As the museum continues to grow we sometimes have to look back in order to move forward. After acquiring the Individual Aircraft History Card on the P-40K, a couple important pieces of information have been revealed. While it is known that this particular plane was part of the Lend Lease Act and went to fight in Russia outside of Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula, how and when it arrived was never 100% certain. We now know the plane was received by the USAAF on November 1st, 1942 and was shipped out of Brooklyn, NY on November 3rd 1942. After going through Naval archives the only arctic convoy leaving on that date was HX.214.
HX.214 went from New York, to Halifax-Nova Scotia, to Liverpool, England. It arrived in Liverpool on November 18th 1942. It is uncertain which ship the P-40K was on when it left the states or which ship it was on when it left Liverpool. It also unknown at this point which date it left Liverpool as shipping manifests and Lend Lease Records are still being attained. However it is known that the P-40K arrived in Russia in November of that year. The P-40K crashed on September 29th, 1943 which means that the museum’s P-40 flew in Russia for ten months before being written off.
