Author Archives: jfwknifton

by | June 5, 2023 · 6:17 am

An impossible Beatles Quiz (1….the Questions)

Hello there, sad children of the sixties!

I’d like to cheer you up with another quiz in my series of Beatles quizzes. The answers will be published in another blog post in a few days’ time.

The questions all refer to albums, including “Sergeant Pepper” and those coming after that.  If you want to look up the answers on Google and do it that way, then good for you, but you might enjoy the questions more if you tried to do them yourself without any help from the Internet. I have tried to make the questions doable, but clearly, one or two are meant to be difficult. Incidentally, the questions do not necessarily relate 100% to the illustrations, although the illustrations are meant to be a very large clue to the correct answers. On the other hand, the answer to Question 1 is not “A bald man with a tattooed head”

1       Who stands in front of me in my hour of darkness?             

2       Who will never walk down Lime Street any more?  

3       She came in through the bathroom window, but what was her protection?

4        She thought she was a cleaner,  but what was she really? And what was her polite name?

5        Who did the “all American bullet-headed Saxon mother’s son” take with him when he went out tiger hunting with his elephant and gun?

6       With whom does he spend his days in conversation?

7       What is happiness ?

8       Now, a question about the girl of his fancy. What was her surname, what did she call herself and what did everyone know her as? 

9       How many holes in Blackburn Lancashire?  

10    Who made a fool of everyone ? And why did we give her everything we owned?

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by | May 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

Enigma 4

Last time, I was telling the story of how the three Polish whizz kid mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Jery Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, had told the British and the French, everything they had discovered about Enigma. Here they are:

That generous act enabled the British to begin decrypting German messages almost straight away, and, very soon, to start affecting the outcome of the war. In March-April 1941, Enigma revealed, for example, that Crete was going to be invaded from the air, using gliders and paratroopers. Everybody was ready for them and the German invasion force suffered heavy casualties, with as many as 4,000 men killed.

I also talked last time about how, in May 1941, the Royal Navy was told the whereabouts of all the supply ships that were servicing the Bismarck. They also ascertained on one particular occasion, that the Bismarck was headed to a harbour in France, rather than in Germany.

The stories all came from the book by John Jackson which relates the story of Enigma, the German encrypting machine used throughout the entire Second World War, the Germans always confident that their codes could never be cracked….

In July 1942, if the Royal Navy had been clever enough to believe the Enigma decrypt given to them, they would not have told the Arctic convoy PQ17 to scatter, an act which condemned 24 ships to a watery grave and 153 sailors to an early death. Arctic convoys were dreadful:

Temperatures were always unbelievably low, and the ships were  attacked more or less constantly:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

There was very little air cover, and the one constant threat was the mighty battleship, the Tirpitz:

Even Enigma cannot overcome the arrogance of unintelligent senior officers. And what was the reason for the mix-up?

Well, the great men at the top end of the Royal Navy believed that the Tirpitz had left port to attack the convoy. But, unbelievable as it may seem, they were actually mistaken and the biggest naval disaster of the Second World War ensued.

In April 1944, General Guderian went on a tour of the various armoured units that the Germans had stationed in Normandy. This enabled the Allies to know exactly which Germans were where, and gave them…….

“a splendid insight into the distribution of the armour a month before the landing.”

Here is General Guderian. He was the author of the definitive book on tank warfare called “Panzer”. If only one of the senior English officers had read it before the Panzers rolled into France in 1940:

Further Enigma decrypts in 1944 revealed exactly the strength of the Germans in northern France, with six top quality divisions in France and Belgium, along with fourteen divisions of lesser quality. Worryingly, perhaps, the Cotentin Peninsula, to the west of the D-Day beaches, was being heavily reinforced, although it was music to Churchill’s ears to hear the large number of complaints from a large number of various German units that petrol and oil were again in very short supply. The Prime Minister was also extremely pleased to hear that, day by day, Hitler and his generals were beginning to believe more and more strongly that the Allies would land not in Normandy, but in the Pas de Calais.

Enigma decrypts also revealed that in, May 1944, the Luftwaffe had a thousand aircraft including 650 fighters, although Allied numbers were much, much, higher. Interestingly, given that the weather satellite had not yet been invented, the Allies were delighted that on D-Day, thanks to Enigma, they would be able to use what were probably far more accurate forecasts than anything they had themselves, namely the Germans’ own weather forecasts.

