No. 112 Squadron Royal Air Force

112 Squadron was formed at Throwley aerodrome on 30th of July 1917 and served as a Home Defence Squadron until it was disbanded in June 1919.
It was reformed aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Argus in Portsmouth on 16th May 1939. It immediately set sail for Egypt and arrived there ten days later. The Squadron was equipped with Gloster Gladiators the following month, and was based at RAF Helwan just outside Cairo when war broke out in 1939.
Airfields at which 112 Squadron was based:

Helwan (Egypt) from 26 May 1939;

'B' Flt detached to Sudan 2 June 1940 - 31 August 1940 then redesignated as 'K' Flight and eventually to form 250 Squadron.

Maaten Gerawla 17 July 1940 - 3 September 1940;

'A' flight detached to Sidi Barrani 17 - 30 August 1940;
'A' Flight to Z LG (LG 08) Matruh West 30 August - 3 September 1940;
'C' Flight detahced to Y LG (LG 06) 30 August - 3 September 1940;

Sidi Barrani LG 30 3 - 7 September 1940;
Sidi Haneish 7 September 1940 - 1 January 1941;

C Flt detached to Z LG (LG08) 14 September 1940 - 1 January 1941;

Amiriya 1 January 1941

Eleusis (Greece) 23 Jan 1941 - 1 Feb 1941
Yannina 1 Feb 1941 - 16 April 1941 ;

Detachment 'A' Flight to Paramythia 7 March 1941 - 15 April 1941;

Agrinion 16 April 1941
Hassani 17th - 22 April 1941;
Evacuated to Egypt 24 April 1941;

Detachment at Heraklion, Crete 24 April - 18 May 1941;

Lydda (Palestine) 29 April - 31 May 1941;
Fayid (Egypt) 31 May - 11 August 1941;

Detachment to Haifa, Palestine July/August 1941;

Maaten Gerawla 25 July - 12 September 1941;
Sidi Haneish, LG 102 12 September - 14 November 1941
Sidi Bahraini LG 110 14 - 19 November 1941;
Fort Maddelena (Libya) LG 122 19 November - 19 December 1941;
EL Adem 19 - 21 December 1941;
Msus 21 December 1941 - 24th January 1942;
Mechili 24 - 28 January 1942;
Gazala 28 January - 2 February 1942
El Adem 2 - 5 February 1942;
Gambut main 5 February - 17 June 1942;
Sidi Azeiz 17 - 18 June 1942;
Sidi Baranni LG 75 (Egypt) 18 - 24 June 1942;
Sidi Haneish LG 102 24 - 27 June 1942;
El Daba LG 106 27 June 1942;
Amiriya LG 91 28 June - 25 August 1942;
Amiriya LG 175 25 August - 6 November 1942;
El Daba LG 106 6 - 8 November 1942;
Sidi Haneish LG 115 9 November 1942;
LG 76 (South west of Maaten Bagush) 10 - 15 November 1942;
Gazala No 2 (Libya) 15 - 19 November 1942
Martuba 19 November - 6 December 1942;
Belandah No 2 (Alam-el-Gzina) 6 December 1942 - 9 January 1943;
Hammraiet 9 - 19 January 1943;
Bir Dufan 19 - 25 January 1943;
Castel Benito (Tunisia) 26 January - 15 February 1943;
El Assa 15 February 8 March 1943;
Neffatia 8 - 21 March 1943;
Medenine 21 March - 3 April 1943;
El Hamma 3 - 14 April 1943;
El Djem 14 - 18 April 1943;
Kairouan 18 April - 21 May 1943;
Zuara 21 May - 9 July 1943;

Safi (Malta) 9 - 18 July 1943;
Pachino (Sicily) 18 July - 2 August 1943;
Agnone 2 August - 15 September 1943;
Grottagilie (Italy) 15 - 19 September 1943;
Brindisi 20 - 23 Sept 1943;
Bari 23 September - 3 October 1943;
Foggia Main 3 - 26 October 1943;
Mileni 26 October 1943 - 30 January 1944;
Cutella 30 January - 21 May 1944;
LG San Angelo 21 May - 13 June 1944;
LG Guidonia 13 - 24 June 1944;
LG Falarium 24 June - 9 July 1944;
LG Crete 9 July - 28 August 1944;

detachment LG Rosignano 12 - 16 August 1944;

LG Iesi 28 August -- 18 November 1944;
Fano 18 Nov 1944 - 25 February 1945;
Cervia 25 February - 19 May 1945.
More info.

