World War II Weapons

I was reading some Orbs and came across this "No “Boozer” indications." can anyone enlighten me as to what "Boozer" was?

Christmas will soon be upon us. The purpose of this thread is to post something from WW2 that is related to Christmas. The great thing about this thread is that we can update it on an annual basis.

Anyway I will kick off with the 1940 Christmas Day menu for the airman at R.A.F. Penrhos. Sounds quite tasty!

I received the following from Forces Reunited. I can’t think of anybody that I know who has not had their credit card details compromised (mine have twice) so maybe this is a useful bit of advice.

Online Security

We are continuously asked at Forces Reunited why members are unable to list their birth dates into their profile details, to let others know when it’s their birthday, so we thought we’d pen an open letter to you all informing you of safe internet practices.

With your name and specifically birth date an identity fraudster is already a good way to being able to clone your details or attempt to hack into accounts, so we postively discourage members from listing their birth dates in their profiles.

Your birth dates are always used in online system such as bank logins and the like so it is very unwise to reveal them to all and sundry.

The only data we ask for at Forces Reunited is enough to get you reunited with your friends, such as your service dates and unit info, which is of no use to internet fraudsters.

We would recommend that if you have entered your birth date into your profile on the site you remove it, furthermore if you use any other sites where your birth date shows we would suggest you remove it immediately.

Further information on how to browse safely online can be found at Get Safe Online

Regards,
The Forces Reunited Team.

Test pilot who went to war and flew presidents gravitated to adventure - Press-Telegram

Two old men battle WWII controversy out in court - Radio Netherlands Worldwide - English

I know this is the wrong place to post this but I’ve tried other threads without success. WHY is this site so slow? All day I have attempted to post and have given up due to the length of time I have to spend waiting for the site to upload. I have no trouble with other sites, in fact they are very fast to upload, it just seems to be this one.
can anyone please explain?

Peter

Britain thinking of joining euro | Business Breaking News | News.com.au

The story of one of the first Sikh Canadian WWI soldiers has been uncovered with the discovery of his Victory medal.
Sandeep Singh Brar an avid Sikh historian purchased the medal from a dealer in England and quickly realized its historical significance. The medal revealed a fascinating story of heroism and tragedy.

sikhmuseum.com Buckam Singh

Brand New C Drum Pouches marked Rusco with strap $650 shipped.These are for the 100 round Thompson drums. Original not reproductions. Hard to find in new condition

Email if your interested

Thanks Joe

Oliver Owen discovered his father was a wartime RAF hero | Life and style | The Observer

The light was beginning to fade and the mist thicken at RAF Bourn, a wasteland of mud and Nissen huts, as 21 Lancasters from 97 Squadron left their dispersals on the afternoon of 16 December 1943. It took a little under half an hour to get them all into the air, each plane needing a minute to goad its four Merlin engines up to full power before setting off down the bumpy runway. The sky above Cambridgeshire shook with the noise and vibration as the bombers lifted into the darkening sky and headed for Berlin, each one seen off with a wave and a silent prayer by those left on the ground. The airfield fell silent for the next seven hours, the smoke from each hut’s coke fire hanging in the damp air. There was little to do until the bombers returned.

That winter, 65 years ago, was particularly harsh and often raids had been called off at the last minute as the weather closed in, but the German capital had not been hit for two weeks, so there was some urgency to get Bomber Command back into battle.

‘It will cost us between 400 and 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war,’ said Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris at the launch of the Battle of Berlin a month earlier. Harris believed that saturation bombing would alter the course of the conflict. But it was a grim time to be in Bomber Command: 7,000 allied airmen were killed over Germany during the five-month campaign against Berlin, and more than 1,000 bombers were lost. For the seven young men who made up the crew of Lancaster JB671 - known as V-Victor - the timing must have seemed particularly bad. Their arrival on operations in mid-November coincided with the start of Harris’s assault on Berlin, when the chance of surviving a full tour of duty was one in five. This trip was V-Victor’s fourth, but the 20-year-old pilot, Charles Owen, had flown a couple of earlier missions. He was my father.