In June 1944, Enigma also managed to decipher encrypted messages between Peenemünde and Blizna, a testing ground for the V1 and V2. Before long, everybody at Bletchley Park was familiar with the name of Werner von Braun, soon to give up being a career war criminal and to move to a cushy well paid job in the United States.

Here’s a V2 rocket:

They were tested initially at Peenemünde and then at Blizna. Not a lot went on without the Enigma decrypts letting the RAF know something about it. Peenemünde was heavily damaged after a huge number of RAF bombers bombed every square foot of the site. They included 103 Squadron, starring my Dad. The RAF were particularly keen to blast and obliterate Peenemünde, because they’d all been told……

“Destroy the secret weapon site tonight, or you’ll all have to go back tomorrow evening.” 

The main scientist in charge at Peenemünde was, of course Werner von Braun, not an SS war criminal who used slave labourers to build whatever he required but a helpful scientist who took Mankind to the Moon. Here he is, sharing one or two Slave Labourer jokes with his pals:

At the time, the people deciphering the Enigma messages were absolutely amazed at what the Germans were doing. They had never anticipated what were, after all, artillery shells, being propelled around a hundred miles to blow up either London or Antwerp. By late 1944, the so-called “Rocket Bradshaw” decrypts were providing everybody with the Germans’ timetable of all the V2 launches from the Hague area of the Netherlands, all of them targeted on London. The exact target was always Tower Bridge although they never got within a mile of it.

One final thought, which does not actually come from John Jackson’s book but from a TV programme I saw about the Final Solution. I hadn’t realised that there were still Enigma encrypts which had defied all attempts to decipher them. One of them was deciphered as recently as 2020. It was a careful record of how many Jews had been rounded up from the ghettoes in a score or more towns and cities in central and eastern Poland and had now been transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered. They were apparently using their strongest encryptions for that one.

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by | May 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

My Dad’s cars (3)

I have already told you about the love of my Dad’s motoring life, his Hillman Minx De Luxe, Registration Number BLT 141B. He gave it to me after he retired, and I had it for about two or  three years. Here is a picture of it in the car park of the old Savoy Hotel in 1980, on our wedding day. That’s why the picture’s so shaky:

Here I am driving this 1964 car, as it gradually began to get rustier and rustier :photo 4

It was in this Hillman Minx that, back in 1968, Fred was returning from Wigan down the M6, when, because the motorway was still in the throes of construction, he failed to see the tiny hand-painted direction signs, and finished up in a building site in Birmingham, having missed his turn off in Stoke-on-Trent. That sounds incredible, but he’d never been on  a motorway before. Wigan is a town in Lancashire and is indicated by the Orange Arrow. My Mum’s parents lived there. The other towns and cities are in capital letters. Fred was aiming at Burton-on-Trent near Derby, which is south east of Stoke:

He was driving the same car in Leicester (south east of Derby) when he got lost and was forced to ask a policeman the way. Realising that he was dealing with somebody from out-of-town, this eminently sensible officer told Fred to avoid a rather horrific one-way system by driving fifty yards the wrong way down a one way street, while he promised to turn a blind eye to the whole thing.

It was again in this very same Hillman Minx that, three years later, Fred again missed his way in that very same city of Leicester, and went the wrong way up another one way street. Instead of being able to solve the problem by the previous method, however, Fred was forced on this second occasion to extricate himself from the situation by executing a three point turn in the face of a rapidly advancing four lanes of densely packed vehicles.

I have vague memories too, of getting lost as we went on holiday for the first time to the Yorkshire coast at either Bridlington or Scarborough. We stopped at, I think, Pontefract, somewhere near a power station, to ask the way.

The man that Fred approached spoke with an accent which was completely incomprehensible, and after a few frustrated minutes, Fred just drove off at top speed, angrily spinning the wheels on his rather sedate family saloon. At the time, he insisted that, against all the apparent mathematical odds, he had managed to find the local village idiot at his very first attempt.

Incidentally, above, you can see the Britain’s Lead Soldier version of the village idiot which usually reaches £200 at auction.

