Sunday, April 6, 2014

Franz Ferdinand, Count Colloredo-Mansfeld


At the age of eighteen, by Atelier d'Ora.

Franz Ferdinand Colloredo-Mansfeld (March 1, 1910, Rome - January 14, 1944, sea near Berck-sur-Mer, France), son of an Austrian (Bohemian) diplomat, count Ferdinand Colloredo-Mansfeld and his American wife, née Nora Iselin.  For most of his youth he lived in Vienna, but he appears to have had at least dual citizenship, and graduated from Harvard in 1932.  In 1933, he married an American, Mabel Bradley, of an old Boston family, and together they had three children.  After the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, while many of his countrymen joined the Luftwaffe, he went to Great Britain and enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve.  He piloted Spitfires, eventually promoted to the rank of Squadron Leader, the Commander of the No. 132 Squadron "City of Bombay".  He was shot down and killed in January of 1944, at the age of thirty-three.

As an infant, with his mother (?).
His mother, née Nora Iselin, a portrait by de László .
Signed photograph, in his plane, the year before his death.



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