Google will find work for idle hands, and one day in June 2006, for no particular reason, I typed in my father’s name. Among countless listings for a man with that name who ‘made the world a safer place’ by manufacturing riding hats was an entry that read: ‘Owen, V-Victor, 16/17 December 1943, 97 Squadron’. I had stumbled across a website that was a continuation of Fire by Night, a book by Jennie Gray that told the story of a raid on Berlin in 1943. Also on the way to Berlin that bleak December night was Lancaster K-King, a plane my father’s crew had used on their first trip together three weeks earlier. This crew, too, were on their first operation, and among them was 21-year-old wireless operator Joe Mack. Jennie Gray is Mack’s daughter, and now her website had made me think very differently about my own father. It also reintroduced me to his wartime diary, a handwritten book that had sat on a shelf throughout my childhood.

Up to that point, thoughts of my father had rarely entered my head because, I suppose, I never really knew what to think of him. He died in the summer of 1984, a few days after my 20th birthday. He was only 61, but looked very much older, due to a long battle with alcohol. In fact it was no battle at all, just one-way traffic with booze very much in the driving seat. The abiding memory I have is of him sitting on a sofa in our house in Wiltshire staring out over the Kennet valley, hoping to catch a glimpse of the American warplanes that used the area for low-level training. We all knew he was dying, but no one talked about it. We just waited.

My memories of my father are divided in two. There was a time when he was still in the RAF, and there were the years afterwards. A round of defence cuts in 1975 called time on his career. We lived in Lewes in Sussex and his final job was at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. On his way back from the station each evening he stopped in at the Kings Head in Southover High Street. When he no longer went to work, there was no getting past the Kings Head. The RAF had been his entire life and he had no training to get by in the world beyond.

I went to boarding school when I was seven years old and have only a scratchy recollection of time before that. My father was stationed in Cyprus and he would take my older brother, William, and me for walks at the weekend on the RAF base at Akrotiri. I liked that; we would walk past the planes and the lines of Bloodhound missiles, but most of all I remember, as I tried to equal my dad’s long strides, that other men would salute him.

One afternoon we went to a ceremony where he handed out ‘wings’ to newly qualified RAF pilots, and he made a small speech in which he gave some advice to the young airmen. ‘As long as you remember that everyone else in the sky is a bloody idiot and they will do precisely what you least expect, then you will be fine,’ was the gem he passed on. It went down well. Years later, when my mother was horrified at my plans to buy a motorbike, he made pretty much the same observations.

While he was serving he was active and did the things that fathers do. He was strict in an old-fashioned ‘children should be seen and not heard’ way, an advocate of good table manners and courtesy, but he was fair and, most of all, fun. After the RAF he became very different.

Looking back, the first sign of the trouble ahead was my 12th birthday. I had asked for a Scalextric set, and when I came home from prep school for a day I expected to be confronted by a large, paper-wrapped box. In the living room my present was already set up on the floor. It wasn’t the end of the world, until I discovered lots of wrapping paper in the kitchen bin.

Dad had been to the pub the night before and ‘batted on a bit’. He came home in good spirits with a couple of friends. They opened my present and raced long into the night.

At the end of 1977 we moved from Lewes to a small village in Wiltshire. The Red Lion became very much my father’s second home. He would be there at lunch time and on the dot of six in the evening. He had a stool in the corner of the lounge bar and a stare that could burn a hole through tungsten should anyone dare to sit on it.

At first, when he was late back in the evening, his arrival was accompanied by an excuse, usually along the lines of, ‘Terribly sorry. Got trapped by some frightful ancient mariner.’ But as time went by, and the more frequently this occurred, he gave up on the excuses. When I was home from school I dreaded the hour he was back from the pub and before he passed out in his chair. He was prone to irrational outbursts and could be very mean, particularly to my mother, Diana. To see her reduced to tears so often was heartbreaking, particularly when she was such a lovely person. She was deeply religious, but also one of the funniest people I ever knew, and certainly the best mimic. Her war hadn’t been easy either; she had been interned by the Japanese in the British Embassy in Tokyo.