Nowadays, I think, in calm retrospect, that the man’s Yorkshire accent may well have been beyond us. It is difficult, though, even to best guess the location of these events. Perhaps it was near the huge power station at Ferrybridge where the A64 to the east coast Yorkshire holiday resorts left the main A1 trunk road, as it would have been at that time. The power station was demolished a long time ago:

Whenever Fred left his car anywhere unfamiliar, such as when he was away on holiday, or for any length of time in his own local area, he would always immobilise it by removing part of the carburettor . On occasion, Fred would even immobilize the car when he parked it on his own drive. It was years after his death that I realized that in this apparently bizarre zeal for crime prevention, Fred was only carrying out the orders that he would have been given in the early part of World War Two, in 1939-1940, when it was a serious criminal offence to leave a vehicle without totally immobilising it. There was a very real fear of imminent invasion, and the arrival of Nazi paratroopers, many of them disguised as nuns. And even in 1975, the Soviet Spetsnaz forces would have drunk a bottle of vodka each in celebration to have found such a fast and classy vehicle as a 1964 Hillman Minx. Here’s their badge in case your car is ever stolen. Spetsnaz are everywhere:

This Hillman Minx was THE car of Fred’s life. He had it for more than sixteen years, before, around 1980, he passed it on to me as a newly qualified driver. I in my turn used the car until it failed its MOT test by a very wide margin, some £300 when my annual salary was £500. I then duly drove it back from Nottingham to Woodville, where my family lived. Fred was then able to drive “that Hillman” as he always called it, on its last ever journey, the short distance from 9 Hartshorne Road to Donald Ward’s scrapyard in Moira Road. Here it is, complete with Victorian bottle kiln:

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by | May 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

Hendon objects 3

In my last blog post about the non-flying exhibits in the museum at Hendon in north London, we were looking at some of the objects and various pieces of metal which had been rescued from aircraft as they awaited their turn in the scrapyard. These treasures were all housed in the RAF Museum which my family and I visited as long ago as 2010.

In my first two blog posts, I made an effort to include mostly things that were associated with the ground, such as a battleship, medals and the metal cross from a dog’s collar. This time, though, the objects are supposed to be connected more closely with the air.

We have therefore, some examples of the nose art on RAF Lancasters and other Bomber Command bombers.

This one comes from an aircraft in one of the Polish squadrons of the RAF:

This aircraft has all of its missions marked carefully, although I do not know whether the white or yellow colouration has any significance:

This is the artwork on a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. In general, American artwork tended to be less inhibited than in the RAF:

Here’s what looks like a wasp type creature on a B-24 Liberator of the Indian Air Force:

These bombing raid symbols are just about the neatest that you could ever get. Note the quotation from Herman Goering underneath them:

“No enemy plane will fly over the Reich Territory.”     Herman Goering

The bombing raid symbols also contain three medal ribbons for the Distinguished Flying Crosses or Distinguished Flying Medals won by members of the crew. The one with blue and red in the medal I do not know. The name of the medal recipient was painted underneath the engine nacelles. Here is Pilot Officer Tottenham:

And Pilot Officer McManus:

This aircraft was “S-Sugar” within the squadron. As well as on the side of the fuselage, the single letter appears on the nose:

And also on the tailfins:

I don’t know what the little aircraft is. Possibly, it is a training aircraft. If you know its identity, please indicate in the Comments Section.

The museum has a couple of bombs on show.

This appears to me to be a standard 4,000lb “cookie” which carried the maximum bombload inside a very thin skin so as to create the biggest blast possible. That would blow the roofs off and allow the incendiaries to get inside the buildings and start their work:

This is a “Grand Slam” ten ton bomb, designed to penetrate the ground at more than the speed of sound and then to explode, creating a vast empty space deep in the ground. The technical term for this is a camouflet, an artificial cavern created by an explosion. Whatever is above it, buildings, railways, bridges, whatever, can then collapse into the void.

It was an incredible sight, my Dad always said, to see a Lancaster getting off the runway carrying this enormous weight. The aircraft would invariably struggle and he always described its wings as “being like a huge crescent”, although somehow, the gallant aircraft always managed to get into the sky:

It was when he was with 617 Squadron in late 1944 and 1945 that Fred had seen Lancasters staggering into the air armed with these gigantic bombs. I did ask him in the latter stages of his life if he remembered any of the places he had bombed, but, alas, he was too old by then. He added that from his point of view, so many of the targets were names he had never heard before. And I suppose with “Mimoyecques” he does have a point!  The only target he did in fact remember were the U-boat pens in Brest. The crews were all told to make sure that they dropped their bombs well in the middle of each protective concrete roof. Otherwise, they would stand little chance of doing very much damage.

These extraordinary ten ton weapons were used operationally by 617 Squadron from March 14th 1945 onwards.

