Air Combat Report 1939-45

Bob · Flight Lieutenant

Air Combat Report 1939-45

dawallace · Wing Commander

Great find Bob!
The searching is not straight forward, I had no success by date or Squadron but the gunner's name turned up the reports I was looking for and I downloaded them right away.
Thanks
Dave Wallace

William Heron · Group Captain

Dave, I've tried to access the Combat Records and am having a great deal of trouble. Do you need both the first and last names of the airman?. As these fields are in yellow I'm thinking they might be required fields, if so I'm in deeper trouble than I thought as I don't have any first names only initials. can you take me through the process you had success with. Thanks.

ALLYOOP · Flight Lieutenant

Hello,
I had trouble with search engine in past so I gave up, just revisited and had same problems. However I just entered a date of combat I knew existed...
i.e. 17/04/1944 to 18/04/1944 and up came a list of every combat for the 24 hours... thus finding individuals names that I originally entered in search engine with no previous results.
Alan

I went back to same entry, and I noticed that "Wentworth" is only entered for the crew of a/c combat, Soderstrom was Mid-upper but he is not entered. So when searching keep in mind the names of airgunners belonging to crew as one may only be entered, if going by date.

-- Edited by ALLYOOP at 12:43, 2008-01-16

dawallace · Wing Commander

Bill
I used only the last name. In my case the surname was not common, "Trinder" which helps. I also had luck with the squadron number but only put in the squadron number - nothing else like "sqn". That seemed to give reasonably complete results. It seems to work best if you enter as little as possible.
In my case I was looking up two combats that were reported in my father's log book. Interestingly in each case, (12 days apart) the German nightfighters were seen becasue they had left their red & green navigation lights on as they were approaching my father's Stirling, lucky for my father's crew,unlucky for the fighter pilots. They shot the second one down.
Regards
Dave

William Heron · Group Captain

Dave, Thanks for your reply and you're right "LESS IS BETTER" I entered on the Sqdn. No. and date and it showed ALL combats for the time frame, HOWEVER, how do you get it to download so as to print it off? Do you have to pay a fee or membership or what?????????? maybe I'm missing something.

dawallace · Wing Commander

Bill
Once you find what you want click on "see details" then "add to cart". You will then get the opportunity to give them a credit card number. I think it costs around 7 pounds. You then download it immediately and save it to the computer. Some of the files are hard to read due to the quality so its a biit of a gamble. I should also say that if you are having a hard time finding something try a different spelling, they seem to have made lots of spelling mistakes when recording the information at debriefings.
Regards
Dave

matt · Air Vice Marshall

I have found that it doesn't work at all if you input a surname, the only way I can get it to work is with a unit and date range. But its still pretty cool!

William Heron · Group Captain

Hi Dave, While interested in obtaining some of these reports and being from the U.K. originally, at 3 Pounds 50P (approx $7.00 CAD) per copy and the uncertainty of the quality not only is it cost prohibitive but it is also like buying an item unseen. I wonder if there is anything like this available in Canada i.e National Archives?.

dawallace · Wing Commander

Hi Bill
Certainly if you are looking for many of these reports it could get expensive. I got maybe 4 or 5 of them and all but one were fairly readable.
I am no expert but would guess that if any combat reports are available through Archives Canada they would be for 6 Group Squadrons only. It's too bad you can't do a 24 hr pass at the NA like some of the newspapers have.
Dave