I can't seem to find a way to trace which aircraft carried which crew via code letters as yet. Too bad. - Does anyone out there have any info that could help isolate which crew this might be? AJ, KC and YZ were the Lancasters modified to carry the Grand Slam. My neighbor T W L (Joe) Merchant (Gunner) dropped one (only) "Special Stores" 27.3.45 at the Farge U-Boat pens in Lancaster 1. PD.128 (Farge is a small port on the Weser River north of Bremen, and was the site of an oil-storage depot and the Valentin submarine pens that were attacked by the RAF on 27 March 1945. The pens had a ferrous concrete roof up to 7 metres (23 feet) thick. Two Grand Slam bombs penetrated parts of the pen with a 4.5 m-thick roof.) He said they were really, truly thrown around when the bomb was released. The plane just jumped upwards. Small odds but... Wouldn't it be wonderful if that photo was him? (He also dropped 7 Tall Boys, plus several abandoned missions.) Joe named one of his sons after his pilot. (Gordon Richard Price, DFM.) Film that this exact photo was taken from YouTube - Grand Slam bomb‏ Joe asked me to visit one of his Wing Commanders and carry his thanks to him on one of my holidays in Australia. He had retired near Lismore / Bexhill, in NE NSW. So I spent a heartrending day with him in 1992 while we toured his famr's Macadamia and Banana plantation. He said that when he was promoted to Wing Commander, the only reason (he said) was that he was the oldest living pilot, at 23 years of age, at the time. :flag_oz: :S! He said he still received a steady stream of letters and phone calls from old crew members, and would politely reminise but in fact could not remember a single name or face. In the war, all crewmen were referred to by the last three digits of their enlistment number only - never, ever by name. He said this was an absolute pre-requisite for emotional survival - the losses were that high.