And finally, here’s one of those hypnotic spinner patterns beloved of the Luftwaffe. They always seem to appear in the newsreels from the early part of the war:

PS :  Forgive the weird colours in the previous photographs, but this entire floor was lit with special lighting to preserve the original Bomber Command matt black.

Here is some modern nose art from the 1970s. This was on the nose of a Handley Page Victor V-Bomber which had been preserved without the rest of the aircraft:

And finally, here is an English Electric Lightning fighter of the early sixties, proudly displaying its tiger badges. Firstly, on the nose itself, there are the two stylised versions either side of the RAF roundel:

And here is the  animal proper on the aircraft’s tail:

This Mach-2 fighter was operated by 74 Squadron and this is the Tiger scheme from the days when they were the RAF display team in 1962.

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by | May 11, 2023 · 6:16 am

Enigma 3

Last time, I had told the story of how the three Polish whizz kid mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Jery Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, had told the British and the French, everything they had discovered about Enigma.  The stories all came from the book by John Jackson which relates the story of Enigma, the German encrypting machine used throughout the entire Second World War…..

From these Polish beginnings, many, many aspects of the war were affected….. for the better. There was, however, a Golden Rule always in operation.

If the only information about a future event came from Enigma, then other sources had to be created as well. The rule resulted, for example, in a lot of photo-reconnaissance aircraft being sent to take photographs of a place already mentioned by the Enigma decrypt and which was going to be bombed  The pilot was always told to fly the aircraft around a lot of other nearby places as well, and to make it look as if the trip was completely routine. Here is a photo-reconnaissance Spitfire. They were usually entirely blue, although  I’m sure that they were also painted pink, a colour which was frequently nicknamed in North Africa especially, “Mountbatten pink”:

Mosquitoes were also used, especially for the longer trips:

If Enigma was the only source of a piece of information, of course, then any action taken by the British would prove to the Germans that the code had been cracked. For this reason, if there was only one source of information, and that was Enigma decrypts, then no action was taken.

The system worked so well that right until the very end of the war, the Germans continued to believe that Enigma was uncrackable and that only they had the secret of deciphering it.

In May 1941, Enigma was able to tell the Royal Navy the whereabouts of all the supply ships that were servicing the Bismarck. They also ascertained that the Bismarck was headed to France, not Germany, after a particular phase of the battle.  Here’s the German “Pocket Battleship of the Month”:

The Bismarck was one of my very few Airfix ships kits. That and HMS Tiger, a Royal Navy destroyer.  The way this piece of informnation from Enigma worked was that the ships carrying fuel and ammunition were all sunk, and so too was any other ship carrying supplies that added to the Bismarck’s capabilities as a ship destroyer.  Supply ships carrying records, newspapers, and a change of library books were all left alone, as were the ships carrying food and drink.

On November 1940, a major air-raid might have been opposed more thoroughly if the people at the top had used their brains and guessed which city in England was being referred to in a mildly encoded sequence of the names of cities about to be bombed back into the Stone Age………..

For example…..

“LOge” was “LOndon”

Do you see how it works? Nothing particularly Enigma-inspired at this point. The first two letters give it away.  So, what was “BRuder” ?

No, it wasn’t Brisbane, or Brighton & Hove or Bradford. It was…..

“BRistol”

So, now, what was “BIld”

No, it wasn’t Bicester, or Bishop Auckland or Bilston. It was…….

“BIrmingham”

So, a more difficult one, now. A city with its own name in German. And it’s actually easier than you might think. If the Air Vice Marshall had  taken his road atlas out of his bag, he would have realised that, of the 1, 165 cities, towns and villages of Great Britain, not a single one begins “Ko-“.

And no,  “Konchester” is not the German for “Manchester”, and “Korwich” is not the German for “Norwich”.

The correct answer is…..

“KOventry”

The  only city of the four with its own name in German. The city was flattened……

…..especially the cathedral……

In March-April 1941, Enigma revealed that Crete was to be invaded from the air, in the glider towing and troop carrying aircraft that the Germans had been assembling in Bulgaria and Greece for some time now. It was easy enough to pass off the information the British possessed as the product of the hundreds of spies in every city in this part of the world. The German paratroopers were called “Fallschirmjäger” and they wore helmets and smocks which were different from the uniform of the Wehrmacht……..

Preparations were made to give the German paratroopers a warm welcome, and as a result of the fierce resistance from both Allied forces and civilian Cretan locals, the invasion force suffered heavy casualties. Hitler then forbade further operations of this type for the rest of the war. Here they are in action……..

