[RodM]

Hi Thor,

thanks for the comprehensive reply and for posting the crew photo (it is always good to put faces to names).

Thanks also for confirming the Lahmann loss, although the statement about the night fighter being claimed by Lancaster gunners is incorrect because no returning crews of the Zeitz raid made a combat claim (destroyed, probable, or damaged). Whether or not a crew reported a combat in the area is now impossible to know because the 1 Grp Form Z appears not to have been preserved. Also, it is not possible to know if the combat involved an aircraft that was shot down later. Note that returning crews witnessed a crash in the Coburg area that was intrepreted as a bomber being shot down by a night fighter (this was some 80 km west of where LM742 crashed). No aircraft has been traced as crashing in this area, and it is possible that the aircraft seen to crash was in fact Lahmann's Bf110, but this is conjecture.

With regards to Knight's capture, he states in his RAAF questionnaire that he was "captured several hours later by civilians", but his memory of the passage of time could have been distorted by his disorientation after his parachute escape.

For Knight to have survived after being blown out of the aircraft, he had to be at sufficient height to open his parachute and decelerate his fall. He would not have survived if the explosion had happened close to the ground.

With regards to Knight being found near the wreckage, note that no mention is made of his parachute, which surely would have been close by if he'd landed close by. I don't think it is possible to know where he landed without further evidence from Knight. He could conceivably have walked a short distance to the crash site.

It is interesting that you mention that a search had to be mounted to locate the remaining bodies of the crew and that they were found "deep in snow". This begs the question - how far from the crash site were the five bodies spread? This would be suggestive of them either being blown out of the aircraft in a mid-air explosion or baling out at low-level bail if they were not found at the site of the crash.

I still believe that the two critical documents are both classifed with the British MoD - one being the original Luftgau crash report and the other being Knight's Loss of Bomber Aircraft questionnaire (which would be more detailed than his RAAF statement).

Cheers

Rod

PS - for other's browsing this thread, I've attached a jpeg map to illustrate the various points throughout this thread. Note that the little squares on the map with times, are the positions of reported sightings of aircraft seen to crash by returning RAF crews - green: crew on Zeitz raid, yellow: crew on Brux raid. The top-most yellow line is the briefed route of the Zeitz bomber stream (flying from left to right) and the bottom line is the briefed route of the Brux bomber stream, flying left to right.