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Aviation History
1952
1952 - 0471.PDF
FLIGHT, 22 February 1952 211 By JOHN YOXALL Bulldog Gauntlet METEOR 8 A Photographic Record of No. 19 Squadron Through Two Decades THAT "They can because they think they can" is as true of No. 19 Squadron today as it was when their motto—of which this is a free translation—was evolved in the 1914-18 war. How often one hears today's squadrons compared adversely with the same units of past years ! Such criticisms, of course, are seldom, if ever, valid; certainly they could never be made of No. 19's formation flying, as the comparative photographs published on these pages will tes tify. There was no cheating—a selection of air-to-air photo graphs obtained during pre-war visits was sent to the squad ron with a request to have the formations repeated; and the challenge was immediately and enthusiastically accepted by the present commanding officer, S/L. B. L. Duckenfield, A.F.C., on behalf of his pilots. It is now 20 years since I first visited them. They were then at Duxford, near Cambridge, and it was a Cambridge University Air Squadron Atlas which was borrowed in order to obtain photographs of their Bristol Bulldogs in various formations—a novelty in those days. In the early nineteen- thirties the R.A.F. was still trying to rival the Navy as a silent service. No visits by the Press to describe and photograph the squadrons had been granted during the long period in which Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord ("Boom") Twenty years apart: No. 19 Squadron in squadron formation on (above) Meteor 8s in 1952 and (right) Bristol Bulldogs in 1932. S/L Duckenfield, A.F.C., led the Meteors and SjL A. C. Sanderson, D.F.C., the Bulldog*.
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