Flying Officer W. Szulkwoski (76749)

[Stig Jarlevik]

Col

Doh....so it was the vessel....
Unfortunately the Spitfire Int'l book gives only very general details about this aircraft in Portuguese service. What I did forget to mention was that Escadrille XZ moved to Tancos soon after they received their first Spitfires.

Laurent

Fully possible, but what is on that web site is a straight copy from the book with possibly added small details.

Cheers
Stig

[alanatabz]

Thanks chaps, great info!

[Laurent Rizzotti]

Originally Posted by Stig Jarlevik

Laurent

Fully possible, but what is on that web site is a straight copy from the book with possibly added small details.

Cheers
Stig

I don't have the book, but from what I have seen on forums, yes it is the same content, just the fact that it is online means it is available to anyone, and Alan may be interested.

One problem with this production list, and AFAIK the similar book, or for that matter the original RAF documents used to write them, is that it is heavily UK-centric. You have a lot of details on what happens in UK but once the Spitfire moves to Africa, Italy, India or Australia, or is sold to another country, you often have nothing.

[Stig Jarlevik]

Quite so Laurent

Reason is that both the two authors (and the website of course) have basically only checked the UK record cards and not specific unit histories.
The further away an aircraft came, ie North Africa, Middle - Far East, the tougher it was to get details back to the UK and thus complete the cards.
Some unit records were also destroyed for various reasons and never made it back in the first place, hence these gaps. I also believe the unit histories from North Africa and later Italy are much more complete than those from the Far East for example.

I don't know if you have the Air Britain range of RAF serial number booklets, but to try and interpret the cards was the initial approach taken by the late Jim Halley. When he updated some of these volumes more unit details were added as they had become known to him.

It is a huge task trying both to read the cards and then also track down each and every unit and correlate the data. Sometimes (quite often perhaps?) the unit histories clash with the cards making things very difficult to interpret.

My hat is off any day in the week for those trying!

Cheers
Stig