Baxter's link to Midlands

Flying Officer Baxter was posted to RAF Montford Bridge near Shrewsbury for six months from February 1944 as an instructor on Spitfires. Montford Bridge was an Operational Training Unit - a school for fighter crews.

He was to meet his future wife at the nearby USAAF 8th Army OTU at Atcham Airfield, where the Americans were flying the P47 Thunderbolts.

At a gathering at Atcham Airfield he was to meet Lieutenant Sylvia Katheryn Johnson, of the US Army Nursing Corps, from the Field General Hospital at Oulton Park. She was an American from Boston.

Baxter's posting at Montford Bridge ended on June 4, 1944. On his favourite Spitfire he would later have her name, Sylvia K, inscribed near the cockpit, when with the 602 squadron. Sylvia died in 1996.

North Shropshire at that time was home to some 20 airfields used by the RAF, Navy and USAAF - mainly for training - some operational, with many more ancillary/associated military sites of many units,.

In an interview Raymond said: "I've always had a very great regard for the Americans, because in two-and-a-half tours of operations on Spitfires, they were the only people to actually succeed in shooting me down."

He was the "voice" of the Farnborough annual air show, in the days when broadcast media had a greater interest in aviation - covering the development of Concorde, from test flights to first service flight in 1976.

Stephen King, Leicester Street, Whitmore Reans.

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