BG - Article in July 2008 edition of “Britain at War” magazine
A review written by Matthew Smaldon relating to the websites launch in July. This highlighting the beginning of our online presence.
A review written by Matthew Smaldon relating to the websites launch in July. This highlighting the beginning of our online presence.
This week we have managed to have an appeal granted by a newspaper on the 8th May which is local to the last known address of W/O. Aleksander Chudek as French researchers recently contacted us that they had found the grave which they are sure belongs to this fighter pilot.
Massive media coverage of the event On the 30th June. Further pictures being prepared for the website. Pictures kindly supplied direct to us by Laurent Taveau from France who has been one of the main organisers of this splendid memorial plaque.
Relatives of Fl/Sgt. Bernard Buxton contact the Aircrew Remembrance Society on the 1st June for memorial plaque.
The website now finished being converted in order to make all the pages to be translated into over 23 languages on the 29th July, all text now searchable and expandable for people with sight difficulties.
We recently supplied small memorial plaques on the 23rd July, for a relative to place at the crash site in France of a Halifax in 1944.
A.R.Society will shortly be contacting Norwich City Council to establish why the Norwich City War Memorial gardens are still in a state of neglect and is in fact cordoned off to visitors! Despite planning permission being gained and finance made available, 28th July.
Relatives found and contacted in Germany on the 22nd July, regarding lost Luftwaffe crew in England - further details and a full article to follow.
A.R. Society linked up with a researcher making a complete record of 408 Squadron losses during WW2 - being prepared On the 30th July. Details to follow.
Aircrew Remembrance Society are pleased to now be working with a specialist researcher in Russia as of the 10th July, further information will now be made available to us.
18,000 Luftwaffe records have now been entered on the website as of the 15th August — a remarkable achievement and one that will assist us to make our Society the leader in the field. (This superb data base has taken 14 years to compile) We would like to express our gratitude to Tom Kracker for the information and also to Techie Services, Norwich, England for the web conversion work. This work will be continually updated as within 2 days of this being on our website we have had no less than 22 new pieces of information provided by our readers! We must insist that these files are not copied and the files are now subject to a ©.
Alec Chudek family contact Aircrew Remembrance Society on the 12th August. We are hoping to be able to re-unite the English family with the Polish family very shortly. Details follow.
German Police contact A.R.S on the 10th August to assist in identification of Lancaster aircraft and remains of crew.
New section added on the 23rd August - Renaming of lakes in Alberta, Canada added.
Relative of former German Luftwaffe pilot contacts the Society on the 20th August, in order for further information to be added to an article. We hope to have further details added to this article very soon.
Renowned cartoonist, Graham Ward has recently donated 2 cartoon created especially for the Aircrew Remembrance Society on the 7th August, to be used to generate some funds to assist in the running of the website. As soon as we have decided how to promote these details will follow. Click onto the image for a larger version:
Royal British Legion contact the Society on the 21st August, in order to have a special page made for a U.S.A.A.F. crew lost over England as a remembrance page — details follow.
C.W.G.C. (Commonwealth War Graves Commission) have just listed us on their website stating; "The Commonwealth War Graves Commission works in close association with many other organisations to achieve its task of the commemorating those who died in the two world wars. In addition, there are many organisations that have a presence on the world wide web which may be of interest." 25th September.
A.R. Society contacted again on the 1st September by Laurent Taveau from France regarding the Polish fighter pilot, Chudek - with no known grave. A probable location has been established and a recovery is planned for the recovery of the body later this year. Following this a proper burial will be arranged. Parts from the aircraft and the watch from the pilot have been recovered. More to follow.
A day of commemorations is taking place in Poland to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II On the 1st September. The first ceremony took place at dawn on Westerplatte peninsula near Gdansk, where a German battleship fired the first shots on a Polish fort in 1939.
We are pleased to announce that Techie Services from Norwich, England have offered their superb photographic enhancement facilities to A. R. Society on the 6th September. This means that for a small fee relatives are able to send us damaged photographs for repair and already we have received many requests to use this service with great reviews.
The Kracker archive is continuing to attract massive attention from many of the specialist forums as of the 5th September, we have also been contacted by other researchers to make their research available online with us. We are of course grateful for this but we have to be sure that information we publish via our web site is as reliable as possible, so please be patient.
The London Free Press, Canada recently publish article on the death of a former aircrew member on the 23rd of September using Aircrew Remembrance Society photographs and information.
In order to assist us to maintain our website and avoid the need for advertising we are working on an archive download page. Here, several files of various sizes will be available as a download for a small fee.(9th October)
We have added a Poem section on the 5th October to the website and we will shortly adding further additions to this.
