What became of RAF special Fortresses following WW2 ?

[28ZComeback]

Hi chaps, 

 

Following WW2, what became of RAF elint Fortresses in Group 100?  Were they scrapped, or did they soldier on in a reserve role? Thank you in advance. 

Edited December 21, 2019 by 28ZComeback

[Work In Progress]

The whole Group was disbanded in December 1945, and 223 Squadron which ran the Fortresses was disbanded earlier in July 1945. Like all Lend Lease aircraft they had to be either destroyed or paid for at the end of hostilities so they were destroyed by the RAF. 

[sloegin57]

I am not sure what date instructions were given for British military aircraft to adopt underwing serials post WWII, but at least one of 100 Groups B-17's carried them in white underwing and also in white on the rear fuselage.  It was photographed in what appears to be a dump obviously withdrawn from use.  Whether or not it actually flew with the serials applied, I know not :-

 

 

Apologies for the poor photo, the original is not exactly in the "best of health" !!

 

HTH

 

Dennis

 

 

[Scimitar F1]

I have always wondered why there appear to be so few photos of the scrapping and storage post WW2. It must have been a huge effort given the number of airframes etc and yet virtually nothing apart from rumours of burial sites and mine shafts full of Merlins.

 

Will

 

 

Edited December 22, 2019 by Scimitar F1

[stever219]

There are some, but not many.  Film was in short supply for non-essential use and cameras were far more expensive and generally less handy comparatively than they are now.  Scrapyard workers, as opposed to owners, weren’t very well paid and were there to do a job so taking a camera to work would be somewhere between inconvenient and a sacking offence.  Likewise service personnel would be actively discouraged from taking photographs, “official secrets” and all that.  

 

Obviously some photos were taken, for example some of the 462 Squadron Halifaxes amongst others at Rafcliffe near York, but there aren’t many.  It’s also quite probable that the people who took photos did so for their own personal use and never considered that seventy-odd years later people might find them interesting so, when the photographers inevitably passed on, it’s a near racing certainty that their surreptitiously taken and carefully hoarded images simply wound up in the dustbin.

[28ZComeback]

Just as an aside my father was on the island of Cyprus as a civilian 1940-1945. After the war he located a junkyard full Luftwaffe  and Regia Aeronautica planes.  Stukas, Ju-52’s and SM-79’s. Thank you all who answered. A few weeks later they were gone.

[torqueofthedevil]

3 hours ago, stever219 said:

There are some, but not many.  Film was in short supply for non-essential use and cameras were far more expensive and generally less handy comparatively than they are now.  Scrapyard workers, as opposed to owners, weren’t very well paid and were there to do a job so taking a camera to work would be somewhere between inconvenient and a sacking offence.  Likewise service personnel would be actively discouraged from taking photographs, “official secrets” and all that.  

 

Obviously some photos were taken, for example some of the 462 Squadron Halifaxes amongst others at Rafcliffe near York, but there aren’t many.  It’s also quite probable that the people who took photos did so for their own personal use and never considered that seventy-odd years later people might find them interesting so, when the photographers inevitably passed on, it’s a near racing certainty that their surreptitiously taken and carefully hoarded images simply wound up in the dustbin.

The other thing to bear in mind is that after years of war and all the associated deprivations, scrapping all those aircraft was just another tedious task to be completed before life could get back to normal. Delaying the task to take lots of photos would have seemed a strange idea!

[Troy Smith]

4 hours ago, stever219 said:

 It’s also quite probable that the people who took photos did so for their own personal use and never considered that seventy-odd years later people might find them interesting so, when the photographers inevitably passed on, it’s a near racing certainty that their surreptitiously taken and carefully hoarded images simply wound up in the dustbin.

or on ebay.de..... 

the amount of pics from private German sources that turn up has greatly expanded many aspects of camo and markings as result.   But the amount that have been dumped is a real shame. less likey to happen now though i think.

[Graham Boak]

The Germans were much more photo-minded before WW2, and the Luftwaffe does not seem to have been as security-minded as the RAF.  Which was no doubt quite a boon to our intelligence services.

