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Enquiries
You must ask elsewhere for information about other Squadrons or the wartime RAF. There are plenty of books and on-line sources: the Glossary, Sources and Sites & Links pages may help.
For more information about 211 Squadron RAF and its men, contact me if you wish and I’ll help if I can.
Linking to this site By all means place a link to this site on your own website links page. Please use the formal domain name to make a permanent link: No 211 Squadron RAF www.211squadron.org
Linking to individual pages If you need to link to an individual page, use the underlying URL, eg 211 Squadron Sites and Links http://users.cyberone.com.au/clardo/sites___links.html
Citing this site You may not directly copy or reproduce material from this website without first asking permission. You may, however, use the information here in developing your own research. Suggested form of citation for your Sources or Bibliography: DR Clark 211 Squadron RAF www.211squadron.org (2008)
211 Squadron enquiries You can write to me about 211 Squadron and its men at these addresses:
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Email:
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Post:
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Don Clark PO Box 5696 Latham ACT 2615 Australia
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To find your way around the pages of this website, you might want to start on the Site summary page, which is like a map of the site with comments. Or use the Site search page to find what you are looking for. The latest version of this site is available from the author on request, gratis, as a CD-R.
211 Squadron Survivors Association For a good many years, Squadron ex-members kept in touch with one another through their 211 Squadron Survivors Association, cared for so ably by Ron McKnight, whose efforts were greatly appreciated both by members and by the families of members.
With the passing years, Ron’s health has declined and the ranks of the Survivors have thinned. Like many of its kind, the Association thus passed into inactivity several years ago. However, in October each year, a group of Burma-era members of 177 Squadron and 211 Squadron continue to gather for dinner in London.
This website has never been formally connected with the Association. It is simply a personal effort of mine, as son of 211 Squadron Sgt Observer, Nobby Clark. Over the years I’ve enjoyed very cordial relations with ex-Squadron members (many of them Association members) and with their families. Deeply appreciated, their interest and assistance have contributed greatly to the richness of this 211 Squadron history as it stands today.
Contributing website material After 7 years on-line, it seems unlikely that many more surviving members will report in, or that many more personal accounts will be put forward. The website in its current state carries a reasonable balance of material from both World Wars, for aircrew and groundcrew, from the main operational theatres, and of the main aircraft types.
What the site does lack is a better chronological account from official records. Future updates will therefor concentrate on this material which will ultimately result in a more complete and coherent picture of 211 Squadron and its personnel.
Many wonderful pictures and narratives have been contributed by the boys or their close family. I cannot adequately express my thanks for the generosity, variety, and quality of all the material put forward to date by Squadron members or their families, either to me or through Adrian Fryatt, Elizabeth Kaegi or Ian Carter.
New material remains of great interest. Anything you feel able to share will be welcome, handled with respect, and returned promptly. Contributors need not feel that they must toil to write up a fully formed story. I will happily compile a page from whatever you care to share.
The briefest biographical details, an old letter, even just a Service Record Form 543: a page can be made from quite small beginnings. Having said all that, a number of ex-members of 211 Squadron have put forward their own stories as first-person narratives. Deeply appreciated, in the main these appear word-for-word (with any amplifications of mine clearly shown in the usual way, in square brackets).
If you have something that you think should be part of this story, please contact me.
- Text: typed originals or photocopies are usually easy to scan. If you can avoid folding pages for the post, that will help.
- Photos: original prints are the best source but very precious.
- My email inbox limit is 10 MB, but please check with me for options before you attempt to send large attachments.
- Text files: ask me first, but any format, within reason.
- Scanned photos: by all means send pictures by email or by CD-ROM.
On scanning images Please check with me first before you spend any time scanning. It is easy to be tricked by the technology into inadvertently creating images of poor quality from good originals. Options in scanners or in software that offer to email images at smaller sizes should be avoided at all costs.
For the clearest results that will enlarge well on screen, please scan original B&W photos as grayscale for preference, at 300dpi, with no sharpening, no enhancements and no corrections of any kind and please, at the highest practical level of JPEG quality. Check your images after scanning with eg the Windows Picture & Fax Viewer. Press the + button several times and you should still see an image free of little blocks of tone.
Blunders This website is an archive, a recognition of service, and an adventure in research. The site and its content are solely my responsibility, carefully thought through and checked before posting. Every effort is put into making it accurate, comprehensive and a faithful reflection of any contributions. There will be blunders: please let me know of any you find.
Internet practice Seeing the site You may want to show this site to a friend with no Internet access. A visit to a good local library with public Internet access and just a little help from the staff will get your friend where they want to go. The name of the site is 211 Squadron RAF and its permanent url is www.211squadron.org or, for the technically minded, http://users.cyberone.com.au/clardo/. A Google search on “211 Squadron” will get you there almost as easily.
Printing the site Whoa! Before you start, to print the whole site will take over 400 A4 sheets and that’s printing on both sides. Besides, the latest edition of the site is available on request, gratis, as a CD-R.
First check Page Setup in your browser, and either select Shrink to fit or set page margins to the smallest allowable. You might like to try printing 2-up and both sides, if your printer set-up allows it. Through your browser, check your Print/Printer/Properties options.
At any update, current pages are likely to be revised and new pages added. See the Site Updates page for details.
