Hi,
I’m a journalist working for a local newspaper here in Warendorf/Germany and I’m researching the end of WWII in my town for a series of articles in the coming months.
There was an incident I’m trying to find out more about: On March 23th 1945 an american plane on a recon mission was shot down by flak over Warendorf. The plane crashed into a ropery and killed the owner. The man killed was my grandfathers father-in-law, he was the only civilian war dead in Warendorf. The fighter pilot was killed, too, his name was Paul W. Schmidt and he was from Garden City/NY. His mother and his younger brother visited the crash site and his grave here in Warendorf in 1958, there’s a newspaper article about his family visiting my family.
Now I want to tell his and my familiy's story 70 years after liberation.
I did a little research and got the Missing Air Crew Report:
http://i.imgur.com/0ksS2LM.jpgFrom that I know that 1st Lieutenant Paul William Schmidt flew a F6-D10 with the tail number #44-140159
And I got a hint that there are pictures of his aircraft.
Now there's some confusion about this particular tail number because Tamiya offered a model-plane which has an (almost?) identical number, but the date and the pilot don't match.
Is there any chance that a tail number was used twice? I know that the tail numbers were shortened during the war and the first digit(?) was left out.
Can you help me out?
Thank you very much!
