There are articles on 6Sqn in Palestine in this and the last Air Enthusiast. Don’t have them with me at the moment so cannot say what their view is, anybody else have them handy?

Paul

Right,

The infamous hose photo.

There are at least four photos which show the hose fairly distictively and four at a distance -photos 40-5927, 5928, 5929 and 5931 for the close ones, 40-5928-31 for the distant ones (all on the http://www.apolloarchive.com website – posting them here is beyond my abilities) All the close one show a dark area on the left hand hose in the same place, and the same appears to be the case with the distant ones. The dark area is a grey colour, it is not black, the same as the other shadows. There are therefore two possibilities
(a) the “shadows” are not shadows but markings on the hose; or
(b) the incompetent toucher-upper was so incompetent that he made exactly the same mistake on four different photos, then also touched up the distant photos to be consistent.

I know which I prefer.

2. The shadow of the LM on the moon from a great height. The shape of the shadow is not right for it being a shadow of the LM, it is right – as pointed out on various websites – for it to be one of the small thrusters or a shadow of one. As these appear in a good few photos taken from the LM – see e.g. 40-5846 where the shape is the same but clearly a thruster – I cannot see why there is such a reluctance to accept such an explanation.

3. Lighting effects and highlighting of the flag. I am not going to get into the technical apsects of this, I – and I suspect virtually everybody else- has no real idea of what the light is like on the moon, the effect of reflections, earthshine etc. One thing I have noticed in many of the photos is reflections upwards from the pads on the feet of the LM, but how significant this is I have no idea. In fact I would agree that some of the photos seem very clear but I would also point out:

Firslty, looking at the Apollo 11 photos taken on the moon from the apolloarchive website, which we both clearly are doing, by my count there are about 15 photos which show the whole or substantially the whole of the LM. Of those 15, only two show the US flag clearly, with another where it is less clear, and none show the United States wording clearly. What an appalling hit ratio. Your most important piece of kit, at its moment of glory and the only time you can get the flag in the photo is in two where it is the background to an experiment. In short, the presence of the flag is not highlighted all the time as various posts suggest and in particular on the LM it is hardly seen at all on the Apollo 11 photos.

Secondly, look at 11-40-5894. Two points. Firstly, this is just one of many photos which disprove the assertion by many that all the photos taken on the moon were of studio quality and therefore must be hoax. In fact, when you look at them, the majority are landscape pictures, then you get a few of the floor when the camera went off accidently, a few out of focus, quite a few underexposed and the odd one where people walk into the picture as you are taking it. Then there are a few like this where it just “didn’t quite work”.

Secondly, from the quality of the photo we can agree this was not a studio photo and I find it hard to see how you can argue for artificial lighting here. Yet the United States wording still stands out. My point? For some reason, and I have no idea why, the United States wording and for that matter the flag do seem to stand out distinctly whenever there is the slightest light to illuminate them, even when, as I say, there is no reason to assume artificial lighting.

Paul

There is a far simpler explanation of the looooonnng shadow picture. It is not a shadow of the rock. It is the shadow of the flag which is out of picture.

Look at picture AS 11-40-5920 on the Apollo website – there is the shadow of the flag which matches the shadow on your photo and seems to be in the right place. Then look at the bottom right hand corner of the shadow on your picture – it is actually clearer in the original. A thin black shadow in exactly the right place to be the flag pole.

Paul

No expert, but think they are all Mk. X’s from the long intake on top of the cowling

Paul

Sod this, I give up, dodgy fingers today, almost finished what I was going to say in any event.

Paul

One of the key issues to me is in Gnome’s posting “(or perhaps more correctly, RAF Bomber Command’s Area Bombing policy as executed by Arthur Harris)”, because that identifies that the question of why Britain bombed Germany gets caught in the emotive issue of whether the area bombing policy as driven (rather than just executed) by Harris was justified.

The latter question has of course been debated at length. Harris I agree did believe that the strategic bombing campaign could win the war. Given that in that narrow aim it clearly failed, his supporters ( and I am not saying whether I am one side or the other!) say first that he was never given sufficient backing to achieve his and secondly that even if his aim was not achievable, the damage the campaign did to the German war effort is sufficient justification in itself.

So there we have the disctinction between winning the war and causing damage clearly defined, with the “traditional” view that bombing was to win the war and diversion of the war effort a useful additional benefit.

However, if we move away from the controversial figure of Harris and ask whether the political/military establishment as a whole approved the strategic bombing campaign in order to win the war, I think we would, and always would have got, a different answer.

To my mind, there were a number of reasons for the campaign and you would have got different answers at different times.

1. Most importantly, because we could. We had bombers and this was the only way we could hit back. Look at Churchill’s character, always wanting to be involved, hit back, have a little victory to cheer about. Given the opportunity to bomb Germany, to pull off a spectacular like breaching the dams, is he the type to sit back and ponder “But is it going to help us win the war?”

2. Morale. We tend to forget how bad things were by 1942. we tend to jump fromt he end of the Blitz to D Day. We forget how from the end of the Blitz, it was an almost contious series of disasters in the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Far East.

3.

Gauntlet surely, the Gauntlet was still operational in the Middle East in 1940 and even made a claim, at that time weren’t all surviving Furys ground instructional frames with no wings?

Paul