The Little World

6 July, 1944. Western France – near the Pas de Calais. One of HM aircraft on a Serrate mission was lost. It crashed with my wife’s uncle in it. His navigator was killed, he evaded capture, and was eventually delivered back to England by the French Resistance. He wasn’t allowed to fly over enemy territory after that because he knew too much Resistance information, but he was put to work as a flying instructor. I was delighted to meet him in the 1970’s.

And I was delighted to get his service record extracts from one of his sons – detailing a great deal of the last mission and hinting at previous service on various other types of aircraft. Armed with the aircraft registration and squadron code, I was determined to model it for my air museum.

What good luck – Tamiya make the very plane and mark – the De Havilland Mosquito Mk II night fighter. And at a good price, too. I am further blessed by the internet, as it has enabled me to hunt up the probable camouflage pattern for this plane in his specific squadron at that specific time, for that specific mission. I shall go with the most likely choices.

I am buoyed by the fact that Tamiya are such precise makers – the bags of parts in the kit seem to be practically perfect on the sprues. I do not presume to imagine that they contain errors – in any case I am not going to split hairs over this. There will be enough to do to make the model as precisely as possible out of the box.

There is one thing that I am missing: the actual report of the enquiry that was held after he returned to England. He’d lost one of HM’s Mosquitos in combat but whether it was due to getting shot down by a German night fighter, by a British bomber, by flak, or whether it was just the windmills stopping is not stated. He was not blamed for the loss, so that is something. He also delivered his navigator safe to the ground, but a sad decision led the chap away with another group of RAF evaders and he was shot.

The good thing about the service records being open on the net now is that it also details the other planes he flew in – and unknowingly I have made one of them already. Now I get to make and Armstrong Whitworth Whitley in Coastal Command colours as well. Bonus. Don’t mind if I do.