Overall, nearly 4,000 German paratroopers were killed.

In June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin had been told time and time again by the British, the Americans and the Japanese that this was going to happen but he thought it was all some vast capitalist plot to upset his non-aggression pact with that nice man Hitler.

For Churchill, it had all become much likelier as a forecast when a series of Enigma decrypts revealed that three Panzer divisions had been moved to the Polish frontier, next to the Russian held zone of Poland. Overall, Churchill thought that Stalin and his Sycophants were…..

“the most completely outwitted bunglers of the Second World War.”

In August 1941, the RAF and the Royal Navy were told all about the German supply ships which were  transporting whatever Rommel required for the war in North Africa across the Mediterranean. Such precision made it easy to target and sink the oil tankers, the petrol carriers and the ammunition/weapons ships, even if that meant letting through the odd ship carrying savoury sausages or bottles of schnapps or a further change of library books for everybody. Ultimately. by supplying this kind of information, Enigma would make victory in the Battle of El Alamein a great deal more likely.

Here’s the ship with the library books:

 

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by | May 5, 2023 · 6:16 am

My Dad’s cars (2)

My Dad’s first car was an Austin A40 Devon, in Connaught green, with the registration leters of LXJ 701…..

After the Austin A40 Devon, Fred had a 1959 Ford Anglia, registration number SNR 863, which he bought from a garage in nearby Ashby-de-la-Zouch. It was exactly like this:

I can still remember how the milometer on the Ford Anglia spun round as Fred drove sedately along, recording three or four miles for every mile travelled. This, of course, was because the seller had wound back the mileage clock to make the car seem less used than it really was. Here’s the crooked garage today. It has been replaced by an award winning architect’s supermarket:
When I was around eleven or twelve we used to go and visit a nearby toy shop, “Shellbrook Motors” which used to sell Dinky and Corgi die-cast models of cars and larger vehicles, Airfix and Frog aircraft kits, and Hornby model electric railways. By 2017, they had changed a little and were selling artists’ materials, although they did refuse to pay the signwriter’s bill on this occasion:
There were no Ford Anglia type problems of low level criminality and cheap plastic with Fred’s next car, an English Hillman Minx De Luxe, BLT 141B. This beautiful blue car with the metallic chrome side stripe was “the one” as far as Fred’s motoring career was concerned.
He had taken me to Derby one day, and we visited Peveril Garage, on Friar Gate, near the headquarters of the Derby County Supporters’ Club:

Fred told me not to mention anything whatsoever about the day to my mother, under any circumstances. Without consulting her at all, therefore, he bought the car, priced at £510, which was, in those days, a princely sum. Indeed, the price was such a total royal that, when my mother did eventually find out how much the car had cost, she would have had Fred beheaded if she could have organised it. The car was a rich pale blue, half way between sky blue and navy blue. Here is one today:

In later years, when he had problems with rust on one of the wings, Fred was to opt for a total respray, which allowed him to retain the same colour blue for the body, but to incorporate a black roof which added that extra, unique, little detail. Here it is, with James Bond driving it, back in the days when I was 28. I had always wanted a personalised number plate, and this was the time when I changed my name to “BLT 141B”:

This was also the day that I caught both Francisco Scaramanga and Auric Goldfinger hiding together on a building site:

It was in this car that Fred had what were probably the most outstanding motoring experiences of his life. I can still recall, for example, just how scared he was, and indeed, we all were, when he drove a circuit of the Alpine like road which ran around the Great Orme near Llandudno in North Wales.

Indeed, some thirty years later, I returned to look at this road for myself, to see whether it was quite the challenge that it had seemed in the late 1960s. And, of course, the circuit had been considerably watered down since then. All the sheer drops down to the sea had now been fenced off, and, most significant of all, perhaps, a narrow road which I remember as having been two way, had been limited nowadays to just one way traffic. Gentrified, I think the word is:

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by | April 29, 2023 · 6:16 am

Hendon objects (2)

As you may have seen from previous blog posts, in 2010, I went with my family to visit the RAF Museum at Hendon. It wasn’t all aircraft at Hendon, though. There were lots of non-flying objects and various pieces of metal rescued/liberated from aircraft as they awaited their turn in the scrapyard. And there were the medals of some very brave men……

Here is the Victoria Cross won posthumously by Ian Bazelgette, a Canadian from Calgary in Alberta and a pilot of No. 635 Squadron, Bomber Command, RAF:

Here’s the citation……

“When nearing the target his Lancaster came under heavy anti-aircraft fire. Both starboard engines were put out of action and serious fires broke out in the fuselage and the starboard main-plane. The bomb aimer was badly wounded.