2nd June 1940 Detachment

7th June 1940 Aircraft transferred

10th June 1940 On patrol

14th June 1940 In Action

16th June 1940 Air defence duty, Erkowit

18th June 1940 Killed in flying accident

29th June 1940 Italian bomber shot down

3rd July 1940 Attachment

17th Jul 1940 Move towards Libya

18th July 1940 Crashed in low cloud

25th Jul 1940 Move

3rd August 1940 Move forward

4th August 1940 Melee

17th August 1940 Attack on Navy fleet

17th August 1940 Move to the front line

31st August 1940 Change of operational control

4th Sep 1940 Detachments reunited

6th September 1940 Ineffective combat

15th September 1940 Sidi Barrani lost

15th Sep 1940 Patrol

15th October 1940 Obsolete aircraft back onto operations

31st October 1940 Air battle over Mersa Matruh

6th November 1940 Battle over Abyssinia

20th Nov 1940 In Action

1st December 1940 Re-equipped with Hurricanes

1st Dec 1940 Transfers to Greece

4th December 1940 Dog fight

7th December 1940 Pilots return.

8th December 1940 Attacks Made

9th December 1940 Advance

22nd December 1940 Gladiators damaged

30th Dec 1940 Patrol

1st January 1941 Respite

23rd January 1941 Move to Greece

10th February 1941 Airfield bombed

20th February 1941 Escort duties

20th Feb 1941 Escort Duty

28th February 1941 Battle over Albania

28th Feb 1941 In Action

4th March 1941 Italian warships attack

7th March 1941 Detachment

9th March 1941 Killed in combat

11th Mar 1941 Escort Duty

11th Mar 1941 In Action

13th Mar 1941 Aircraft Lost

13th Mar 1941 Dogfight

14th Mar 1941 In Action

23rd March 1941 Raid on airfield

26th March 1941 C.O. killed

26th March 1941 Combat over airfield

12th Apr 1941 In Action

13th April 1941 King goes into exile

16th April 1941 Battle of Athens

19th April 1941 Evacuation

22nd April 1941 Gladiator force on Crete

29th April 1941 Move to Palestine

1st May 1941 Withdrawal

5th May 1941 In Action

11th May 1941 In Action

13th May 1941 Airfield attacked

14th May 1941 German Ace shot down

16th May 1941 Dog fight over Heraklion

18th May 1941 112 Squadron abandons Crete

19 May 1941 Hurricanes obtained

20th May 1941 Escape on foot

20th May 1941 Back onto operations

31st May 1941 Move back to Egypt

June 1941 Re-equipped

2nd Jun 1941 Escape

25th June 1941 New aircraft

11th August 1941 Return to Palestine

12th September 1941 Back to the Western Desert

14th Sep 1941 In Action

25th September 1941 112 Squadron Tomahawk shot down

3rd October 1941 Australian pilot killed

14th November 1941 On the move

19th November 1941 Move into Libya

20th Nov 1941 In Action

25th Nov 1941 Dog fight

30th Nov 1941 In Action

4th December 1941 In Action

5th Dec 1941 In Action

21st December 1941 Move to the west

22nd December 1941 Axis airfield attacked

27th Dec 1941 Aircraft Lost

24th January 1942 Withdrawal East

28th January 1942 Retreat

2nd February 1942 Moving east

17th February 1942 Move to the east

8th March 1942 Bomber attacked over Tobruk

18th June 1942 Back into Egypt

24th June 1942 Movements

6th November 1942 Move to the front line

8th November 1942 Leapfrog

9th November 1942 Moving into Libya

11th November 1942 Aerial combat

15th November 1942 Move to Gazala

16th November 1942 Moving again

19th November 1942 Fighter/bomber command

6th December 1942 Attacked on the move

11th December 1942 Solitude

31st December 1942 Sandstorm

5th January 1943 Moving in

9th January 1943 Move completed

19th January 1943 Moving across Libya

20th January 1943 Move to Bir Dufan

23rd January 1943 Fall of Tripoli

26th January 1943 Airmen drowned in a storm

28th January 1943 New command structure

3rd February 1943 Visit by Churchill

12th February 1943 Preparing to move.

