A letter received 30 years ago by author and publisher Jonathan Falconer sparked an avenue of investigation that revealed a bizarre but long-forgotten twist of World War Two
Every picture tells a story – or so the saying goes. In 1992, I reproduced a photograph in a book I had written showing an RAF Halifax bomber taking off for a raid on Germany in March 1945. A year later and out of the blue I received a letter from a former publishing colleague, Graham Powell, with whom I had worked in the 1980s. “It was a shock to see my brother Gordon’s name and plane in your book,” he wrote. Gordon was a Halifax pilot who was lost with most of his crew in the last weeks of World War Two. Graham continued: “I’m sending you a couple of photos from Gordon’s personal album.” Two small black and white pictures of Graham’s older brother and his crew were enclosed. One showed the crew posing informally underneath the wing of a Halifax coded ‘X’ for X-ray; the other portrayed Gordon with some of his air and groundcrew and another (unknown) pilot against the backdrop of a Halifax bearing nose artwork and the legend Intuition. Referring again to my book, Graham continue…
