No. 25 Squadron RNZAF
military unit
No. 25 Squadron of the Royal New Zealand Air Force was formed at Seagrove, Auckland in July 1943 with Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers and served in the Southern Pacific based at the Piva Airstrip on Bougainville, flying missions against Japanese forces on Bougainville and at Rabaul. It was disbanded in May 1944 and reformed as a fighter/ground attack squadron flying F4U Corsairs. It served in Santo, Guadalcanal, Los Negros and Emirau, before returning to New Zealand and being disbanded in September 1945.
Formation
No. 25 Squadron was formed at Seagrove Aerodrome, near Auckland, in July 1943 under the command of Squadron Leader Theo de Lange. Its initial complement of aircraft was nine Douglas Dauntless SBD-3 dive bombers loaned from United States Marine Aircraft Group 14, which had been stationed at Seagrove. More Dauntlesses were received in following months as the flying personnel trained in dive bombing techniques in preparation for service in the Solomon Islands campaign. On 13 September, Pilot Officer William McJannet and Sergeant Douglas Cairns were killed when their Dauntless crashed near Waiuku.
Espiritu Santo
On 30 January 1944 squadron personnel were flown by Lodestar and C-47 aircraft of No.
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This entry incorporates text from “No. 25 Squadron RNZAF” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.