We are still concentrating on producing our sales pages today (14th October) testing is in progress to ensure files can be downloaded OK and it is looking very good. Most (If not all!) of these downloads have never been seen before and are a researchers dream. We also plan to release some photographs — again never published previously. We are working with a photographic studio to have the many negatives we have in our archive converted over to digitalised images. These can be worked on if required by our "Techie" services team at an extra charge.
1st October 2009: Website new navigation bar published — created to make the site more navigable.
Many Canadian Authorities are assisting us as of the 11th November, to place renamed geographical features on Google maps. We are proud to be involved in this work but - we need your help! Can you spare some time to collate infomation for us? The Canadians honour their WW2 Aircrew with this amazing idea - we need to spread the word.
New section added on the 12th November - early stages yet - POST WAR LOSSES will be added to each loss section - first has been added to R.A.F. today.
Pleased to be able to announce that we now have 5 people (From all parts of the world) as of the 22nd December, who have contacted us regarding helping with our research. Not a great time of the year to start this off as everyone is so very busy, but we hope to have their first articles up on the site as soon as we receive them.
Following our appeal for people to assist us with our research we have since been contacted by several people who have offered their services on the 10th December. We plan to send each of them a set of guidelines and a loss that they can assist us with. We will evaluate the work that they return and continue from that. It is imperative that we have accuracy which is why we have chosen to use this method of selection.
We are proud to announce that we have been contacted by 408 Squadron researchers on the 3rd December, who would like to use their information to expand our site.
We are proud to announce that we have been contacted on the 8th December by 51 Squadron researchers, who would like to use their information to expand our site.
Following our appeal on the 10th December, for people to assist us with our research we have since been contacted by several people who have offered their services. We plan to send each of them a set of guidelines and a loss that they can assist us with. We will evaluate the work that they return and continue from that. It is imperative that we have accuracy which is why we have chosen to use this method of selection.
We have been inundated with requests for further information from relatives as of the 14th January who would like further information on what happened to their loved ones. When we researched this it seems that many other websites who offer their services choose easy solutions and many emails to them are simply not answered. We seem to be building on the fact that we reply to every single email received - even the one's that we are unable to assist with from our extensive archives. For those we try and direct them to a possible source.
We would like to place an appeal 14th February, for any surviving relatives of the crew from Stirling EE873 lost on 13/14th July 1943. The owner of the land a Mr. Sylvester Colson has built a superb memorial to the crew and is seeking relatives to contact him (Via us) in order to arrange a visit.
We would like to thank the people who have offered their assistance with our work. We now have 14 "volunteers" working alongside us (1st February) some have already contributed great article and very well researched using some of the tools that we provide - some have even gone further and visited the National Archives to gain more information. But all offer dedication and all for no rewards apart from the help they are providing relatives in their quest for information.
Our download pages are currently offline as we are revamping the offers that are available to visitors, 5th February.
Our friends over in Saint Nazaire have just recovered a propeller that we understand is from a downed B-17 - the item is in superb condition and further research is also being undertaken to establish which aircraft this is from and of course the story behind it. 14th March. More follows!
We are receiving a great deal of information from many sources and at times it is proving very difficult to keep up to date with everything (Remembering that we all carry out this work in our spare time) as of 17th March, if we have not yet contacted you in response then please email us again to give us a gentle reminder. One of the great stories recently received is regarding an English lady who had been living in Dinant, Belgium during WW2 who assisted in the evasion of many downed aircrew - further research is currently taking place and hope that this will shortly be on the website. This is superb news as otherwise this story would have been lost forever.
Does your house or your neighbourhood have some type of WW2 history about it - would you like to know more? Contact us and maybe we are able to find out further information and perhaps even place a small plaque to honour the incident. We have already provided such a pack to several households (U.K. only at the moment as of the 25th March) - although you can of course still contact us and we will try and find out more for you)
A great programme on Sky T.V tonight (23rd March) showing the article on our web site. - Our researcher David Mole bringing the whole story together with his dedication. We hope to have a brief extract of the video on the site very soon.
We are pleased to announce that the Kracker archive which is visited by many of you now has over 22,000 records on the database! as of the 4th April. Tom works on it almost every day and a further 8,000 are being prepared to upload.
A big Thank You to all the individuals contributing to this Database.
During March 37 new loss reports were added to the site which does not include the Telegraph Obituaries recently added. Many more are yet to be added of course but a great deal of our time is taken up by researching following contacts by relatives. We are hoping that new volunteers will soon come forward to assist us with compiling some of the loss reports we have on file.
