This is another skin for next month's Dunkirk-based FSO. There is a well known photo of this 605 Squadron aircraft partially sunk into the sand of a beach with four German soldiers posing by it, but as the airframe code's been overpainted it has not been known who flew it. So I have done a bit of detective work and worked out who it was. An airframe list from a book I have let me find the airframe codes of the sixteen Hurricanes allocated to 605 Squadron before June 1940. I then traced the eventual fate of each of these aircraft on an online RAF airframe database. There is only one which really fits the story of the photo, as described below:-
This Hurricane Mk I L2119 was flown by Flt. Lt. Norman Forbes of 605 Squadron during 1940. While normally based in Scotland at this time 605 were transferred south for a week to fly patrols over northern France during the Dunkirk evacuation. On one of these patrols on the 27th May Flt Lt Forbes was forced to make a wheels down landing on a French or Belgian beach. He was captured and later became a POW in Colditz castle while his aircraft sank up to its belly in the soft sand once the tide came in.
L2119 had the standard black left, white right underside RAF ID scheme of the time, Sky undersides for RAF fighters were not mandated until a few weeks later. Unusually it also has the "T" of the squadron code repeated behind the spinner left and right and the squadron's bear and staff emblem painted over the fin flash. Whoever did this seems to have repainted the fin flash in reverse with the blue part of the flash at the front.