As the deputy “master bomber” had already been shot down, the success of the attack depended on Squadron-Leader Bazalgette and this he knew. Despite the appalling conditions in his burning aircraft, he pressed on gallantly to the target, marking and bombing it accurately. That the attack was successful was due to his magnificent effort.

After the bombs had been dropped the Lancaster dived, practically out of control. By expert airmanship and great exertion Squadron-Leader Bazalgette regained control. But the port inner engine then failed and the whole of the starboard main-plane became a mass of flames.

Squadron-Leader Bazalgette fought bravely to bring his aircraft and crew to safety. The mid-upper gunner was overcome by fumes. Squadron-Leader Bazalgette then ordered those of his crew who were able to leave by parachute to do so. He remained at the controls and attempted the almost hopeless task of landing the crippled and blazing aircraft in a last effort to save the wounded bomb aimer and helpless air gunner. With superb skill, and taking great care to avoid a small French village nearby, he brought the aircraft down safely. Unfortunately it then exploded and this gallant officer and his two comrades perished.

His heroic sacrifice marked the climax of a long career of operations against the enemy. He always chose the more dangerous and exacting roles. His courage and devotion to duty were beyond praise.”

Ian Willoughby Bazalgette was one of the individual RAF airmen that my Dad, Fred, as a member of 20 OTU came into regular contact with. Bazalgette was reputed by some of his contemporaries to have been a concert pianist.  He apparently had the habit of flying when others either could not or would not, go up into the air. It was as if he just wanted to experience how rough the weather could be or was seeking the thrills of being aloft when conditions really were too dangerous for flying.

Eventually Bazalgette was to win the Victoria Cross. There were, however, those, Fred Knifton included, who thought that he was the kind of pilot who would end up by getting other people killed. How ironic that was, given the circumstances of his death!

All this, of course, contrasted very strongly with Fred’s more usual opinion of bomber pilots, a group of men to whom, after all, he had frequently had to entrust his life. Fred saw the best pilots as steady characters, who could always be trusted to push on slowly but surely, and to get the job done. They formed a strong contrast with the fighter pilots, who were far more extrovert characters, capable of great triumph, but also perhaps of great failure. Not so the pilot of the four engined bomber which slogged on through thick and thin like some very, very deadly old bus.

Research has revealed that Bazalgette, despite his own wishes to form a new Pathfinder unit, was stationed with 20 OTU at Lossiemouth from September 1943, as commander of ‘C’ Flight. He was not transferred away, to No. 635 (Pathfinder) Squadron, until April 20th 1944, when he became a flight commander with the rank of Squadron Leader.

Presumably then, Fred must have been present with 20 OTU at Lossiemouth at some point in this period of September 1943-April 1944. He could well have been at Lossiemouth both before and after Bazalgette’s time there.

Fred also spoke of “Pedlar Palmer” who, to give him his correct name, was Robert Anthony Maurice Palmer. He too, like Bazalgette, was with 20 OTU at Lossiemouth.

According to Fred’s own handwritten notes, discovered after his death in 2003, Palmer was posted to 20 OTU as a Flight Sergeant after finishing a tour of operations with 75 Squadron at Feltwell on February 13th 1941. He was then promoted to Pilot Officer in January 1942, while still at Lossiemouth.

Serving briefly alongside Bazalgette in ‘C’ Flight, he too wanted to return to operations, and his wish was granted on November 9th 1943, when he was transferred to the Pathfinder Force at RAF Warboys. He was then posted to 109 Squadron in January 1944 and eventually went on, after his promotion to Squadron Leader, to win a Distinguished Flying Cross on June 30th 1944, while flying a Mosquito. Six months later, on December 23rd 1944, Palmer attacked Cologne, this time in a Lancaster, and won a posthumous Victoria Cross. He was buried at Rheinberg.

And here is the badge of 103 Squadron where my Dad, Fred Knifton, served. In his time they were stationed at Elsham Wolds in north Lincolnshire. There are lots of squadron badges at Hendon:

And here’s our final picture, a photograph of a piece of nose art, on the nose belonging to a captured Argentinian  FMA IA 58 Pucará.

