View Single Post
  #9  
Old 29th April 2007, 17:21
SteveB SteveB is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 359
SteveB is an unknown quantity at this point
Re: Individual letter on F/Lt. Frederick Hilley Bradford's P-51 Mustang MK.IV?

Apologies for the lack of precision in the wording of my earlier post. It was not my intention to state that 65Sqn Mustangs NEVER had red spinners. My comments were intended to make the point that as far as I know there is no evidence that 65Sqn Mustang IVs had red spinners when they were based at Peterhead.

Bradford was shot down on 11/4/45 and the discussion/profiles seemed to be about Mustang MkIVs and about operations from Peterhead. In the absence of photographs clearly it is wrong to rule out the possibility of any a/c having particular personal markings. However the photos in Roger Freeman's book were taken on 20/4/45 and the photo of ten a/c taxiing does not seem to show a single example of a dark coloured or red spinner they all seem to be either Sky or NMF.

It does seem to be the case that 65sqn and the other sqns of 122 Wing may have introduced red spinners (and retained the white nose band) on their Mustang IIIs when they were based at Funtington in May and June 1944. However there are a lot of photos of Mustang IIIs in the Polish sqns of 133 Wing from April 1944 onwards and none of those have coloured spinners and almost all of them show the full, white, type identity markings on spinner, nose, wings and tailplane. The photo of Westenra’s a/c FZ120/YT*J comes from the May 1944 period and the photos of FZ110/YT*S shows the a/c crashed in Denmark on 17/5/44. It is not clear whether red continued to be applied to spinners by 122 Wing during the invasion period and when they moved to ALGs in France. Available photos suggest that they had black spinners and the white nose band painted out (there are examples on the Australian War Memorial website).

There are photos of 65Sqn MkIVs in NMF from the post-war period when they returned South to Andrews Field that show a dark colour on the spinner and cockpit frame and this may be red.

Steve
Reply With Quote