Between June 1943 and May 1945, one Mosquito B. Mk. IX emerged on VE Day as the survivor of 213 sorties over occupied Europe: more operations than any other allied bomber during the Second World War. A celebrity in her own right LR503, or F for Freddie as she became affectionately known, served with distinction […]
Tag: 105 Squadron
The Wartime Diaries of a Mosquito Navigator – Part 1
My uncle, John C. Pickford, served in the RAF from 1941 until 1946. Between October 1944 and the end of the war in May 1945, he flew about fifty missions over Germany as a Navigator/Bomb Aimer in Mosquitos. With the aid of his flight logs and entries in Operations Record books, over the coming months I […]
30th January 1943 – Mossies put the kibosh on Herrs Göering & Goebbels
30th January 1943 was the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power. To coincide with the commemorative rallies, the first daylight raids over Berlin took place on that day when Mosquitoes carried out two attacks timed to disrupt speeches being delivered by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göering and Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s Propaganda Minister, at the main broadcasting […]