8th March 1943 Move into Tunisia

21st March 1943 Moving on

3rd April 1943 On the move

14th April 1943 Patrols over the Mediterranean

18th April 1943 Moving on

21st May 1943 Training role

9th July 1943 Move to Malta

19th July 1943 Move into Sicily

15th September 1943 Move to the Italian mainland

20th September 1943 Moved on

26th October 1943 Mud

30th January 1944 Fighter bomber Wing assembled on the Adriatic

February 1944 Army support and anti-shipping sorties

March 1944 Close support

29th April 1944 Airfield straffed by friendly fire

18th May 1944 Attack on Monte Cassino

21st May 1944 Move to the west

13th June 1944 Move to Rome

16th June 1944 New aircraft

24th June 1944 Move north

27th June 1944 Royal visit

9th July 1944 Move forward

7th August 1944 In Action

12th August 1944 Operation Dragoon

28th August 1944 Move east

29th Aug 1944 Airman tortured and killed

18th November 1944 On the move

18th February 1945 Killed in action

25th February 1945 On the move

19th May 1945 Army of occupation

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Those known to have served with
No. 112 Squadron Royal Air Force
during the Second World War 1939-1945.

Duke DSO, OBE, DFC & 2 Bars, AFC, FRAeS. Neville Frederick. Sqn.Ldr.
Johnson William Alexander Jenkinson. F/Lt.

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Sqn.Ldr. Neville Frederick Duke DSO, OBE, DFC & 2 Bars, AFC, FRAeS. 112 Squadron

Sqn. Ldr. Neville Duke was a very famous test pilot. His obituary published in the Telegraph on 13th of April 2007 reads:.
The test pilot Neville Duke, who has died aged 85, was an icon of the New Elizabethan Britain of the 1950s. At the dawn of the television era, when media personalities were born within black and white newsreels, picture weeklies and smudgy tabloids, the former Royal Air Force squadron leader had the celebrity of sportsmen such as Stanley Matthews, movie actors such as Dirk Bogarde, or the conquerors of Everest. It was a form of celebrity almost unimaginable now, built not only on Duke's performance as a test flier but on his record as a wartime fighter ace.
Duke was far from being the first or only test-pilot-as-hero during that time, but as the country edged out of postwar austerity, his style and achievements singled him out. His understated public persona - in contrast perhaps to American equivalents such as Chuck Yeager - suited the public mood. Duke may have been a technologist doing an extraordinarily hazardous job, but he also provided an ideal image for the domestic aviation industry. In those days the annual Farnborough air display, in a pre-multinational era when it showcased only British aircraft, was a part of middle England's summer season.
Duke's aircraft was the Hawker Hunter jet fighter. He took the machine from its trials, as the Hawker P1067 in July 1951, to a world speed record of 727.6mph in September 1953, achieved in the impeccably English setting of Bognor, Littlehampton and Worthing, just three months after the Coronation. It was a time when the Eagle comic's Dan Dare Pilot of the Future - RAF fantasia relocated in outer space - fuelled those New Elizabethan dreams of sound barriers, supersonic flight, new empires and interplanetary travel. Duke even showed up, dressed for the part, in the Eagle's "Heroes Of Today" slot. In 1951, the white-overalled pilot had dispensed with old-style leather flying caps for what became part of his trademark, an American white helmet, born of gridiron football, pre-astronaut 1950s modern and soon adopted by teenage ton-up motorcyclists on their Tiger 110s.
In the immediate postwar period, the British fleetingly held a world lead in jet technology. But soon the power of the US made itself felt. In October 1947, Yeager piloted the rocket-powered Bell XI through the sound barrier and the F86 Sabre jet fighter achieved the same in a shallow dive.
In 1950 the Korean war began, and, in a defining moment, the Labour government began its rearmament programme, feeding more money into the aviation industry. Duke took over as chief test pilot at Hawker in 1951, following the death of "Wimpy" Wade in a Hawker P1081. By then both the US and the Soviet Union had high-performance frontline fighters - the F86 Sabre and the MIG15 respectively. The RAF, meanwhile, did not fly its own obsolete Gloster Meteor jet fighters in Korean war combat. Thus were the Hawker Hunter, conceived in 1948, and the Supermarine Swift - together billed as successors to the Hurricane and Spitfire - heralded as a solution to the RAF's problems and a fillip to national pride.
The Swift flopped, except as a star of David Lean's 1952 feature film about intrepid test pilots, the Terence Rattigan-scripted The Sound Barrier. The Hunter did not flop, and what set the seal on its success, and Duke's fame, was his performance at the 1952 Farnborough show. Standing in the aircraft park, Duke had watched as the test pilot, John Derry, and his navigator, Anthony Richards, broke the sound barrier in their black de Havilland Dh110. Then catastrophe ensued. The jet disintegrated, its crew perished and 28 spectators were killed by flying debris. Minutes later, Duke took off in the Hunter. It was, he recalled in his autobiography Test Pilot (1953), a lovely day for flying. Eight miles above Odiham he dived the fighter at 40 degrees, descending at 50,000 feet a minute. Minutes later, the Hunter's sonic boom reverberated around Farnborough. The show had gone on. "It was characteristic of you," prime minister Winston Churchill wrote to Duke, "to go up yesterday after the shocking accident."
