Post by Dave Homewood on Mar 19, 2006 17:45:47 GMT 12
Today I pulled an audio tape off the shelf which has some stuff I recorded from National Radio's excellent Sounds Historical show a couple of years ago.
(Sounds Historical is on Sundays, 8-10pm, and is always two hours of recordings, interviews and music with a New Zealand history and nostalgia theme. Brilliant!)
Anyway on the tape was a 1949 documentary on the RNZAF pulled from the archives by SH's presenter Jim Sullivan, which he says was made for radio to promote the Air Force and boost recruiting in the immediate postwar era.
It has several interviews and also what is supposed to be recordings of actual ops but it sounds a little staged to me. One item, the first, was (coincidentally for this weekend since the recent tragedy and rescue) a Search and Rescue mission to Raoul Island. Supposedly a 40 foot launch was in destress, and so three Mosquitoes were despatched.
The exact words of the 1949 'announcer' in this doco were "And so an Air Sea Rescue goes into action. Up they go, three slim, powerful Mosquitoes, climbing. Heading south, circling, searching. Sweeping the sea at 400 miles an hour...." You then hear some Morse code as he counts out the hours of searching, "One hour. Two hours." And you can here a radio operator translating the code, mumbling "vessel detected." The announcer then boasts "Operation successful."
What it never explained was, what did the Mosquitoes do when they found the distressed vessel. Would they have had air-droppable liferafts, perhaps Lindholme equipment, attached to their bomb racks? Or did they simply circle till a ship came?
Did Mossies actually do SAR work? Perhaps this was all rubbish for the radio? Does anyone know? They'd have been a lot faster than the Sunderlands or today's Orions.
(Sounds Historical is on Sundays, 8-10pm, and is always two hours of recordings, interviews and music with a New Zealand history and nostalgia theme. Brilliant!)
Anyway on the tape was a 1949 documentary on the RNZAF pulled from the archives by SH's presenter Jim Sullivan, which he says was made for radio to promote the Air Force and boost recruiting in the immediate postwar era.
It has several interviews and also what is supposed to be recordings of actual ops but it sounds a little staged to me. One item, the first, was (coincidentally for this weekend since the recent tragedy and rescue) a Search and Rescue mission to Raoul Island. Supposedly a 40 foot launch was in destress, and so three Mosquitoes were despatched.
The exact words of the 1949 'announcer' in this doco were "And so an Air Sea Rescue goes into action. Up they go, three slim, powerful Mosquitoes, climbing. Heading south, circling, searching. Sweeping the sea at 400 miles an hour...." You then hear some Morse code as he counts out the hours of searching, "One hour. Two hours." And you can here a radio operator translating the code, mumbling "vessel detected." The announcer then boasts "Operation successful."
What it never explained was, what did the Mosquitoes do when they found the distressed vessel. Would they have had air-droppable liferafts, perhaps Lindholme equipment, attached to their bomb racks? Or did they simply circle till a ship came?
Did Mossies actually do SAR work? Perhaps this was all rubbish for the radio? Does anyone know? They'd have been a lot faster than the Sunderlands or today's Orions.
