Mark Postlethwaite

Our Dambuster Lancaster book is now 6 years old, and sold out. It was published with the best available references at the time but we mainly focused on illustrating the Type 464 mods. Rather than reprinting the book we've decided to publish a new 'modeller's guide to the Type 464' with our Lancaster expert Peter Allam as author. Pete knows more than most about the standard internal fit of a 1943 ED series Lancaster and so has advised Piotr on what bits of background kit to change or add. I've just received Piotr's renders and Pete's text so if all goes well the book could be published within a month or two.

I think Andrew's theory about them being Station Keeping lamps is a good one. Looking through our Wingleader Archive, they appear and disappear around the same timeframe as Spitfire Station Keeping lamps. Here's a close up of one of our images of Z2521 with the sun at just the right angle to illuminate what would appear to be a lamp lens. The lamps were designed to illuminate the wings so pointing forwards makes sense, as does the forward shroud seen on the 85 Squadron panel.

I don't think any of us at Wingleader said it was yellow at any time. The diarist for 1 (RCAF) Sqn called it orange and we illustrated it as orange on our BofBCA 14 cover.

In our Wingleader Photo Archive Vol 18 we carry a photo of DS771 which has windows in the rear section but not in the centre section, suggesting that the change happened around the time it was on the production line. As far as I remember, the LL series MkIIs were very late and the photos we have of them show no fuselage windows.

The discrepancy between the lighter tones on the fin and the darker tones on the fuselage can be seen on most Hurricane photos. It's simply down to angles of light and the presence of exhaust staining in that fuselage area. The photo was a copy print so sometimes the edges are slightly lighter than the centre of the photo but there's not much evidence of that here.

Glad to hear people enjoyed our film! Just to clarify, the evidence for this stripe is base upon the photo, (dark grey band) combined with the Canadian ORB entry which mentions ORANGE bands being carried. The word orange is the subjective description of the ORB writer and could cover anything from the warm yellow of the roundel to the Tango man. It is impossible to be sure what exact shade it was but bearing in mind 303 was asked to paint a red band, it would suggest that orange was a consciously specified colour to be mixed rather than a warm yellow. Of course this new evidence does invite the question as to whether any other squadrons took part in the trial, but as 229 was in the process of replacing 1 Sqn at the time at Northolt, it's probably unlikely.

Our film is now live where hopefully we prove the case for the band being orange! Not sure if the link will work but here it is;

We're launching our Wingleader films Youtube channel later today and our first subject is this rare photo which we think shows an orange band around a 401 Sqn Hurricane in the Battle of Britain. See what you think!

I think what we're seeing here is a new grey panel where an erk was charged with painting the green section and carefully lined up his edges with the upper cowling and then roughly made up the rest from memory!

We have five photos of the P4/34 in our Wingleader Archive library that we're currently constructing. I've dragged them into a Free Samples folder so that you can gain access to them. Simply click on the image to view and then select the size you want, and then click the download button top right. https://wingleaderarchive.com/index?/category/975-free_samples

As Commissioning Editor, and occasional author for this series I'm very happy to see the positive comments here. We are indeed trying to attract the very best people on any given subject to cover 'their' aircraft, so to have Chris Thomas on Typhoons, Ian Thirsk on Mosquitos and Jonathan Falconer on Stirlings was and is a real privilege. (And much easier from an editing point of view too!) The only query I remember on the He111 book was someone who confidently stated that the RAF Investigator who had actually stood in the field next to the wrecked Heinkel in question had made a mistake by recording a code letter and colour that clearly couldn't have been there according the Luftwaffe coding rules. I politely pointed out that the investigator had also noted that all codes were obliterated and that Luftwaffe coding 'rules' were actually very lax in many ways and shouldn't be relied upon. So if that's a 'we know what we are talking about' response then yes I'll stand by that, having published 12 volumes of the Luftwaffe Crash Archive we do know a bit about the subject! As a sidenote, we aim to cover pretty much every RAF WW2 type in the series (as well as other on RAF types) so if anyone on here fancies taking up one of their favourite subjects then we'd be happy to hear from you. We usually have the photos, we just need the in-depth expertise on any given subject. Just send me a direct message here or via our website.

