[Robert Reid]

I got some records from ottawa on several of Canadian dambuster raid casualties. I two cases the graves recovery file or part of was available for hopgood crew and Maudsley crew. They advised contacting RAF historic branch for Rest. Well , I was told at RAFHB that absolutely couldnt have anything ,there was silence when I asked for pages X Y Z that were missing from ones I already had from Canadian government. They even refused to give copies to ottawa archives!!!!!!!
They werent keen also to release info on airman whose brother was willing to give permission for me to request it. Something about being too graphic and upsetting. I already had most of it and being in medical profession it was pretty tame.
Also if war crime was involved they wanted to spare relatives feelings.!
At Kew there are files on warcrimes and lot of info in them that you can find.
In Washington index is for location and Perpertrator and victim. Many were not war crimes but index doesnt say so this you have to go to file. The file at Kew had quite few crashes where there were casualties and abuse and files in some cases stated items removed as too graphic. Moving to warcrimes trials transcripts often have lots of info.Have 2 US cases and 700 pages of evidence.
Much of time its luck and cross checking the different files.
People in ottawa are very busy but they did come through in bout 8 weeks with dambuster info,they culled out lot of repeat info so to keep down the number of pages to be copied

robert