When I finally left school my father had been banned from driving and had given up on trying to have any life beyond the local pub. I wanted to be at home as little as possible. I loved my father, but I didn’t like or admire him at this time, when I should have been really getting to know him. How could you admire a man who couldn’t start the day without a large sherry in his tomato juice? When he finally died the family’s sadness was tempered with relief. I never really thought how, or why, my father ended up like he did. Not until Jennie Gray’s website rekindled my interest.

Charles Blundell Owen was born on 5 January 1923 in Barcelona. He was the second of five children and his parents ran a hotel in Algeciras, just across the bay from Gibraltar. I know little of his childhood except that he was sent to boarding school in England aged five and only returned home to Spain for the summer holidays. He never spoke particularly fondly of his parents - he used to call his father ‘Sir’ - or the two aunts he stayed with in Dorset for the majority of the year. I heard more stories of his bulldog, Admiral Sturdy, than I ever heard of Owen family life in Spain. He was sent to Malvern College in Worcestershire and then, as Max Hastings records in Bomber Command, ‘after leaving public school, [he] was working at the Supermarine aircraft factory as a boy of 17 in 1940, when he was badly injured in an air raid. He spent the winter in hospital, and came out at last old enough for the RAF. An exceptional pilot trainee, he was posted as an instructor, and served a year before transferring to operations with 97 Squadron, where he proved an outstanding operational captain.’

The skills learned as a flying instructor were to save him and his crew that December night in 1943, on what became known as ‘Black Thursday’. The journey to Berlin took around three hours, and the Pathfinders of 8 Group led the vast stream of bombers. These were elite squadrons, expert at marking targets and precision bombing. Made up from a mixture of British and Dominion air crew, 97 Squadron was such a unit. Almost to a man they were young, some so young they could fly a heavy bomber but not drive a car. Many were still teenagers and there was general suspicion of crew in their thirties, the feeling being that they had no right to still be alive, having used up all their luck. Crews could volunteer for the Pathfinders; with the post came a higher rank and the right to wear the insignia of the force, a gold eagle. The downside was a ‘double tour’ of 45 operations, as opposed to the 30 flown by Main Force. This did not mean that Pathfinders had any more experience; four of 97 Squadron’s crews flying that night were on their first sortie of the war.

Despite all the training, the novices could have little idea what the skies above the target had in store. They had to run the gauntlet of flak and searchlights, and keep an eye out for the nightfighters that preyed on the bombers. And it wasn’t just the enemy that could kill you; often, crews would look up through the canopy in horror to see a ‘friendly’ aircraft looming above, its bomb doors yawning open. Collisions were frequent, as the Lancaster, suddenly relieved of the weight of bombs, would occasionally leap upwards, sometimes as far as 500ft, and into another plane.

On this particular night only one of 97 Squadron’s Lancasters failed to complete the bombing run. Q-Queenie, flown by Flight Lieutenant David Brill, exploded high above Berlin and all eight men on board (like three other crews, Brill was carrying a rookie second pilot) were killed. The crews of the other 20 Lancasters were pleased to be turning for home after surviving another bombing run to the dreaded ‘Big City’, but they weren’t to know the most dangerous part of the night still lay ahead.

Having been a pilot, with the ability to enjoy the freedom of the skies, the loss of his driving licence in 1982 must have come as a terrible blow to my father, although he was never going to admit it. He apparently never liked being flown, so it made perfect sense that he wouldn’t enjoy being driven. My mother would become a nervous wreck whenever my father lurked in the passenger seat even before the alcohol really got hold of him. He drove ‘flamboyantly’, leaning back with arms straight. He helped out in the commentary box at Silverstone and I loved going motor racing with him. We would leave before dawn and he attacked the country roads with gusto. It wasn’t clever, but it was thrilling, and it was on these occasions that he was very much my friend. He was relaxed, funny, never short of an anecdote and I loved his stories. He’d tell me about Admiral Sturdy, the bulldog, swimming in the sea but not being able to turn round. He used to chase him in a rowing boat as the dog paddled towards Gibraltar. Once pointed in the right direction Sturdy headed back to shore.