Having recently visited Grangemouth in Scotland on the 22nd August, we met up with a representative from the 1333 Squadron ATC. THey are hoping to raise funds to place a Spitfire near the memorial wall recently erected. Further information will follow how you can help with this superb memorial.
14th August 2010: It is with regret that we announce the loss of our great researcher friend from Holland, Rob Philips. He died last week aged just 58 peacefully at home surrounded by his close family. Rob dedicated himself to preserving the memories of those airman who fought the good fight in the skies over his beloved Holland in those dark days of the Second World War. He has earned his own wings and flies with them - "through adversity to the stars" a tribute to Rob. The Aircrew Remembrance Society are proud that he had chosen us to continue with his work and over the coming months add to his great research. Our thoughts are of course with his family at this time. Stil van verdriet en met respect voor de enorme hoeveelheid getoonde wilskracht laten wij u weten dat van ons is heen gegaan: Robert Guy Philips.
Hajo Herrmann Passed away on November 5th 2010 Aged 97. Hajo was the Originator of the Wilde Sau, or Wild Boar, single-engine night-fighter tactics.
Reburial of Flight Lieutenant Henry Smith: The burial of Fl/Lt. Henry “Lacy” Smith will take place at Ranville War Cemetery, France with full military honours on 19 April at 10.30 am. We are indebted to a supporter of the society, Dale Heighway, who will be attending the service and taking photos on our behalf, which will be made available for display here courtesy of Dale following the service.
Search for relatives of Stirling crew lost 20/21st April 1943 (16th April) The Society is pleased to announce that following the inclusion of a recent page of remembrance to our site regarding the loss a 75 Squadron crew, along with additional details that we have been able to supply, relatives of two of the crew, Diane Ramsey (Nee Upton) and Lynne Truex (relative of Sgt Ellis), have now received a great deal of interest and support in their search. Both are seeking contact with relatives of other crew members, with the view of inviting them to attend a service, at the unveiling of a new memorial to the crew at the crash site in Denmark-. Firstly “The Kentish Express” have published the story this week:
Messerschmidt Bf 109 G-14 of Luftwaffe Fighter Ace, Major Erich Leie, Recovered in Poland: Details from Peter Sikora. Engine has been found in Drogomysl, Cieszyn Silesia, Poland. (11th August)
Pictures courtesy of Zbigniew Legierski and Grzegorz Kasztura. Major Erich Leie flew the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wolf, FW190 . He claimed his first victory on the 14th May 1940 in the Battle of France. By the end of 1940 he had 11 victories to his credit. In 1940-41 during the Battle Of Britain, Erich Leie shot down a total of 21 planes and was awarded the Ritterkreuz. On the 19th of August 1942 he was shot down and wounded in the air battle over Dieppe, he baled out of is Fw 190-A3 and survived to fly again. Read More….
Under Sea Wreck Of Savoia Marcheti SM.79 Located. Search for Surviving Crew Members/relatives: The Society has recently been contacted by Vasilis Mentogiannis a member of the UFR diving team, who have recently discovered the almost intact remains on an SM.79. The aircraft was forced to ditch returning from an operation against enemy shipping on the 4th/5th August 1944.
08-11-2011: R.C.A.F. Memorial Project:
Please contact us for information where you can assist with this fine project. At present, there is no National memorial in the United Kingdom to honour the men and women of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) who fought for our freedom during World War Two. RAF Linton-on-Ouse and RAF Leeming are determined to remedy this important omission. Both stations were at the heart of 6 (Canadian) Group RAF during the war, and it is the intention of both Station Commanders to erect a lasting and fitting memorial to all Canadians who served, and are still serving in the RCAF / CAF. The plan is to construct a memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) in Alrewas, Staffordshire, by July 2011. The memorial will be in the form of a stone monolith, topped by a Canadian Maple Leaf. The Maple Leaf will cast a shadow over one of 13 stone slabs representing the provinces and territories of Canada on the 11th. of November each year, on Armistice Day. The project will cost in the region of £33,000 (C$53,000). We believe this represents excellent value for money, and is a small price to pay to honour the brave men and women who volunteered to fight for the freedom that we all enjoy today. Email us.
New memorial unveiled today to the crew of Wellington R1451, 11 O.T.U. at Watlington, with 16 crew relatives in attendance. (3rd October 2012)
Privacy : Cookies : Responsibilities
Your privacy we take very seriously. We therefore never make your email address available to any third party, unless you specifically request us to. We do not collect any personal information about you for any purpose what so ever. Where cookies are used, this is to provide us with anonymous statistical information about how our pages are being used so that we can optimise our site for you, our users. Which enables us to measure how long a user remains on our site before moving on, but information is always anonymous. Read more.