Hello everyone, I was wondering if anyone could help me. I have successfully researched the aviation history in my home town going back to 1909 all the way up until the outbreak of WWII. I would like to diligently put together a record of all the combat and sorties flown by the Luftwaffe, the RAF an later the USAF over my region, but I can't seem to find any books or websites that deal in that sort of dry information. The area I'm looking at in Essex, England.
I know that there is the National Archives, but unfortunately to do what I would like to do I would have to buy every record at £3.50 each which would cost upwards of thousands of pounds! Thankfully I managed to find a couple of books on WWI that did this, giving just a day to day account - but obviously there were very few sorties flown in WWI and it was a comparatively easy task.
Does anyone have a starting point, or know of any resource I could use? I've been looking for books and have yet to find anything that seems to fit the bill.
I'm not sure there's an alternative to spending some serious time (or money) at the National Archives going through Operations Record Books in AIR 27. Countryside Books publish a range including Essex Airfields in the Second World War that might be a useful starting point, but getting down to an individual sortie level would, I think, need to get into ORBs. If there are other options the folks at the RAF Commands website and forum might be able to suggest some pointers.