not to by their own Technical Directorates on the grounds that the British aircraft industry had thus far been singularly unsuccesful in produing military monoplanes. To require a monoplane would thus mean running the risk of a total failure of the programme. You do not need to read too much of the Air Ministry correspondence of the time to detect its extreme frustration with the conservatism of the aircraft industry. Nonetheless Dowding (then AMSR) was encouraged to spend the Air Mins money only on advanced designs in the sure and certain knowledge that there would be more conservative private ventures to back the programme up if the more advanced designs failed. Which is pretty much what eventually happend when the Gladiator was chosen. The inevitable (for a Zone fighter) requirement for night operation and therefore low landing speed combined with an aggressive (for the day) 215 mph top speed requirement did indeed lead many designers to chose biplanes, but also led the Air Min to ask why on earth the designers (including Mitchell) had not used flaps to meet the requirements. A good question.

As for engine choice, perhaps someone else knows where this notion of some Air Min preference for the Goshawk comes from, but it seems to have been cut and pasted from one book or article to another for time immemorial. The Spec itself (and its 20 or so Corrigenda) left engine choice free to any British engine that had passed its type test by the time of delivery of the prototype. Dowding was inclined to insist on an air-cooled engine, partly because of his long-running interest in the faster warm-up time and lower vulnerability to combat damage of an air-cooled engine, but also because both Bristol and Napier had very thin order books at the time. In the end it was decided to let designers choose whatever engine gave them the best chance of meeting the performance requirement. Of the five preferred designs eventually submitted, four (Supermarine, Blackburn, Parnall and Westland) used the Goshawk, the odd one out being Boulton Paul with its Rapier-powered twin. In the end the three ordered designs (Supermarine, Westland, Blackburn) were all delayed and all failures and the Gauntlet was ordered as an interim measure to fill an increasingly obvious hole in the expansion programme.

I think the notion that the RAF would have had to fight the B of B with the Gladiator were it not for the:

the likes of R J Mitchell and Sydney Camm (and Rolls) being able to see what could be achieved over and above their F7.30 designs

is somewhat wide of the mark. In 34 the RAF drew up F.5/34 for a Fury (ie. Interception Fighter) replacement asking for 275 mph, 8 guns and a service ceiling of 33,000 ft. From that point forward 8 guns was the standard for new service single-seat fighters. Shortly afterwards, and before the Gladiator had even been ordered, F.10/35 was drawn up for a new Zone fighter to replace it: again asking for 8 guns and now 300 mph. Most significantly they also asked for greatly reduced endurance.

Independently of these programmes Dowding ordered Hawker and Supermarine’s speculative designs as a part of the high speed research programme. For those who have watched “First of the Few” too often or otherwise believe the Air Min dragged its feet over ordering these two aircraft, Camm’s proposal for the Hurricane (as we know it) is dated 4 September 1934, Dowding instructed that it should be ordered on the 14th of the same month. Supermarines costed proposal for its Merlin-powered proposal is dated 5 October 1934. Dowding instructed his staff to issue an ITP for it on 8 November.

Ultimately the key decision was that to specify greatly reduced endurance for F10/35. It was that which allowed the Supermarine design to be brought in line with it, at Mitchell’s suggestion, by taking out fuel to compensate for the additional weight of 4 more guns, and the Hawker to be treated likewise, at Sorley’s suggestion, by adding six more guns.

I suspect that there’s a peculiarly British appeal of this notion that British fighter technology of the mid ‘30s was driven forward by the inspired genius of a handful of designers and manufacturers valiantly struggling on in the face of a conservative and slow-witted Air Ministry. However attractive it may be it does not survive even momentary contact with the – very substantial – archival record.

NiallC

10 Group’s ORB and its appendices (AIR 25/186 for 1943) are invaluable for giving a big picture perspective on operations. Squadron ORBs are (sometimes) good on the who, what and when, but weak on the “why?”

However they are “Operations” record books and generally record only operational activity. As far as Staff officers like Geoff Warnes are concerned they will generally only record his posting in and out, but give little detail as to what he was doing while there.

Is there something specific you’re looking for – I may have an answer somewhere in my notes?

NiallC

I wrote:

Theoretically there is no difference – the Ds were built by Republic, the G’s by Curtiss. There were some minor differences between the 5 production blocks as there were with the Ds, but, other than these minor changes over time to equipment etc. the G is identical. I don’t think Gs ever carried the underwing pylons, but then, these aircraft were never used operationally and perhaps pylons were fitted to Ds after manufacture.

and XN923 wrote:

In any case, I got the impression that many improvements had been made between D and G model – though perhaps the increase in visibility was dramatic enough to help pilots get the upper hand where previously they had struggled.

…..which made me realise I had not made myself clear:-) The P47G was not a later version/improvement on the D. It was an early-model, Razorback D (a D-10 to be precise) built by Curtiss rather than Republic.(in the same way that the difference between a P51B and a P51C is simply one of where it was built). The P47 was undoubtedly improved over time with the later, Republic-built, bubbletop D-25, -27, -30 etc. However Curtiss production of P47s was terminated before the various “improvements” came on line and there is no “P47G” (i.e. Curtiss-built) equivalent of these models.

NiallC

“Chassis”, “Airscrew”. Hmmm. Surely British rather than American?

NiallC

It’s a shame that nobody has written/published a genuinely useful book on the history of Bristol engines. Lumsden’s “British Piston Aero Engines” is useful on the detail but not the big picture, Binghams “Major Piston engines of World War II” oddly ignores the Mercury but devotes many pages to the Centaurus (and the Brabazon), Graham Whites “Allied Aircraft Piston Engines” is genuinely useful, but inevitably can only cover Bristol briefly. The only other work we’re left with is Gunston’s deeply ludricous hagiography of the works of St. Roy Fedden which even in its moderated second version is an appallingly slack attempt at documenting an important piece of history.

NiallC