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The 211 Squadron website Major additions to the site came to a natural close with the 70th and 75th Anniversary updates of March and April 2016. Smaller revisions continue: on 31 July each year or more immediately if needed. The website is copied annually by the Australian national web archive PANDORA. Copyright You may not directly copy or reproduce text or images from this site. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of His Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office and the King’s Printer for Scotland, under the terms and conditions of the Open Government Licence. The 211 Squadron badge is British Crown Copyright/MoD, reproduced with the permission of the Controller of His Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office. Plagiarism Plagiarism is cheating. It is also a discourtesy to authors, to the men of the Squadron and their war service, and to other honest researchers in the field. All such copies are deliberate, not inadvertent, not unintentional and not accidentally “found on your hard drive”. Tediously, when addressed about such cases, offenders all but invariably respond with feigned ignorance, indignation, patronising bluster, insult and delay...until the case is ultimately resolved by one or more of the several means available to patient, determined authors. Conditions of use D Clark 211 Squadron RAF www.211squadron.org With proper attribution, you may link to pages from this website. You may not otherwise copy, reproduce, or re-post any text or images from the site. Images You may not copy, reproduce, or re-post images from this website. Citing this site D Clark 211 Squadron RAF www.211squadron.org Linking to this site No 211 Squadron RAF www.211squadron.org Linking to pages Glossary www.211squadron.org/glossary.html Archival, persistent links Earlier web addresses April 2001 to September 2003: users.bigpond.com/clardo/ These addresses and page content no longer exist. Full commercial hosting for www.211squadron.org site name and pages content began on 21 March 2013, bringing all individual page addresses and content under that URL, as noted above. Enquiries
All other emails will simply be binned and their addresses permanently blocked. Repeated misuse of this service will result in its prompt withdrawal. Existing friends and contacts are welcome to stay in touch using my personal email address. Looking for answers Offers of material Blunders Compliments and critics
Having pondered long on the worth of this small addition, I again thank those who made kindly remarks directly to me: your words are deeply appreciated. The critics (all bar two) were anonymous and indirect. Scope Although it took some years to be able to add much of the chronological account from official sources, transcripts of surviving 211 Squadron World War II era operational records are now complete for each year from 1937 to 1941, for 1943 and for 1946 (if not without loss, error or omission), offering a searchable account of the records of the time. For the missing 1942 record, a partial reconstruction has been compiled from other sources. For the years 1944 and 1945, the sets of Forms 540, Forms 541 and Appendices are extensive and yet still not without instances of omission or illegibility. Tackling a transcription on this scale, though technically possible, is impractical. In the meantime, digital retrieval at the UK National Archives has at last made available Squadron records readily accessible at reasonable cost, either directly or (for undigitised material) through private research services. Updates 211 Squadron Survivors Association Like others of its kind, the ranks of the Survivors inevitably thinned over the years following and the Association itself had passed into inactivity by 2006 as Ron’s own health declined. His efforts in keeping the Association going for as long as he did were admirable indeed. Born in the Summer of 1923, Ron had enlisted in the war-time RAFVR in 1942. Aircraftman Ronald McKnight 1687540 was soon posted to India, to join the groundcrew tending the Squadron and its Beaufighters from 1943 to 1945. In latter years, he and his family suffered the death of his wife Eileen and the early deaths of their son Graham and daughter Diane. Ron himself died on 8 February 2014 at the age of 90, a grandfather and great-grandfather mourned by his surviving son and daughters and their families. Thanks in large part to the Association membership lists kept by Ron and Graham, I was able to get in touch with a good many ex-members of 211 Squadron, to enjoy very cordial correspondence with them or their families over a good many years. Their interest and assistance contributed very much to the richness of this account as it stands today. Internet practice Error 404 Page not found You may need to click your browser’s Refresh or Reload button when first re-visiting after an update. Scheduled dates are shown on the Site updates page. Error 500 Internal server error HTTP vs HTTPS and SSL There is no need for the added continuing expense of the more secure HTTPS protocol and SSL certificate: there is simply no personal or financial data to protect. None. The saving comes at the cost of a little inconvenience for readers: modern browsers, oblivious to the complete absence of any entry point for or records of personal or financial data, see only the HTTP prefix and automatically wag an admonitory digital finger, declaring "site not secure", "be careful" and the like, with some warning icon. Malware & viruses
