Originally Posted by
Gil Boyd
Mrclark303
John,
Not wishing to digress here, but in my long search for the hurried but exact burial site in 1941 of Lt Jock Lewes founding father of the SAS IMHO, for his family, I took a different viewpoint.
As they had returned from a highly successful attack on an airfield in southern Libya on the 31st December 1941, it was a lone Messerschmidt 110 that sprayed the vehicles as they waited for the rest of the patrol at a final RV.
Sadly in this pilots randon spraying, Jock Lewes was hit in the hip and bled to death at the RV. I interviewed the man that buried him in a shallow grave, a Cpl Jimmie Storrie RIP a number of years ago now, and sadly no longer with us, who gave me a rough location.
Coming to the point....I then located the German Pilots report after a lot of hard work in Germany, and his side of what he saw and did on the day from his actual words which were indeed recorded.
From his flying log of the attack I could then cross the hairs and precisely locate the likely spot, as his Lat/Long was written down of his attack.
I had nearly given up, but found that EVERYTHING is actually recorded during wars, but it is finding the documentation that takes the time and real effort.
So in short, as I said earlier in the thread, the records for that pistol are in someone's hands, which if located through FN Historical or whoever, will make a nice pistol really collectable and dot the i's and cross the t's to the whole historic provenance of it.
Might be worth trying their museum on this, even if they can tell you when that series of pistols were stamped for the Germans would be a starting point regardless of numbers produced as that would be recorded as to who authorised that one after production feature.
Good luck but worth the time I am sure.
We do still have a number of Market Garden vets alive, some I see often on various gatherings of the Regiment. My good friend and local lad to East Anglia Johnny Peters died a couple of years ago very suddenly. He was the President of the Arnhem Vets for a number of years. Great bunch of lads, whose humour is as fresh today as it no doubt was, then under a great deal of pressure!!