Site navigation On this site, text highlighted in underlined blue always indicates a live link: to a part of the current page, to another page of the website or to some other website. The cursor changes to a little hand whenever it is over such a link. Simply click on the link to proceed.
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 navigation menu: the long list of page name links that sits at the top of the left hand column on this and every page. To go from one page to another, just pick a link and click.
The foot of each page carries another simpler set of links: to the Home page, the Site summary, on to the Next page or back to the Previous page, or to the Enquiries page or the Site Search page. To go to the page you last looked at, use your browser’s Back button.
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.
Screens and browsers The pages are designed for the 800x600 screen setting (ie without horizontal scrolling). They work well at this and higher settings, on 15in and larger screens. At lower settings (640x480) horizontal scrolling is needed. The photographs look best at the 32-bit or True colour setting, quite acceptable at 16-bit High colour, and poor at 256 colours.
All pages are without frames and free of pop-ups or cookies. They should work well in any recent browser. For ease of reading, you may wish to set your browser’s viewing options to a sans serif font like Arial, at medium size or smaller. For printing, I choose to reset to Times New Roman.
Photographs Image sources are invariably acknowledged on this site. Some photographs came with brief captions or descriptions and these are indicated in the text. In the majority of cases, the captions are my work, as are the extended comments.
With few exceptions, photographs on this site are reproduced as near as practicable to their original state: monochrome, in their entirety (ie full-frame), near original size and with little or no enhancement.
The images come from a variety of sources varying greatly in quality, from original prints and negatives, from 60 year-old half-tone newsprint and photogravure, from copy negatives and prints, from photocopies, from laser and inkjet prints, and from scans of every level of quality.
For Web purposes the images are stored in JPEG format at a notional 72ppi and at or near the highest “quality” level (ie web quality not archival quality). This way, pages will load with reasonable speed and print at reasonable quality but individual images will neither enlarge or print well.
The space limit offered by my Internet service provider is most generous but to deter image theft and to leave plenty of room for growth there will be no thumbnail links to higher quality pictures. If you need higher resolution copies of photographs from this site, contact me.
Stripping images from websites like this without asking, without attribution or a link to source and without their carefully developed captions is dishonest, slipshod and an insult: to the men, to the intelligence of readers, and to future researchers. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute or re-post images from this website without my express permission, nor without an agreed form of acknowledgement: all you have to do is ask. And yes, I do find and pursue breaches. Patiently, politely, repeatedly and with success. And I do not care how long it takes or how far I have to go.
Error 404 Page not found The site goes off-line for an hour as each update is released, usually in the evening (AEST) of the update day. If you access the site on update day only to see the HTTP 404 error message, check back in an hour or so. You may need to click your browser’s Refresh or Reload button when first re-visiting after an update. The expected date of the next update is shown on the Site updates page.
On spam I report all spam, without exception, to the Australian Communications and Media Authority through its SpamMatters service and to the abuse or report spam addresses of the originator’s Internet or email service. Readers in other countries may find their own government agency or the site www.spammatters.com of assistance.
Archival preservation Preservation of this site and future access are both assured, for the short term and the long term, with two independent archive sets:
- off-line, the latest state of the site is available from the author on request, gratis, as a CD-R.
- on-line, the site is expressly and completely preserved in PANDORA, the Internet archiving programme of the National Library of Australia and partners. A copy of the site is taken on 6 August each year. These copies, from May 2002 on, are readily found: by Internet search; through the National Library's on-line catalogue; directly from PANDORA menus; or by clicking the PANDORA logo on the Home page of this site, or lastly by the persistent URL http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-24825, also used to cite the complete PANDORA archive set of 211 Squadron copies.
Other Internet archives National web archiving programmes have been developing quickly in the last few years. In the UK for example, there are now separate initiatives for government sites through The National Archives at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/archivedwebsites.htm and for other sites, commercial or personal, selectively through the UK Web Archiving Consortium http://www.webarchive.org.uk/.
The life span of personal non-commercial websites can be quite short, often only a handful of years. Often good aviation history sites, with rich and unique content, pass into oblivion when the site owner can no longer maintain them. Anyone who has gone to the effort of creating and maintaining a well-researched private site with unique and sound content could assist future researchers by finding their local web archiving programme and putting their site forward for possible preservation.
For other web-archive programmes, try this Austrian summary of National and State links http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~aola/links/WebArchiving.html.
The Internet Archive also known as the Wayback Machine offers a hands-off but very imperfect alternative. Although frequent, archive copies are often quite incomplete (frequently lacking images and/or pages in whole or in part). And to find archived instances of any site you must know the original URLs or addresses of the site during its existence. For this site, they are: users.bigpond.com/clardo/ from April 2001 to September 2003 members.aardvark.net.au/clardo/ from September 2003 to July 2005 users.cyberone.com.au/clardo/ from July 2005 to date.
Copyright © DR Clark and others 1998–2007. The content of this site is copyright. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute or re-post from this website without my express permission, nor without an agreed form of acknowledgement. Requests for permission to reproduce any of the content in any form should be directed to me in the first instance, at the address above.
Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland. The 211 Squadron badge is British Crown Copyright/MoD, reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office.
www.211squadron.org © DR Clark & others 1998–2008 Site created 15 Apr 2001, last updated 31 Jul 2008. Page created 28 Oct 2001, last updated 31 Jul 2008 Home | Site Summary | Next | Previous | Site Search
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