On spam If the email attempts to fudge or spoof a real organisation as sender, the offending email is also forwarded to that organisation’s fraud, abuse or report spam address. Readers in other countries may find their own agencies of assistance. Photographs The images come from a variety of sources varying greatly in quality, whether original prints and negatives, 60 year-old half-tone newsprint and photogravure, copy negatives and prints, photocopies from laser and inkjet prints, or from scans of every level of quality. With few exceptions, they are reproduced as near as practicable to their original state: monochrome (grayscale), in their entirety (ie full-frame), near original size and with little or no enhancement. Most of the images are in JPEG (.jpg) format, at 72ppi and at JPEG “high” quality. This way, pages load with reasonable speed and print at reasonable quality, however, individual images will not enlarge or print well. To deter image theft and to leave plenty of room for growth, there are no thumbnail links to higher quality pictures. Printing the site For some of the site pages, the count of printed pages will be 30, 40, 50 or more. As pages are updated, any prints will become out of date. Try a Print Preview first and then a small test print. Check Page Setup in your browser and either select Shrink to fit or set page margins to the smallest allowable. Try printing 2-up at least and both sides if your printer allows it. Through your browser, check your Print/Printer/Properties options. Screens and browsers For ease of screen reading, the site html sets page font to sans serif (Arial, Helvetica etc) at medium size. With those settings, each page displays satisfactorily on current desktop or laptop PC screens and on most current tablet screens, without horizontal scrolling at settings from 1024x768 and upwards. At lower settings (640x480, 800x600) horizontal scrolling is needed. Most current browsers have very simple options to zoom in or out or magnify any page view and, if needed, to over-ride site page html font and size setting. The photographs look best at high settings: in Windows 10, HD Colour for example. With older set-ups, the 32-bit or True colour setting is good, acceptable at 16-bit High colour, and poor at 256 colours. Site navigation In this simplest possible website layout, each page is just one mouse-click away from every other page. The order of material is a sensible compromise between background, chronology, theatre, and individual narrative. So on this site, the Home page is an active page with useful content that briefly introduces the Squadron, the aim of making such a record, and the pages list, the long column of page links from top left of this and every page. To go from one page to another, just pick a link and click. To go to the page you last looked at, use your browser’s Back button. The foot of each page carries another simpler set of links: to the Home page, the Site summary, on to the Next or back to the Previous page, and to the main help pages. Within-page navigation: Most pages are quite long. Use your keyboard [Home] [End] [Page Up] [Page Down] keys, click-and-drag the scroll bar on the right, or use the mouse scroll-wheel to move up and down each page. The Squadron summary page acts as a narrative site map, introducing the site pages in context, again with live links. Website archiving Anyone who has gone to the effort of creating and maintaining a well-researched presentation of unique, sound content could assist future researchers by contacting their own national web archiving programme to propose their site for preservation. The International Internet Preservation Consortium offers a comprehensive summary of national programmes. Australian national web archive: PANDORA Preservation of this website and future access are both assured, for the short term and the long term, with independent archive and back up sets:
Access to PANDORA was integrated with Trove in 2019. Subsequently discovered that several instances of the annual 211 Squadron site “take” were either missing (2014 - since silently restored) or displayed as duplicates of other takes (2007, 2006, 2002). On asking about these apparent corruptions, NLA staff advised that the three duplicate Trove entries arose from some deep technical fault between Trove and PANDORA. In the interim, the problem 2002, 2006 and 2007 references are no longer listed. They may, in time, display correctly again in Trove, as the underlying copies still exist in PANDORA. Other web archives United Kingdom UK Government sites are covered by The National Archives at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webarchive United States For over 20 years, any search for archived copies of a closed site was seriously hobbled by restricting search to URL address/es of the site while it did exist. By May 2018, however, at long last the search field allowed both keyword and URL search. At about this time, a number of earlier site instances simply disappeared, while for more recent instances, robots.txt protections were to all appearances wilfully ignored. The archive still does not respond well to Google search. Fly-by “archives” A deliberate large-scale breach of copyright, these unauthorised copies needlessly consume site band-width, to duplicate selected content regardless of any true, authorised, complete archival instances. In the long term, the result will be multiple incomplete copies of outdated content.
www.211squadron.org © D Clark & others 1998—2024 |
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