And from closer up:

Well, I got “Fuerza Aerea Argentina”. I have no idea what “Rescate” means, though. Just look how the Argentinian pilot had a Scottish surname.

 

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by | April 23, 2023 · 6:16 am

Enigma 2

Last time we finished with a really strange episode from the book which was the story of Enigma, the German encrypting machine…..

A rather large and peculiar parcel had been sent in obvious error to Warsaw’s main Post Office.  Nobody knew what it was. Nobody had a clue. When the Great Gift was opened, though, it was found to be a military grade Enigma machine, brand new, state of the art, and, as yet, unused.

So what did Anton Palluth, the Head of the Cipher Bureau, do with it? Well, we found out last time that the Poles had worked out for themselves that World War One codebreakers would not be clever enough to crack the new type of codes  being introduced at the time, that is to say, the early 1930s. They found three whizz kid mathematicians, all with first class degrees, at the top universities in Poland and gave them the job. Their names were Marian Rejewski, Jery Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski. As leader, Anton Palluth picked the man that he thought was the cleverest and the one likeliest to defeat Enigma. It was Marian Rejewski.

Marian was also given a file which contained everything that the Poles had already discovered about Enigma machines, both commercial, and military. Anton asked him to work on their brand new Christmas present n his spare time. After a reasonable interval, Marian finally cracked it. He knew how Enigma worked.  He knew how to programme it and he knew how to read the messages. This feat was called in the book by author John Jackson….

“a breakthrough in cryptography on a global scale”.

Marian deciphered his first Wehrmacht communication in January 1933. I could not resist saying that the first message he found was….

“Come home Machine No 476. All is forgiven.”

Here’s another shot of Marian Rejewski. He must have saved millions of lives with what he had discovered, and we all owe him a debt of gratitude that we cannot begin to repay.

At a meeting with the British and the French in January 1939, it was obvious that the two western countries knew very little indeed about Enigma. They had more or less no ideas whatsoever about how it worked.

On that occasion, the Poles kept their mouths firmly shut, but, in July 1939 at a second meeting in Warsaw, as German forces prepared to invade their country, the Poles realised that they had to come clean and to tell the British and the French everything that they had found out. There was nothing for them to lose. In actual fact, the Poles knew an enormous amount about Enigma. By September 1st 1939, the day the Germans violated the frontier, the Poles had intercepted and decrypted so many Wehrmacht messages that they know the exact identities of some 98% of the German units involved…..

The British and the French, who included a Professor of Mathematics from Cambridge, were dumbfounded to find out that the Poles had cracked Enigma.

They were dumbfounded and then, quite simply embarrassed at their own stupidity, when they asked the Poles for one particular thing that had totally beaten their cryptographers for months, namely……

“How are the wirings inside the Entry Disc set up? We have made no progress whatsoever on this one!”

And the Poles replied:

  “Well, the wiring sequence is “A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-

and so on ”.

These Polish secrets saved the British at least twelve months’ work on Enigma. This was because the first Enigma machine was not captured in Norway until May 1940. Until then, any progress whatsoever would have been impossible for the British and the French.

Later in the war, the three Poles, Marian Rejewski, Jery Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, came to England to help with code breaking. They were never allowed to work at Bletchley Park. I cannot imagine why.

In October 1944, Marian Rejewski asked for the return of the Enigma machine they had given to the British in 1939. The British refused.

Marian also asked the British to share what they had discovered about German codes since 1939.  They refused that too.

Marian also asked that the British should share any intercepted material with the Poles so that they could decipher it and, presumably, help the war effort. This too was refused.

Conceivably, these slaps in the face were connected with the celebrations in London at the end of the war in 1946. The British Labour government failed to invite the Polish forces in exile who had fought under British High Command to participate in the Victory Parade which celebrated the end of the war in Europe. A number of MPs including Winston Churchill protested against the decision, which was described as an affront to the Polish war effort as well as an immoral concession to communist power, namely Stalin and the USSR.

The things we did to make jovial Joe Stalin feel better!! Here’s a bit of the celebrations:

 

There were no Soviet forces invited to participate either.