[modelldoc]

Martin Streetly wrote in his book "The aircraft of the 100 Group" on page 64:

 

"...The end of the European war did not terminate the B-17s' career as an RCM platform with the RAF. During August 1945, 192 Squadron was disbanded and a number of its crews and Halifax aircraft became the nucleus of the Radio Warfare Establishment's  (RWE) Flying and Servicing  Wing at Foulsham.

,,,An advanced party of the Flying Wing arrived at the RWE's permanent base, Watton, during September and on October 6 1945, its first aircraft arrived comprising fifteen Halifaxes, ten Mosquitos, three B-17s anOxford and all things, a Ju-88! (Possibly Ju-88G-6, Wk. Nr. 622983, coded 4R+RB of Nachtjagdgeschgwader 2. Captured at Schleswig ...)

...By the middle of the month, the RWE haf a strength of... eight B-17S (coded U3-A  to U3-N).

The RWE continued its work from Watton and Shepards Grove until late 1946 when it became Cenbtral Signals Establishment.

...The only identified RWE "Fort" is B-17G-75-VE, serial KJ117 / 44-8620, which carried the code "U3-E". How long the RWE continued to operate its B-17s is uncertain, but "Easy" was still on the unit's establishment on March 11, 1946."

 

modelldoc

     

[sloegin57]

17 hours ago, modelldoc said:

Martin Streetly wrote in his book "The aircraft of the 100 Group" on page 64:

 

...The only identified RWE "Fort" is B-17G-75-VE, serial KJ117 / 44-8620, which carried the code "U3-E". How long the RWE continued to operate its B-17s is uncertain, but "Easy" was still on the unit's establishment on March 11, 1946."

 

modelldoc

     

mungo1974 posted this on "a web site" a few years ago :-

HTH

 

Dennis

[Julien]

With regards to lease-lend aircraft, a friend of mines dad was on carriers at the end of WWII in the far east and they just pushed their lease lend stuff over the side.

 

Pretty sad really, but better than us having to pay for them.

[Tired&Emotional]

On 12/22/2019 at 10:35 AM, Scimitar F1 said:

I have always wondered why there appear to be so few photos of the scrapping and storage post WW2. It must have been a huge effort given the number of airframes etc and yet virtually nothing apart from rumours of burial sites and mine shafts full of Merlins.

 

Will

 

 

Speaking from my (much more recent) experience around aeroplanes, it's just a job. I didn't take many pictures of the stuff I worked on because I saw it every day and wasn't really worth wasting my time on at that point. I suspect scrapping them was pretty much the same deal.

[28ZComeback]

See the film, “The Best Years of Our Lives” some time.  One of the greatest war films of all time, and the key scene takes place in a plane graveyard.

[NorthBayKid]

[busnproplinerfan]

Photos are the best way to preserve things, they take up little space compared to an actual aircraft. From what I understand, people weren't into the future much then. I work at a bus company washing buses and took pictures for the last 16 years I've been there, lots of the fleet are gone now. Unfortunately, my old computer crashed and took just that folder with it and I didn't know about data recovery then. So much for that.

[e8n2]

11 hours ago, busnproplinerfan said:

Photos are the best way to preserve things, they take up little space compared to an actual aircraft. From what I understand, people weren't into the future much then. I work at a bus company washing buses and took pictures for the last 16 years I've been there, lots of the fleet are gone now. Unfortunately, my old computer crashed and took just that folder with it and I didn't know about data recovery then. So much for that.

Another precaution to take is copy the pictures onto one or more other hard/flash drives.  I have a directory called "Modeling Files" with pictures and drawings of aircraft and ships as well as a number of different publications for reference materials.  I have copies of this directory on all three computers as well as on my cell phone and tablet.  The chances of everything going bad at once is slight to say the least!

Later,

Dave

[busnproplinerfan]

7 minutes ago, e8n2 said:

Another precaution to take is copy the pictures onto one or more other hard/flash drives.  I have a directory called "Modeling Files" with pictures and drawings of aircraft and ships as well as a number of different publications for reference materials.  I have copies of this directory on all three computers as well as on my cell phone and tablet.  The chances of everything going bad at once is slight to say the least!

