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Halifax II: retrofitting enlarged tailfin


AWFK10

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I know this is a long shot but does anyone know the date at which the modification (Mod 814) to install the enlarged tail fin was embodied on Merlin-engined Halifaxes at RAF Elvington?


I’ld like to model a particular 77 Sqn aircraft at the date of its loss on 21/22 January 1944. It’s LW233, a B.II Srs 1a from the final batch of Merlin-engined Halifaxes built by English Electric. It was completed after 25 August 1943 and I know from the 77 Sqn ORB that it arrived on the squadron between 7 and 15 September. While I don’t have a photo, there are two in-service shots of LW235 in “From Hull, Hell and Halifax” taken before its loss on 20 October, which give a clear picture of the configuration in which LW233 must also have been completed. Though these are very late production aircraft, I was surprised to see that LW235 still had the original, triangular fins, as I‘ld have expected a Halifax produced at this late date to have been built with the larger ones.


The question is, were they retrofitted to LW233 by late January 1944? From Ken Merrick’s Halifax book, this would have been done by a travelling working party from 13 MU which modified “225 Mk II and Mk V Halifaxes in the remarkably short period of three and a half months” but he doesn’t say when the programme started. He continues “Within the next two months they modified a further 277 and in March 1944 moved to St Davids where they modified a further 60 Halifaxes for Coastal Command”. So, reckoning back from that date, it sounds as if the programme of work in Bomber Command must have started in Sep/Oct 1943 and run on till Feb/Mar 1944. I think I have most of the published Halifax references with the exception of the Halifax File but not surprisingly none of them throw any light on this. 


I had hoped that the 77 Sqn ORB or Summary of Events might have recorded the Squadron’s aircraft having the mod carried out (very little operational flying took place in December and January, so there would certainly have been an opportunity) but no, nor do the 13 MU records seem to be available online. There were some 17 Halifax squadrons in Bomber Command at the end of 1943. 77 Sqn, at any rate, had at least 25 aircraft on strength so the front line force could have been around 425. The majority of these would have required modification, given that Halifaxes were still coming off the production line with the smaller fin as late as the end of August, so going by Merrick’s figures thee would still have been a significant number of unmodified aircraft in front line squadrons as of late Jan 44.


The reason for my interest in this particular aircraft is that a gentleman named Donald Tittley gave a talk to my junior school class nearly 50 years ago in which he told us, among other things, that he’d flown with Bomber Command and had been a POW. It occurred to me a couple of months ago that I might be able to find out a bit more online and I was more successful than I’d hoped for as I came across this account.  The ORB revealed that Z Zebra was LW233, which was initially flown by another crew before F/O Garlette’s inherited it. As well as the Magdeburg raid on which it was shot down, they also flew operations in it against Berlin and Frankfurt.
 

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