Origins Of Meteorology For The Army’s Airborne Forces In Ww2

[knocker]

Shortly before 2130 GMT on the evening of 19 February 1943, Halifax bomber DK123 of 295 Squadron climbed from the grass runway of RAF Netheravon and turned south towards the target for the night, the electricity transformer at Distré, near Saumur in north-west France. It was to be the Halifax’s last flight for it crashed near the transformer after being hit by anti-aircraft fire.

The aircraft’s crew rest in Saumur Cemetery, where a headstone records the name of the flight engineer as Squadron Leader Crichton-Miller, an unusually senior rank for such a position (Figure 1). Therein lies a mystery, for the Squadron Leader was not a flight engineer, but the Senior

Meteorological Officer of HQ 38 Wing at Netheravon (Figure 2).

A brilliant mathematician and physicist, in a brief but eventful, career, Crichton-Miller had become the authority on meteorology for Army airborne operations, writing several papers on the subject, and it was in the pursuit of his work that he died.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wea.147/pdf

[johnholmes]

thanks for that fascinating article-I've never read that before, I worked at times with Brian Booth in the Defence Services branch.