To: exit82; All
According to articles I found in Polish:
The crew
Arnold R. Blynn,
George A. Chapman,
Harold L. Brown,
C. B. Wylie,
Arthur G. W. Liddell,
Frederick G. Wenham,
Kenneth J. Ashmore,
The plane was supposed to drop their cargo near Skiernewice (central Poland, west of Warsaw, 20 km. from the town where I live), but it was shot down before managed to get here.
Plane crashed into mud.
All the remains of the crew members, that the locals found right after the crash had been collected and buried. After the war they were exhumed and buried again in the military part of the Rakowicki Cemetry in Krakow.
Now the historians found parts of the plane (including wings, 2 Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and many more), remains of the crew members, their equipment and personal belongings.
How they found it?
Many people thought, that after the war communist authorities removed the parts of the plane and hid them somewhere.
Recently historians from the Warsaw Uprising Museum in Warsaw contacted some witness, who said, that the communist couldn't manage to take them out, so they left them where they were.
24 posted on
12/01/2006 2:17:32 PM PST by
lizol
(Liberal - a man with his mind open ... at both ends)
To: lizol
Its interesting that they found Merlins. Merlins were used only on early versions of the Halifax (pre-Mk III"s I eehink). Later marques were equiped with Hercules radials. I would have thought that by August 1944 pretty much all of the early marque Halifaxes would have been relegated to towing drones and other non-combative tasks. Early Lancasters, on the other hand, were powered by Hercules engines, which were changed to Merlins from Mk II on. For reasons no one seems to be able to explain, this swap of engine types significantly improved the performance of both aircraft. While it could not carry the same bomb load (partially because of the location of the main spar)the Halifax was actually slightly faster than the Lancaster. The Halifax pictured on this website was equiped with Merlins.
My father (who died on Christmas Day) was a Halifax tailgunner with 426 Thunderbird Squadron. The last conversation I had with was on Christmas Eve, and we talked about the discovery of this aircraft. He was particularly interested because the pilot, P.O. Blynn, was from Kingston, Nova Scotia, a small towm about five miles from where we live.
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