This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.
The spate of air trooping disasters continues: shortly after noon yesterday, the Times reports, an RCAF Dakota operating with RAF Transport Command crashed near Shelsham in Surrey as the aircraft, en route from Germany, was preparing to land with twenty passengers and eight crew on board. It's believed that eight of these were killed in the accident. Earlier on Wednesday morning an RAF Short Sunderland of Coastal Command which had just taken off for a journey to Sicily came down in flames about one hundred yards off the shore at Lee-on-the-Solent, just west of Portsmouth; apparently one of its starboard engines had caught fire. All ten crew members perished in the crash.
In lighter news, the Manchester Guardian makes a good point when it observes: “Mr. Lawson was able to triumphantly announce yesterday that letters [of complaint to the War Office] are down to a mere 54,000 a week. A British Army of the present size that complains in writing fewer than three million times in a year is obviously reaching an unheard of standard of contentment.”
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