TheGenealogist marked last month’s anniversary of the famous Royal Air Force Dambusters raid on the Ruhr Valley dams in May 1943 by releasing a large tranche of fully searchable RAF Operations Record Books (ORBs) including the ORBs for the famous No 617 Squadron, giving an insight into their lives.
With a release of 1,550,018 records, bringing the total to 6,748,021, these new diary-like RAF documents paint a picture of the goings on in a squadron on a day-to-day basis for those units under British control.
These are uniquely fully searchable by: forename and surname; squadron; and date range. Using keywords, users can also search for service number, rank, and duty, aircraft type and location where the fields appear in the record. This makes it possible to easily find your Royal Air Force ancestors and discover more about their war time activities on the base and in the air.
See the usefulness of these contemporary daily diary entries in a short video that spotlights the famous leader of No 617 Squadron, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, V.C., D.F.C. and Bar, D.S.O. and Bar as he and his unit prepare for their mission to drop the bouncing bombs on the German dam targets: youtube.com
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The Operations Record Books are for squadrons primarily from after the First World War, although there are a few early squadron records from 1911 to 1918. These ORBs follow the daily happenings in the air and on the base, and frequently name the brave aircrew who battled against the odds.
You can use the collection to follow an airman’s war time experiences from these fully searchable Air Ministry operations record books which cover various Royal Air Force, Dominion and Allied Air Force squadrons that came under British Command. The AIR 27 records allow the family history researcher a fascinating insight into their relatives serving in a number of wartime air force units, as can be seen in the video.
Find out more about the AIR27 record set here .
This release expands TheGenealogist’s extensive Military records collection for Diamond subscribers.
To take a deeper look into these records read TheGenealogist’s feature article and see how 617 Squadron recorded the famous Dambuster operation in the ORBs from the time here