The men who raise the wings of war — ghouls or historians?
Aug 2, 2022 19:47:20 GMT 12
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Post by Dave Homewood on Aug 2, 2022 19:47:20 GMT 12
The men who raise the wings of war — ghouls or historians?
By RICHARD GIRLING, "Sunday Times,” London
There is no undergrowth. The soil, when the spade bites, is a poisonous blue. A thin hedge, sparse as an adolescent’s chin, has outgrown its strength in the upward dash for light. There has been too much death: life here is still too difficult. What happened was monstrously routine. Late one afternoon in February, 1943, an American Liberator bomber was returning to the 44 Bomb Group base at Shipdam, 40 miles inland from the Norfolk coast — twenty tons, 110 ft wingtip to wingtip, a crew of 10.
It had dropped four tons of bombs on Germany: it had been stung by gunfire and was burning. Eight hundred feet above the East Anglian fields, four miles short of its home runway, it blew apart. On the ground, the heat was enough to weld alloy to flint.
As military archaeological digs go, this one is not rewarding. It took four million parts to make a Liberator. Shattered into flecks and dusted across two fields, the pickings are thin. The metal detector wails like an unobtainable telephone as it hunts among the roots. Its occasional yelps lead the searchers to a shovelful of Jubilee clips, several dozen 50 calibre machine gun bullets, and, biggest prize of the day, the dead navigator’s dividers. The spades also turn up some unidentifiable engine fragments, twisted by fire; Perspex chips from cockpit and gun turrets; and clods of sterile earth, stained R.A.F. blue by rotting aluminium.
In the middle of a Kentish cornfield another group of searchers have better luck; and worse. Better because they unearth the complete, though horribly compacted, wreckage of a Messerschmitt BF109 fighter. Worse because not all the remains are mechanical. Some are human.
This new war game, played with metal detectors and earthmovers, was born in the 1960s when a very few individualists decided that a Heinkel on the lawn would be one up on the neighbours’ gnomes. It was an eccentric hobby, apparently ghoulish, and thoroughly disorganised. But the idea took fire.
Serious war historians began to involve themselves. Up and down the land, men who had been boys, cheering from the sidelines while the Battle of Britain was fought, organised themselves into local aviation history societies and began to dig. Rivalries were passionate. One group devoted itself to pinpointing and uncovering the Hurricane of a distinguished pilot. After dark, another collector arrived with a mechanical digger and made off with the engine.
It was indecent, and people’s sensibilities were hurt; though there was nothing new in that. One Hurricane pilot who survived his crash complained that souvenir hunters had begun their pillage while he still sat trapped in the cockpit, his body heavy with shrapnel.
When the new archaeology hit full stream, up came Spitfires and Hurricanes, Heinkels, Dorniers, Lancasters, and Junkers. Most were empty, but not all. Up, beneath the spades of men, came the bones of youth. Among one Lancaster crew the navigator was identified by the dental plate inside his skull. He would have been a mature, professional man; no other member of the crew could have been old enough to need false teeth.
Up from an Oxfordshire meadow came the bones of a Wellington’s terrier mascot. Up from grassy fields and hillsides came young Englishmen, Czechs, Poles, and Germans. It was not easy to look at. Stomachs were stirred; minds were jolted.
When it touches death, a little reality goes a long way. Other truths, too, revealed themselves to the dreamers. Aircraft had remained where they crashed because they were in inaccessible places where digging was hard and miserable work. Often the only reward for days of toil was a sprinkle of mud-clogged shards which it took days more to clean, identify, and restore.
The glory boys did not last long. Those who remained were men of serious purpose. But what was their purpose?
It cannot be doubted that their activities do arouse some ill feeling. “Better left alone,” is the kind of pencilled comment that will appear in the visitors’ book at the Kent Battle of Britain Museum, where the biggest single collection of relics is kept. Fear of disapproval does prompt some men to shroud their hobby in packages of academicism.
Take off the wrapping, however, and what remains is a simple fascination with the machinery of war. No disrespect is intended; nor, in most cases, is any offence taken. For instance, it was at the request of surviving relatives that the Kent group recently traced and exhumed the remains of a young Spitfire pilot for reburial in a churchyard.