 

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by | April 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

My Dad’s cars (1)

My Dad, Fred’s, first car was a Connaught green Austin A40 Devon, registration number “LXJ 701” (“seven-nought-one”). This car had been acquired in the early 1950s with the help of his in-laws, as a bargain for the newlyweds. It had previously belonged to the owner of a cement factory near Manchester, and for this reason, it proved almost impossible ever to get a good shine on the vehicle, as the painted surface had absorbed such a huge quantity of cement dust through being parked all day long in the office car park at the works. Here is a car of the correct colour, although it has been modified for use as a taxi:

I really wish my Dad had bought an A40 of this revolting bright blue. And I’m an absolute sucker for white wall tyres:

Fred never seemed to use the car an enormous amount, but, like so many people during this era, we often went out for a drive as a family on a nice Sunday afternoon. I remember that on occasion we used to go out on trips towards Repton, but I cannot really recollect anywhere else that we went, although Fred assured me in later years that we had visited destinations as far afield as the church at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Calke, Staunton Harold and Swarkestone Bridge:

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The one thing I do recall about these trips, though, was parking the car one day in a sunlit grassy field, and leaving all the doors wide open to let in the fresh air. The car had rich brown all leather upholstery, sewn lengthways in distinctive style:

I must have been a very small boy indeed, when Fred had a crash in this car. We were out somewhere in the lanes around the village of Smisby, perhaps somewhere towards Pistern Hills, and I remember that at a T-junction, we failed to turn, but just drove straight on, ploughing into the bank below the hedge at the far side of the road. The Orange Arrow points at Pistern Hills where this accident may have taken place:

In the days before seat belts, I was projected forward, and the ignition key somehow smashed into my forehead between my eyes. I certainly was not taken to hospital with what in the 1950s was just a minor injury, but instead, I was transported to the nearest country cottage at the side of the road. All that I can recall now is sitting at a wooden table in an almost bare kitchen. A woman came in. She was wearing a white blouse and a voluminous long skirt. She was plump and reached up to the wooden shelf which ran all the way around the room, some six feet off the ground, because she had to stretch to reach the tin she was after. She passed it to me. It was a tin of biscuits and she let me eat a few. I do not remember any more. I still have the scar on my forehead.

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by | April 11, 2023 · 6:16 am

What would you do ? (18) The Solution

“What would you do ?” used to figure on the cover of a boys’ comic called “Boys’ World”. This was a publication, obviously, aimed at boys, and first appeared on January 26th 1963. There were 89 issues before the comic was merged with Eagle in 1964. The last issue of “Boys’ World” came out on October 3rd 1964.

I used to buy “Boys’ World”, and this was mainly for the front cover which always featured a kind of puzzle. It was called “What would you do ?” and was based on somebody being in what Ned Flanders would call “A dilly of a pickle”. Here’s the situation:

And the problem was:

The correct solution was always given inside the comic, in this case on page 2.  Here it is :

And just in case you wondered, here is the whole of pages 2 and 3 :

And what about the clue? Well, if you look very carefully at the front cover, there are large quantities of lemons hanging on the trees, both behind the Orange Box, and to the right of the sentry tower.

In actual fact, this is a rather strange clue to have. Hardly any German POW camps  were in locations where lemon trees grew. For example, the POW camps of Italy were staffed by Italian troops  until September 1943 when they surrendered. Many Allied prisoners took the opportunity to leave their camp and walk south to the Allied lines. The vast majority, though, obeyed their orders from London which said, basically,  “Sit tight and we will come and get you.” Within a couple of weeks, the Germans arrived and moved every single Allied prisoner to Germany, many of them as slave labour. Some of them finished up in a POW camp from where they had a grandstand view of the daily workings of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. You can read all about this in “Spectator in Hell” by Colin Rushton. Many of these spectators were Nottingham men, captured when the Sherwood Foresters surrendered at Tobruk. In my researches, I discovered that one of them may have been John Arthur Finking, the son of a factory manager from 5 Selby Road in West Bridgford, and an Old Boy of Nottingham High School. John would be murdered by his captors as they marched all of their prisoners westwards to escape the Red Army in the snowy depths of the savage 1944-1945 winter.

Finally, there were no POW camps in the Balkans as far as I am aware or in Greece. This was because any escaper might well have been helped by the local people.

The main  criteria for the location of POW camps was (1) in Germany, surrounded by hostile civilians (2) if possible, on sandy or very light soil, so tunneling was difficult. This latter point was the reason that so many camps were located in what is now Poland, where the pine forests were gigantic, difficult to navigate in and devoid of any sympathetic locals, as those areas were then part of Germany. The soil was also extremely sandy. Finally, all of the POWcamps were as far to the east as possible, so that anybody who did escape had a very long walk to the west, and therefore a much greater chance of being spotted.

 

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