That’s a very good point, FP, and one that I’ve been guilty of missing as I have a horse in the race, as it were, for Hendon to be right with their ID. Nonetheless, as an occasional archive hound myself, I’d still love to know what information they had that led them to their original conclusion. Nosy beggar, aren’t I?

Adrian

No doubt the reason it’s taken 70 years to shift is that someone was going to move it “dreckly”!

Adrian

They certainly happened, though I don’t think to a major extent. Gosfield in Essex was actually bombed on the day of its official opening, which must have wound the yanks up a bit. I wonder whether the Kenley raid of August 1940 made the Luftwaffe reluctant to target airfields thus in future – though, of course, that was a special attack in itself.

I don’t think there were even that many intruder attacks on returning bombers once they crossed the coast, though at least some caused real chaos (there’s one such described in “The Last Blitz”) – possibly due to the state of our night defences later in the war?

Will be interesting to watch this thread…

Adrian

I recall hearing – and I don’t know how true this is – that Manchester’s Jewish population have always tended to side towards City rather than United. If that is so, it makes Trautmann’s adoption as a City hero all the more impressive.

I particularly like the story about meeting the Queen (and suspect that he avoided a rude remark from Prince Philip as having been a fellow serviceman)

Adrian

Good point, Andy – you have far more knowledge of this than me. Both aluminium and magnesium will have largely white corrosion products (wonder what the blue flecks in “daz” are from?) and I don’t suppose they’ve tested it for composition. The expansion of oxide is astonishing – I once cracked open a lump of ferrous oxide at Whitstable to find an entire 20mm round, case and all, that had been entirely hidden in it (DO NOT try this at home, kids – I was young and dumb!), and “my” bomb actually threw up a cannon ball inside a six inch spheroid of the stuff…

Adrian

I ask would anyone want to keep and display a Taliban IED to show what sort of weapon blew someones loved one to pieces? Thats what I think of that Dornier and all axis aircraft!

Well, there are at least two IRA IEDs – a nail bomb and a pipe bomb – on display at Duxford, so someone must think so. However, as far as I know Duxford has no examples on display of the sort of devices my grandfather – trained with explosives in WW1, a gamekeeper so a classic Auxiliary Unit recruit, and by then in the Home Guard – was almost certainly building for the purpose of blowing, burning or generally breaking seven shades of it out of any Germans that showed their noses.

Adrian

My students have educational, behavioural and social difficulties;

I know you’ve already been thanked for taking students on tours, and I wholly concur, but as someone who went to just such a school, thank you for working with those who in my day were termed “maladjusted”. It can’t be easy, but some of us have derived huge benefits from people like you.

On the morning of November 20th 2007, we stopped in Trescault and walked down the old Argyll Road to Ribecourt-la-Tour*, a few hours over 90 years since my grandfather had done exactly the same journey in full kit behind the tanks as they crossed the “impregnable” Hindenburg Line. Perhaps the easiest action the 11th Essex ever saw, they lost just a handful of men – less than ten. Four months to the day later, they were not so lucky – caught in the teeth of the German spring offensive, they took 90% casualties and grandfather spent the rest of the war in POW camps.

Adrian

*all splelings approximate!