What I find odd about that picture is how immaculate the children are. Good clean clothes and hair brushed and combed to perfection.

The invaluable “Last Take Off” by Colin Cummings, has this:–
This aircraft was flying at No.3 in a tailchase but pulled away from the section without making an RT call. The pilot ejected at a low height and his parachute deployed just before he hit the ground and he sustained fatal injuries. The Board of Enquiry believed that the pilot may have blacked out and that, on recovering at a low height, he ejected because he was too low to regain control.

I should explain that a “tailchase” was an exercise to teach pilots to dogfight, and involved a leader indulging in violent manouevres in which the 2 or 3 trainees following him tried to hold him in their gunsight. There were many accidents to trainee pilots in this period caused by over exuberance or sheer bravado, while flying aircraft of a performance beyond their capabilities.

I well remember watching these operations, I lived a few miles away from Lympne and we would bike over there to watch the planes. I also worked for the Met office there from June to December 1949. One instance I remember was when the complete fleet of 3 Freighters came back from Le Touquet one evening in close formation and carried out a proper break and landing. I believe that some/all of the pilots were ex Mosquito pilots.

Certain events are stuck in my mind, I was 8 years old at the time so it’s all a bit hazy now, but.

The tremendous thump when a Me109 went into the hill a few hundred yards in front of our bungalow.
My mother making us go inside as we were watching a block of German bombers grinding across us, the guns were going and there was a little tinkling noise coming from the road in front of the garden where we stood.
A German pilot in his parachute drifting across near the church, I thought his chute would get snagged on the spire but he was the far side of it from me.
Watching the remains of German aircraft being unloaded in the yard across the road from us, and begging the troops guarding the place for “souvenirs”. I didn’t know what the word meant, I thought it was some special part.
The strange smell of crashed aircraft.

I agree with Realpolitik.

It should also be remembered that many Poles and Czechs and Yugoslavs served with distinction in the the RAF well into the ’60’s. Out of 10 pilots on my first squadron, 2 were Polish, and from 20 in my second 3 were Poles. They made a very significant contribution, one I particularly remember served time in first a Russian and later a German PoW camp, but he was still a first class pilot always contesting top place in the air firing score sheet.

A first class idea.

As an aside my Polish pilot used to refer to Battenburg cake as “Polish Air Force cake”
For the uninitiated, Battenburg is yellow and red cake arranged in squares and bound together with a strip of marzipan. It very closely resembles the old Polish insignia

Somewhere I recall reading of bomber crews taking beer bottles with them and dropping those, suitably refilled, “somewhere over Germany”.

I have recounted here before the sad story of using the official apparatus in the Mosquito and only succeeding in lubricating the cockpit floor

A very interesting programme. I served on 39 Sqdn which Leefe Robinson was serving on when he destroyed the Zeppelin, it was still prominent in the squadron history. They didn’t really stress his achievement enough, flying an underpowered aircraft at the limits of its height without oxygen or homing aids at night. Incidentally there was a pub at Harrow called the Leefe Robinson in his honour.
Also showed that the Germans instigated “terror” bombing, so they had no reason to squeal later.