Our page for Captain Brown was added recently, and it seems the timing was opportune, as the American PBS series "Secrets of the Dead" just happened to feature an interview with him regarding his World War II exploits as part of the "The Hunt for Nazi Scientists" programme, which just happens to be available online.

Links on the page.

Interestingly, it would appear that even with such a ranking position he had to be careful about how much he told his superiors about what he was doing. His early account of testing the Me 163 apparently referred only to gliding tests, however it would seem that more recent tales of flying what amounts to little more than a death-trap - his own assessment was that with the number of pilots it killed versus the number of Allied aircraft/bombers it brought down, it was more of an asset to the Allies than the Germans - were actually in a fully fuelled an operational aircraft.

When you think about it, this makes sense, as the evil little beast had such a small wing area, it depended on that rocket motor to give it speed and make the little wings work, its lift would have been so low, and its glide speed so high - with no undercarriage and only a landing skid, it liked to kill its pilots on landing - that towing the thing aloft would have been near impossible and extremely hazardous due to the high take-off speed needed. It would probably have been so unstable at low speed it would have crashed itself, and probably taken any towing aircraft with it too. But his bosses wouldn't have known that!

I hadn't realised, when I made the preceding post, that journalist Sir Charles Wheeler had died recently.

He appears in the "Secrets of the Dead" mentioned above, as Captain Charles Wheeler, 30 AU Intelligence Officer, Royal Marines.

He's written some interesting articles too. The facts and a good story is quite relevant to some of the items we cover occasionally, where we have to depend on little more than hearsay and assumptions based on what may comprise otherwise undocumented remains - or no remains at all on some cases.

Charles Wheeler was a scrupulous reporter who tirelessly pursued the truth. But on one occasion, a story that seemed far-fetched turned out to be true after all, says Lisa Jardine.

Never take a story at face value. That has to be the watchword, for those of us whose job it is to paint a vivid picture of past events.

Whether historians or journalists, we have a responsibility to sift through the stories we are told - even those recounted by eye-witnesses - collating them with the documentary and archival evidence, until we can be sure that the story is a sound one and its message reliable.

Sound words.

I wonder what he'd have made of the Iranian missile story?

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-image-a-missile-too-many/index.html?hp

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/photoshop-frenzy-on-iran-missile-tests/

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/07/attack-of-the-p.html

I finished reading about the remarkable Captain Eric Brown. What an interesting story. I'd never heard of him before, and I find his aeronautical achievements absolutely outstanding. The famous German test pilot, Hanna Reitsch, had nothing on this man! 487 different aircraft is one thing, perhaps just imaginable, but I just cannot imagine anyone making 2407 landings on an aircraft carrier, unbelievable! Geez, 'n he's from Edinburgh; ach, why weren't we told all about him in History 123.