Gaëtan Marie

Hello. I've come upon a photo of Spitfire VIII JF716 with what is to me an unknown antenna on the rear fuselage, slightly forward and above of the serial. The photo can be seen here : https://allspitfirepilots.org/aircraft/9055 (I'm not posting it here for copyright reasons) Does anyone know what this antenna is ?

Hello Christian. I have very little skill in modelling so I only focus on illustrations ! // Bonjour Christian. Je n'ai presque aucun talent de maquettiste, donc je me contente des illustrations ! Thanks a lot, Graham ! I don't have a copy of Gifts of War so this is very useful.

Hello, I've been trying to gather photos of white-stripped Operation Rutter aircraft these past few days, and I haven't been able to find much. So far these are the ones I've been able to confirm FWIW (via photos only - no written reports) : * Spitfire Mk Vb AA853 WX-C of Wg Cdr Stefan Witorzeńć, CO 2nd Polish Fighter Wing. (NB: this aircraft may actually not have been used by Witorzeńć) * Spitfire Mk Vb BM579 FN-B of Rolfe Arne Berg, No 331 (Norwegian) Squadron. * Spitfire Mk Vb BM324 “Tomana” GW-S, of Wg Cdr Dupérier, No 340 (Free French) Squadron. * Spitfire Mk Vb "Général de Gaulle", unknown serial, GW-Y, Cne Fayolle, No 340 (Free French) Squadron. * Hurricane "Mauritius VII", unknown serial, XP-?, No 174 Squadron. * Hurricane, unknown serial, XP-N, No 174 Squadron. * Hurricane, unknown serial, XP-A, No 174 Squadron. * At least four Spitfire Mk V of 310 Squadron (see note 1) * Spitfire Mk Vb AR336, UZ-O, No 306 Squadron (1) One source indicates EP637 NN-K received the stripes but EP637 did not arrive at No 310 Squadron before 9 August 1942, too late for Operation Rutter. Some sources state that these were not actually linked to Operation Rutter. Does anyone have more info about this possibility ? If you have any extra photos, I'd be very interested in them. From what I can see, there were several "variations" in how the stripes were painted. My original FB post on the topic is here, with pictures : https://www.facebook.com/gaetan.marie.aviation.profiles/posts/2620582644653085

Hi all, I'm Gaëtan Marie, author of one of the profiles shown here. I'm joining the conversation very late, but I thought I should indicate that I did use the post-crash photo of KM121 that SteveBrooking mentions as reference for the profile. I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to post the reference photo. It is indeed not of very good quality, although the copy I was provided has a decent size. Steve has a point about the size of the letters: I probably made them a bit larger than they should be. I'll have to look into it some more. All profiles should always be taken with a grain of salt as they are very often an interpretation, unless there is very good documentation. Interpreting B&W photos is always a challenge notably. I do my best to be as accurate as possible, but I am not immune to bad interpretation, lack of knowledge or simple omissions ! :-( Based on the photo, what I can say is that the W/C pennant is almost certainly there. It's faint and partly covered in oil but one can see the triangular shape and inner details of the pennant. If it's not a WC pennant, I have no idea what it might be, but it would be extremely similar so the pennant is the only things that makes sense to me. The canopy is definitely painted and not NMF. For the rest of the details, I'm less sure. There might even be some nose art/badge between the exhaust stacks and the spinner, but the location, surrounding damage and poor general quality of the photo make it impossible to determine. I hope this helps, short of being able to share the version of the photo I was provided.