Duke was educated at the Convent of St Mary and Judd School in Tonbridge, Kent. In the 1930s, as air shows toured a country newly intrigued by flying, the schoolboy Duke took several flights with Sir Alan Cobham's flying circus.
He enlisted in the RAF as a cadet in June 1940 and later joined 92 Squadron, flying Spitfires. The first plane he shot down was a Messerschmitt Bf109 over Dunkirk in 1941. Later that year he joined 112 Squadron, initially flying American Curtiss Tomahawks with the Desert Air Force. Later he flew the Curtiss Kittyhawk, then returned to later marques of the Spitfire. Duke had two spells as a flight instructor, but as a fighter pilot his spectacular record meant he ended his war in North Africa and Italy as the RAF's leading ace in the Mediterranean, having destroyed 28 enemy aircraft, and having spent a spell with Italian partisans after he was shot down.
In 1945 he became a Hawker test pilot and in 1946 joined the Empire Test Pilots School in England. That June he was seconded to the RAF High Speed Flight, set up for development work - and to break the world air speed record. That September the aim was briefly achieved when Group Captain Teddy Donaldson flew his Meteor at 615.78mph.
Jet aircraft incarnated the future. Landing in Prague that June in a Meteor, Duke was met, and mobbed, by a 150,000-strong crowd. In 1947, he married Gwendoline Fellows. The following year he left the RAF and joined Hawker as assistant chief test pilot, remaining an officer with the Auxiliary Air Force. In 1949-50 he achieved world records on flights between London and Rome, London and Cairo and London and Karachi. In July 1954, the Hunter entered service with the RAF. It was beautiful, but, within cold war logic, late, with a performance little better than the F86 which the Americans had been operating since the beginning of the decade. Yet it was a major sales success, with nearly 2,000 produced for many countries, including Chile. It was a flight of Hunters that strafed Santiago's Moneda palace during the 1973 Pinochet coup, and the fighter was still in service with some air forces in the 1990s. Its contours are echoed in the contemporary American B1 bomber.
In 1956 Duke left Hawker, after a forced landing led to serious and long-lasting back injuries. Yet his subsequent career in test flying continued into the 1990s on light aircraft. From 1960 to 1982 he ran Duke Aviation and subsequently worked as a consultant. He published six books, including Sound Barrier, Test Pilot (both 1953), the anthology The Crowded Sky (1959) and The War Diaries of Neville Duke (1995).
He received many awards and decorations, including the DSO, OBE, DFC and two bars, AFC, MC (Czech) and fellowship of the Royal Aeronautical Society. His hobbies were yachting - and flying. Forty years on from his 1953 world record, he co-piloted a re-creation of the flight in a two-seater Hunter. The Hunter, he observed that day, was the love of his professional life. A decade ago, interviewed for a BBC2 documentary The 600mph Men, he painstakingly described the technique of flying the Hunter into the sound barrier and coming out across an airfield at 720mph. "Piece of cake," he concluded, in the language of another time, and smiled. Hours before his death, Duke felt unwell while flying his aircraft with his wife. He landed safely. Gwendoline survives him.

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F/Lt. William Alexander Jenkinson Johnson 112 Sqdn.

My dad, William Johnson, joined up because he didn't like what Hitler was doing. He trained for a year in Zimbabwe, then went to join the war. He was based in Khartoum and was involved in various battles leading up to the first battle of El Alamein. He was shot down, then moved into the Qatari Desert. He was the talk of the desert when he tried to rescue his boss. He cut his radio, landed and the bullets flew, but he just could not get him out. He went back with two others but still could not get him out. However, they shot the place up.
He was in Bara, Sulmona, then Bologna. Dad escaped in Italy but was recaptured and taken by cattle truck to Wernsburgh and then to Strasbourg to Fort Bismarck. After that he was sent to Stalagluft 3. His room mate was shot with Roger Bushell. Dad was the only Scotsman in the 112 and was on the long march. Dad finished up on the Danish border, perhaps taken by the SS. I don't know when he came back and how or when he left the RAF. He was in hut 112.

Rosalind

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No. 112 Squadron Royal Air Force
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Those known to have served with No. 112 Squadron Royal Air Forceduring the Second World War 1939-1945.

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The Wartime Memories Project
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Those known to have served with
No. 112 Squadron Royal Air Force
during the Second World War 1939-1945.