Yes, that is true – but do not underestimate how hard it can be to produce a tag from burned human remains. This is not a job for the recovery crew. If available and removable then a tag might be passed to the IO, but if not it would only be made available by the mortuary. Bear in mind that at the height of the battle it could take a week for remains to be extracted from a crash site, an operation that required the MU crew and someone to receive the remains.

Then there is the fact that the standard issue chord was cotton. This burned, so the tag of a casualty that had suffered burning might not be attached to the neck, even if the neck remains intact. This is the gruesome stuff that needs to be considered, unfortunately.

So essentially an ID disc was just one way of establishing identity, and often ID was already established by the logical process above well before tags were found, if they ever were.

As I explained above, a recovery crew’s job was to clear up a site, and were not the first on the scene (sometimes getting there several days later) nor were they responsible for checking ID’s. They MIGHT be instructed to look for dog tags but I have never heard of this happening. I have a copy of standard instructions to recovery MU gangs issued in 1940 and there is nothing about aircrew ID in the prescribed procedures.

Still, you make a very good point in that before burial at least one would imagine tags would have been thoroughly looked for among the remains. I guess the swapped ID idea is less likely now as it would rely on the tag not being present or at least visible on the East Hougham casualty.

To be fair, anyone who wasn’t on the recovery party for the aircraft or who became responsible for the body or bodies wasn’t directly involved, and was therefore retelling a story. Being on the same squadron at the same time or not does not actually change this, while at the same time being a former squadron mate would, you would think, encourage sufficient enquiry to get the story right. But it is all conjecture, of course.

And perhaps it is possible that Hill’s aircraft did come to rest gently in a field at West Hougham, with Hill in that awful condition, and the ‘tree’ part of the story was the exaggeration that reached Tuck? Perhaps it took longer than usual to identify the pilot simply because the aircraft had just arrived on the Squadron and carried no codes? Perhaps the touchdown was so gentle it took a return to an MU and an inspection before the aircraft was SoC? All things to be explored, or simply explained when the National Archive and MoD get their collective acts together over the casualty packs.

Useful. We can tell from this that Hill was officially missing for a period, alongside Eyles. Does anyone have the date on which the Observer Corps identified the wreckage of ‘X4417’ behind the pub?

No, no no, it’s not ‘my version’. i don’t have a version, and I cannot add any more in the way of answering the question than any one else has. Why do you wish to make it an argument? Surely as a mod you understand it’s not about creating confrontation? Your insistence on this being a myth perpetuated by lying RAF officers for the sake of a line shoot is more of an insistence on a ‘version’ than my suggestion for consideration?

Not ‘collusion’ with the church, just sensitive discretion, and I am sure the CWGC would know absolutely nothing about it! If it happened, which is doubtful but worth ruling out.

Look, you know as well as the rest of us that have an interest in these things that sometimes a wristwatch and some sand bags were buried. No one talked about it, and relatives rarely knew the true circumstances around remains. I know. My own maternal grandfather, who died in a postwar DC-6 accident, isn’t where the official record says he is, we all know this now except for my grandmother who went to her own grave not knowing what her children knew. He had changed seats before take-off with a nervous flyer. Because what they scraped off the burned-out seat frames was unidentifiable, the allocation of identities was arbitrary. And this was in peacetime.

But I digress. What is important here is that Tuck et al were not just telling a tall story. They were recounting the death of someone they knew, worked with and fought alongside. It is grossly insulting to think that they would make it up.

92 squadron representatives even went to Hill’s funeral. So why would anyone from 92 then make up the circumstances of his death, especially if they contradict?

Unless people who were there were repeating myths about what happened immediately around them to people they knew, Hill was later found in an aircraft in tree branches. The record shows that someone died in a violent crash behind a pub, and was buried as Hill. The rest is conjecture, including the conjecture that Tuck and others were lying about it. I am only suggesting one logical resolution to the impasse, not trying to definitively answer the OP’s question as I know very little, and probably a lot less than some people, experts in this field, who are doubtless reading all this without comment.

By the way, the ‘vacant’ plot was not next to Hill’s. It was on the end, Row One, Number 33. In October/November 1940 it looks like they started Row 2 without using 33. Hill was No. 30. Proves nothing. https://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/2361172/hill,-howard-perry/#&gid=null&pid=2 Right hand document at the bottom.

Yes, except that it would mean putting his colleagues through the whole nasty business of standing beside the grave marked ‘Eyles’ while knowingly burying Hill, possibly even alongside relatives. And what if they wanted to see the body? It would be just as convinient to have a quiet word with Hawkinge church, explain the error and put Hill in the right place. Eyles would remain ‘missing’, easy to do as he already was. Yes, I know this isn’t any kind of definite solution. Accident cards and casualty pack records might help.

I dug out my ‘BoB Then and Now’.. There were two 92 Spitfires supposedly shot down by Molders in that engagement, both recorded as happening at precisely 11.42. The other was N3248, in which Sgt P.R. Eyles died, recorded as lost over the channel.

Is it at least possible that, there being only one Spitfire reported crashed on land, it was presumed that it was Hill’s and that Eyles was missing, presumed shot down over the Channel as this was the only logical reason by which it could be missing.

It was later, after the funeral, that Hill was found in exactly the way two of his squadron colleagues described. By which time it was too late, and the official record stood.

It’s not as far fetched as it first sounds, when you look at it ‘in the round’, and with the fog of war etc.

The only other suggestion is that it was Eyles that was found in a tree, and was mis-identified as Hill – less likely as the reported timing puts it as after the body reported as that of Hill had been buried.

Does anyone have the accident cards for X4417 or N3248? The movement card states X4417 was struck off charge on October 3rd, two weeks after the loss.