What matters most to the discoverers of a new wreck is the precise identification of the machine and the story of the pilot. The history of a recently discovered Messerschmitt is typical. The crash site had long been known to the Kent Battle of Britain Museum. Hop-pickers had watched a BF109 slice into a field at Mountain Street, near Chilham , Kent, on September 2, 1940, and their memory of it was clear. This is the classic method of site identification: by patient inquiry, tapping local knowledge.
Before excavation can begin, two permissions are needed: from the Ministry of Defence, and from the landowner. In those cases, now relatively few, where human remains are likely to be present, it is also necessary to inform the police. In this particular case the landowner would give his consent only on condition that the recovery was made by an Army bomb disposal team.
Territorials of 590 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Squadron RE (V), from Rochester, homed in on the wreck with a Forster bomb-locator — a powerful metal detector, ironically of German manufacture.
An aeroplane can sink through soil at up to a foot a year and it is not unusual to have to burrow 30 feet or more. This time, however, the tip of the tailplane was only four feet down and the propeller boss 12 feet, brought up short by a substratum of chalk. Eight feet, from nose to tail. Eight feet, smashed down from twenty-six.
The machine guns were bent like bananas; the back armour, from behind the seat, was crushed into the engine. The pilot was a few small pieces of ivory, resting on some rotted shreds of Luftwaffe grey. No one enjoys finding him; he is accorded every respect. The bones become the responsibility of the local coroner’s officer and, two months later, still rest in the mortuary at Ashford.
An inquest must eventually decide who the man was, and how he died. His few personal belongings have little evidence to give: a rotted wallet, a kidney-shaped leather purse, two campaign medals, some Belgian money, a chromium expanding wrist strap and — sign of a prudent man — a French-made Dunlop inner tube, his personal life support system for use in the event of ditching at sea.
But the Messerschmitt itself is more eloquent. Its starboard undercarriage leg yielded an identification plate, bearing a clearly legible works number: WN 1574. This was supplied to the Ministry of Defence which in turn passed it on to the West German Embassy, still trying to make an identification.
Not so the Kent Battle of Britain Museum. Even before the excavation began, its copies of British wartime intelligence reports had led museum officials to suspect the number of the plane they would find, and the identity of the pilot. They had already contacted the man’s brother in Germany and had been given a photograph (reproduced above left). For confirmation, they took down from their bookshelf one large, heavy volume: “Battle Over Britain,” by Francis K. Mason, They turned to page 341, where Mason tabulates Luftwaffe losses for Monday, September 2, 1940. And there it was: Messerschmitt BF109 E-4 (1574), recorded as a 100 per cent loss.
The pilot was Oberleutnant Schelcher, of Staff 111 Gruppe. Jagdgeschwede 54, a well-known fighter wing based at Guines in Belgium and known as Grunherz (Greenheart). He had been killed at 6.25 in the evening by Pilot Officer M. Feric, of 303 (Polish) Squadron, Northolt, who was himself shot down in the same engagement but managed to make a safe landing just north of Dover.
How is it, then, that private enterprise can summon more efficient military intelligence than the authorities of two governments? Is it believable?
The answer lies behind an apparently derelict shopfront in the tiny country town of Watton, peacefully asleep in that isolated part of the Norfolk flatlands that still seems to have more aerodromes than villages.
Here Frank Mason has his office. Mason is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Associate of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He is author of “Battle Over Britain” and it is his connection with World War Two military archaeology which, as much as anything, gives it solid respectability.
The book is a kind of Wisden of the Battle of Britain. A day-by-day account, immaculately detailed: who was shot down by whom, where and at what time, with battle histories of the individual men and their machines. British and German alike. It is a triumph of research, the product of 12 years’ obsessive hard work: 636 pages of words and pictures But when Mason claims knowledge of German aeroplanes that have not even been excavated, and of which the Ministry of Defence know nothing, can he be relied upon?