Later,

Dave

Thanks. I have an external hard drive now and put most of my stuff on it. I just don't know how to add new stuff in mass without recopying the same stuff over. Otherwise I have to go through each picture. Just have to stay on top of it I guess. I also have a second matching external H.D. but not sure how to back up onto it also and futurely copy more stuff.

[NorthBayKid]

10 hours ago, e8n2 said:

Another precaution to take is copy the pictures onto one or more other hard/flash drives.  

 

After a devastating disaster a few years ago, I now have three complete backups of my hard drive.  I have one on-site external drive attached to my wireless router, another stand alone hard drive, and off-site backup via www.crashplan.com.  I will *never* lose data again.  Having the two on-site backups eliminates the possibility of data ransom attacks, even in the unlikely event of someone hacking my off-site backup.  I use the Mac OS’s Time Machine backup app, which works flawlessly.

[e8n2]

On 12/24/2019 at 10:47 PM, busnproplinerfan said:

Thanks. I have an external hard drive now and put most of my stuff on it. I just don't know how to add new stuff in mass without recopying the same stuff over. Otherwise I have to go through each picture. Just have to stay on top of it I guess. I also have a second matching external H.D. but not sure how to back up onto it also and futurely copy more stuff.

Keep the new stuff separate until you are ready to drag and drop into your storage directory.  Sometimes you will find it is easier to go through and make sure everything you want is in the one directory and then delete everything in the other storage directories and copy from the master directory into the other one.  Sounds sort of confusing huh?  One time I had added some new pictures to the aircraft photos directory on my secondary desktop computer.  I copied that directory to a flash drive and then tried to just overwrite everything in the same directory on my laptop.  Did not work out like I thought it would with the laptop now showing more photos that what there should have been.  I then deleted all the pictures in the laptop's aircraft photos directory and selected all photos (Cntrl A in windows), then Cntrl C to copy them, and finally Cntrl V and drag and drop to put them into the laptop's aircraft photos directory. 

Later,

Dave

Edited December 27, 2019 by e8n2
Corrected a dumb a$$ mistake of mine, d'oh!

[busnproplinerfan]

49 minutes ago, e8n2 said:

Keep the new stuff separate until you are ready to drag and drop into your storage directory.  Sometimes you will find it is easier to go through and make sure everything you want is in the one directory and then delete everything in the other storage directories and copy from the master directory into the other one.  Sounds sort of confusing huh?  One time I had added some new pictures to the aircraft photos directory on my secondary desktop computer.  I copied that directory to a flash drive and then tried to just overwrite everything in the same directory on my laptop.  Did not work out like I thought it would with the laptop now showing more photos that what there should have been.  I then deleted all the pictures in the laptop's aircraft photos directory and selected all photos (Cntrl A in windows), then Cntrl C to copy them, and finally Cntrl V to put them into the laptop's aircraft photos directory. 

Later,

Dave

Never tried cntrl A,neat feature. I have to sit down with this and do some updating. Thanks.

[Clifton]

On 12/24/2019 at 12:43 PM, 28ZComeback said:

See the film, “The Best Years of Our Lives” some time.  One of the greatest war films of all time, and the key scene takes place in a plane graveyard.

That's a great, great film.  It won a few Oscars, if I remember correctly.

[e8n2]

23 hours ago, busnproplinerfan said:

Never tried cntrl A,neat feature. I have to sit down with this and do some updating. Thanks.

One little update.  Forget about Cntrl C and Cntrl V.  Go Cntrl A and then drag and drop the files where ever it is that you want to copy them to.  I reminded myself of that this morning as I was doing a drag and drop on a bunch of files and then called myself a dumb a$$ for the Cntrl C and V part.  Sorry about that.  Hope it works out for you.

Later,

Dave

Edited December 27, 2019 by e8n2

[busnproplinerfan]

Thanks, I hope we didn't hijack this topi to much from the B-17 question first asked.

[593jones]

On ‎12‎/‎24‎/‎2019 at 6:43 PM, 28ZComeback said:

See the film, “The Best Years of Our Lives” some time.  One of the greatest war films of all time, and the key scene takes place in a plane graveyard.

This would be the scene, yes?