Post by Dave Homewood on Mar 8, 2011 0:48:44 GMT 12
Earlier tonight I was having an email discussion with David Duxbury about repair depots in the wartime RNZAf, and I remembered that a while back I had photographed a large document from No. 4 Repair Depot that I found in the collection of the late Bob Lawn.
I looked it out and was looking through it so I could describe it to David. The document is a multiple page inventory of all the tools and equipment held by No. 4 Repair Depot (Overseas), as it was on the 24th of May 1943. This unit was established at Pallikulo, Espiritu Santo, in late January 1943. So the unit had been established for four months and by the pencil ticks it seems that F/Sgt Lawn had been doing an inventory check to ensure everything was there. This was possibly in preparation for the unit's expansion soon after to become the Base Depot Workshops.
Now it lists the tools of all the different workshops, Machine Shop, Electrical Shop, Blacksmiths, Fabric Shop. Parachute and Dinghie section, etc. And it has five pages of equipment specialist to aircraft they were then servicing, these being Ventura, Avenger, Dauntless, Kittyhawk and Lysander. It was here that I balked. What?? I put this to David and he is as absolutely mystified as I am.
I do not think that any Lysanders were ever operated in the South Pacific by any country. The closest I can think of would have been in the India/Burma front.
So why did the No. 4 Repair Depot at Santo have tools listed in its inventory specialist to assembling and maintaining the Lysander?
I would bet no-one here can offer an actual answer, howeber it throws up a lot of great questions and ideas. Was a squadron going to move into the Pacific, and then it got cancelled? If so, which squadron? RAF, RAAF or RNZAF? Were the USAAF considering the type? Or did the term Lysander refer to something else and it was maybe a bluff to fool the Japanese (like the RAAF referring to their Spitfires as Capstans)? What sort of role would the Lysander have performed? Ambulance work? Spy droping? Army Co-op? Artillery spotting for the Navy? Did the Lysander have the range to operate around the islands?
Curiouser and curiouser.
So who reckons a what-if model of an RNZAF Pacific Lysander is a neat idea?
I looked it out and was looking through it so I could describe it to David. The document is a multiple page inventory of all the tools and equipment held by No. 4 Repair Depot (Overseas), as it was on the 24th of May 1943. This unit was established at Pallikulo, Espiritu Santo, in late January 1943. So the unit had been established for four months and by the pencil ticks it seems that F/Sgt Lawn had been doing an inventory check to ensure everything was there. This was possibly in preparation for the unit's expansion soon after to become the Base Depot Workshops.
Now it lists the tools of all the different workshops, Machine Shop, Electrical Shop, Blacksmiths, Fabric Shop. Parachute and Dinghie section, etc. And it has five pages of equipment specialist to aircraft they were then servicing, these being Ventura, Avenger, Dauntless, Kittyhawk and Lysander. It was here that I balked. What?? I put this to David and he is as absolutely mystified as I am.
I do not think that any Lysanders were ever operated in the South Pacific by any country. The closest I can think of would have been in the India/Burma front.
So why did the No. 4 Repair Depot at Santo have tools listed in its inventory specialist to assembling and maintaining the Lysander?
I would bet no-one here can offer an actual answer, howeber it throws up a lot of great questions and ideas. Was a squadron going to move into the Pacific, and then it got cancelled? If so, which squadron? RAF, RAAF or RNZAF? Were the USAAF considering the type? Or did the term Lysander refer to something else and it was maybe a bluff to fool the Japanese (like the RAAF referring to their Spitfires as Capstans)? What sort of role would the Lysander have performed? Ambulance work? Spy droping? Army Co-op? Artillery spotting for the Navy? Did the Lysander have the range to operate around the islands?
Curiouser and curiouser.
So who reckons a what-if model of an RNZAF Pacific Lysander is a neat idea?
) interest in Kiwi aviation so can't add much more to your surmising but I do think a what if RNZAF Lysander would be great, I fancy the Darkgreen/Pacific GreyBlue scheme similar to the Harvards you colourized sometime ago. Thinking about the Lysander in this environment, I really wouldn't have given much for its chances, at least until after the Jap fighters had quit Rabaul. Something with hull or floats makes more sense anyhow, a bit like a Catalina.