Hello Michel

I realise that this is an old post. I should explain first. My father flew with this crew on training and for their first few missions. He was injured on a mission to Dortmund in Dec 1944. He was due to to fly with this crew on the night they went missing.

Perhaps you could get back to me and explain your interest?

Regards.

Dr Gould

I stand corrected (as we say in the UK!) although I am interested in you saying that he flew with the crew in January. This is not correct as he was grounded for two months due to his injuries.

I have much interest in NF975 - my father (who died in 1995) always wanted to know what happened to the 'boys' - and so I am very keen to piece together what really did happen.

Have you any thoughts?

Regards.

Dr Gould

Alan

My father wrote the following

'Lancaster Finishing School followed at Hemswell, north of Lincoln. We then joined 576 Squadron, based at Fiskerton, close to Lincoln in late October 1944. Our first seven operations included two to Dortmund where we received flak damage on both occasions. The second of these, and the most serious, occurred during a daylight operation when a shell burst between the port inner engine and my head and apart from stunning me and knocking out my ear drums reduced us to the use of two engines and myself on emergency procedure on our return trip over the North Sea. A somewhat stressful trip marked by my failure to isolate the IFF from its detonator with the result that our heavy landing resulted in a pumpkin shaped IFF box!

As a result of the injuries I received I was grounded for a period during which my crew tragically went missing on their third trip to Dortmund. They have no known graves and are commemorated at Runnymede.'

I believe that the entry in the squadron record book is incorrect and that it was F/S Coates who was on the trip to Merseberg. I recall my father telling me that he was due to return to operations with the Bastick crew on the night they were lost but Coates had asked that he go instead as he would 'complete his 30' that night. Last year I came across Coates' name in the D Day museum in St Mere Eglise - he had escaped from a Lancaster which crashed nearby in the summer of 1944.

I attach copies of the relevant pages from Dad's logbook.

Regards.

Keith (Gould)

Hello Keith,

I was looking for a crewmember who where found by the "C" Company 58th AIB on February 22th 1945 at the village Linne in the south of Holland.

Irving Odgers Company C 58th AIB wrote:

 On the fourth night we were in the line we saw our first air raid on Germany. The beams of searchlights and the flashes of bursting shells illuminated the distant skies; but, since the city under attack was on the Rhine River over forty miles away, none of the sounds reached us. We watched hypnotized as plane after plane was hit, burst into flames and fell like a glowing ember against the blue black of the cold clear night. The next night one of the downed pilots, a Canadian, crawled into the field in front of the company. A GI seeing a figure crawling towards him nearly shot him. The GI asked for the password but the pilot didn't respond. The GI yelled " Stick your damn head up and I'll blow it off." That got a response from the Canadian who recognized the American accent and called out who he was. He was wet, tired and hungry, so we fed and warmed him before we sent him to the rear. We wondered how he had made it into the little triangle of land formed by the Roer, the Maas and front lines.

But Lancaster NF975 was not his plane........

He was a crewmember of Lancaster ME456  424 Squadron...

Unfortunately i have no more info about Lancaster NF975

Regards, Michel