I think the prop tip is a red (or yellow!) herring. The lighter colour is scraped metal and the only remaining bit of yellow in the centre is actually quite dark, so I think Jochen is right, it's orthochromatic film, not a filter.

This is definitely an Me410. The only reason that the tailplane looks 'squared' is that the elevators are either missing or fully pitched up. If you look closely there is a considerable curve to the leading edge. If the elevators were in a level position you would see the curved tips more clearly.

I think the roundels are there, but hidden by a fiendish combination of faded paint, reflection and uneven tones. The biggest clue is on the port wing where the green wingtip camo suddenly stops, exactly where the roundel would be. The red and blue in the fuselage roundel are pretty similar in tone so fade them a bit and stick a filter on the lens, as us b/w photographers used to do, and you'd have a pretty convincingly disappeared roundel!

I think the answers to the questions are; No stencils underneath. When repainted from the black and white scheme, stencils were hardly ever retained as they were at war and the groundcrew knew where to trestle etc. Yellow spinner, (possibly a slightly different mix, with less red) the side view print is lighter on the left hand side and also the surface of the spinner is angled more towards the sun due to the curve, than the roundel. The second picture backs this up as we're pretty certain it's the same aircraft. Being a stop-gap replacement, P9386 was only with 19 Squadron for a week from 4 September 1940. Brian Lane only flew it twice in combat on 7 and 11 September before the squadron got newer X series Spitfires. So the photo was most likely taken during that period. The widespread use of yellow noses on Me 109s only started on 7 September so any reaction to that would have been after 7 September. Of course, the groundcrew may well have been in the process of repainting the spinner back to black just after the photos were taken, who knows!

From what I remember when working on our Me109 Units part 2 in the WPA series, the Second Gruppe of JG52 didn't carry the horizontal bar, hence the confusion, but it was definitely 5/JG52.

Like anything Lancaster based, there's no definitive answer, but the question should really be 'when was the port blister removed' as early models had both and later models had the port blister (pilot's side) removed. The possible reason for this was with the fitting of H2S equipment, made use of the blister very difficult.

Bill Reid VC's Lancaster LM360 had windows, just Google the serial number and you'll find photos of it the morning after it crash landed. The reason LM287 doesn't is that the LL740 -LM756 batch was delivered out of sequence with LM301 the first to be delivered in November 1942. As we point out in our Wingleader Photo Archive book on the Lancaster, nearly all mods and deletions were introduced at a certain time and not at a certain serial number. In early 1943 there were four different batches of Lancasters being built, including some W serialled Lancs, so don't try to identify window deletion by serial numbers!

If you look at the many photos of P9450 on a test flight, around April 1940, it doesn't appear to have the header tank, so 600th production aircraft seems to be in the right area.

'Jack' Storey was a remarkable globetrotter, even in later life. Several years ago he toured Europe and stayed with us in Poland for a few days. I asked him about the spinners and he confirmed that Z5659, which I had painted for the cover of Osprey's Hurricane Aces 1941-45 book, also had the plum coloured spinner.

Internal armoured windscreens were fitted to some RAF Hurricanes in spring 1940 possibly a bit earlier. There are plenty of photos that show this, including a fair few in our recent Hurricane MkI book.

I think the answer to the windscreen question is all about timing. This looks like P2539, so one of the first Gloster built Hurricanes, delivered around November 1939 which is before the N series were delivered and around the time the final L series aircraft were in production. Mods weren't introduced by serial number, they were introduced by date, and some were incorporated quicker than others between factories. So for example, the internal windscreen could have been delivered to Hawkers in October 1939 to fit the last 100 L series aircraft, but in November to Glosters which missed, for example, the first 20 aircraft on their production line.

The light coloured turret internal frames seen on early Lancasters were aluminium, not interior green. Hope that helps! Mark P

We have a couple of high res images of this Beaufighter in the ww2images.com library and it's definitely R2069. We also have R2081 (uncoded).

The official report into fitting rear armour into Hurricanes states that it could be fitted into a two bladed prop aircraft if the flare tube was removed. It did however recommend that the DH or Rotol prop be fitted as a preferred alternative as their extra weight shifted the CofG back within acceptable limits. There also another report somewhere that mentions that all Hurricanes in France have been fitted with back armour, so I would presume from that that the remaining 2 bladers did have the armour fitted and the flare tube removed.