For example:
After he left Josephine in the Hollywood Hills [on the 13th April 1945] - the morning after the day Franklin Roosevelt died, the next place we find Townsend Brown is a few days, maybe a week later - in the skies over Germany, aboard a British Halifax bomber, with a parachute on his back.
Of the six-thousand-some Halifax bombers that saw service during World War II, only three remain intact today. One of them, the NA337, was recovered from the frigid waters of Norway’s Lake Mjøsa fifty years after it crash-landed there in April of 1945 and was fully restored in the 1990’s.
According to Morgan, the NA337 is the same plane that delivered Townsend Brown - and certain other Caroline operatives - behind enemy lines in Germany in the closing weeks of World War II.
This time, the big Halifax lumbered into German airspace just above the treetops with just the one passenger huddled near the open hatch, waiting for the order to jump. When the plane reached the drop zone, it was flying at a mere 300 feet. The bomb-bay doors opened to drop some supplies, and then the plane circled to gain altitude. At all of 600 feet, the bomber was still low enough to fly under the German radar — and just barely high enough for Brown to get out the door and get his parachute fully open before hitting the ground.
Newly manufactured Halifax, airframe number NA337, was delivered to 644 Squadron (Royal Air Force) at Tarrant Rushton, Dorset, England on the 5th March 1945. It was allocated the squadron code 2P-X, which was painted in large characters on each side of the fuselage. ‘2P’ indicated the aircraft belonged to 644 Squadron, and ‘X’ uniquely identified the aircraft.
It should be noted that Operational logbooks and suchlike refer to aircraft by their squadron codes, not by their airframe numbers, in much the same way we refer to a vehicle by the characters on its number plate, not by its unique vehicle identification number.
Click here for a larger image:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4434803/Halifax ... -large.jpg
Official records show that 2P-X (NA337) made only two operational flights during April 1945.
On the night of 20/21 April 1945, 2P-X was flown to Denmark on S.O.E. Operation Tablejam 160 to drop supplies to the resistance. The drop zone was located about 25 miles SSW of Copenhagen, at position 55 22 00N, 12 10 03E.
644 Squadron’s Operations Record Book shows that the weather conditions were poor, and that the signals displayed by the reception party on the ground were not consistent.
The pilot, F/O Alexander Turnbull DFC, therefore decided not to drop the supplies, and so they were brought back to England - with the official records showing the operation was “not completed”.
Dr. Brown could not, therefore, have been dropped behind enemy lines in Germany on this flight to Denmark, for it is clear from the account given to Paul Schatzkin that NA337 dropped supplies before climbing to 600 feet to drop Dr. Brown.
On the night of 23/24 April 1945, 2P-X (NA337) was flown to Mikkelsberget in Norway on S.O.E. Operation Crop 17 to drop supplies to the Norwegian resistance. Another Halifax, 8A-H from 298 Squadron, also based at Tarrant Rushton, had taken off seven minutes ahead of 2P-X bound for the same drop zone at position 60 27 50N, 11 51 23E.
Hallvard Sund, who was in the reception party at the drop zone, says the first aircraft [8A-H] approached at 01:10 from the south and dropped its supplies in accordance with established procedures.
The second aircraft [2P-X] made its initial approach from the west at 01:30. They waited for it to approach the dropping zone a second time before they displayed the appropriate light signals, whereupon the aircraft dropped its supplies and departed to the west. A few minutes later the aircraft was hit by flak over the railway bridge at Minnesund at the southern end of Lake Mjøsa, and F/O Turnbull was forced to ditch the aircraft near the small town of Stange.
Halifax 8A-H landed back at Tarrant Rushton after 10 hours and 6 minutes in the air. Its flight time to the drop zone was 5 hours 26 minutes, whilst 2P-X took 13 minutes longer. Nine other Halifax flights that night from Tarrant Rushton to drop zones in roughly the same geographic area as Crop 17 were airborne for between 10 and 10½ hours.
The flight times of all these aircraft were entirely consistent with those flights having been made directly to and directly back from Norway. A flight via enemy held territory in Germany would have taken, at the very least, 1½ hours longer.
It is clear from the above that 2P-X (NA337) could not have dropped Dr. Brown behind enemy lines in Germany before proceeding to Norway.
Conclusion:
The evidence shows that “Morgan’s” assertion that NA337 delivered Townsend Brown behind enemy lines in Germany in the closing weeks of World War II is simply not true.
This calls into question the validity of all the other information “Morgan” provided to Paul Schatzkin.
Sources:
Book: “Defying Gravity”, by Paul Schatzkin.
38 Group SOE Circuit Drop Log held in the National Archives, Kew, England.
Book: “They ditched on Lake Mjosa”, by Peter F. Lloyd.
DVD: “NA337 - Last Flight from Mikkelsberget” by Håkon Løkken.