Mason's answer is that his information is as good as Goering's own. At the end of the war the British captured eight of the nine original copies of the Luftwaffe’s Quartermasters’ returns, cataloguing the Germans’ own records of their aerial losses: which plane, which pilot, where and when. These became available for public inspection in 1966 and Mason, then unemployed, spent every day for nine months copying them out in longhand. Shortly afterwards, the Ministry of Defence, at the Germans’ request, returned the records to Bonn. Which is why the only available copy, detailing every aerial loss from 1939 to 1941 which was known to the Germans themselves, lies behind a whitewashed window in Watton High Street.
In Mason's handwriting, Schelcher’s name is clear; and he has yet to find an error either in the German records themselves or in his own transcription of them. However, the original lists were typed in German by French girls and spelling mistakes, particularly in unfamiliar foreign names, are an obvious possibility. But still: if the name was not Schelcher, then it had to be something very like it.
And Feric? He was the only pilot to claim a victory in the right place at the right time: circumstantial evidence, but of the strongest kind. It convinces Mason, and that’s good enough for the Kent Battle of Britain Museum, which considers the story of WN 1574 now to be complete.
When the authorities in their turn have an identify anon they can be satisfied with, and when an inquest has been held, the fate of the pilot's bones will be decided. Any specific wish of the surviving relatives will be honoured. Otherwise Obit Schelcher will be buried at the Cannock Chase Luftwaffe cemetery. The Kent museum collection is on permanent display during the summer months at Chilham Castle. There are wings ripped from Spitfires and Messerschmitts; there are parachutes, first aid kits and bullets and bombs; there are photographs of the pilots, with extended captions telling their stories, kept up to date by those who survived. (Luftwaffe veterans eagerly accept invitations to be present when their aircraft are disinterred).
There are Hurricane engines and instrument panels: there is Dowding's uniform: and there is much else besides. It is a haunting, chilly and evocative place, at once a tribute to the heroism of the men who flew, and a brain-stopping glimpse, for those too young to remember, of what it meant to be alive at a time when it was the men to take to the sky daily business of young and kill each other.
THE PRESS, 27 DECEMBER 1977
By RICHARD GIRLING, "Sunday Times,” London
There is no undergrowth. The soil, when the spade bites, is a poisonous blue. A thin hedge, sparse as an adolescent’s chin, has outgrown its strength in the upward dash for light. There has been too much death: life here is still too difficult. What happened was monstrously routine. Late one afternoon in February, 1943, an American Liberator bomber was returning to the 44 Bomb Group base at Shipdam, 40 miles inland from the Norfolk coast — twenty tons, 110 ft wingtip to wingtip, a crew of 10.
It had dropped four tons of bombs on Germany: it had been stung by gunfire and was burning. Eight hundred feet above the East Anglian fields, four miles short of its home runway, it blew apart. On the ground, the heat was enough to weld alloy to flint.
As military archaeological digs go, this one is not rewarding. It took four million parts to make a Liberator. Shattered into flecks and dusted across two fields, the pickings are thin. The metal detector wails like an unobtainable telephone as it hunts among the roots. Its occasional yelps lead the searchers to a shovelful of Jubilee clips, several dozen 50 calibre machine gun bullets, and, biggest prize of the day, the dead navigator’s dividers. The spades also turn up some unidentifiable engine fragments, twisted by fire; Perspex chips from cockpit and gun turrets; and clods of sterile earth, stained R.A.F. blue by rotting aluminium.
In the middle of a Kentish cornfield another group of searchers have better luck; and worse. Better because they unearth the complete, though horribly compacted, wreckage of a Messerschmitt BF109 fighter. Worse because not all the remains are mechanical. Some are human.
This new war game, played with metal detectors and earthmovers, was born in the 1960s when a very few individualists decided that a Heinkel on the lawn would be one up on the neighbours’ gnomes. It was an eccentric hobby, apparently ghoulish, and thoroughly disorganised. But the idea took fire.
Serious war historians began to involve themselves. Up and down the land, men who had been boys, cheering from the sidelines while the Battle of Britain was fought, organised themselves into local aviation history societies and began to dig. Rivalries were passionate. One group devoted itself to pinpointing and uncovering the Hurricane of a distinguished pilot. After dark, another collector arrived with a mechanical digger and made off with the engine.
It was indecent, and people’s sensibilities were hurt; though there was nothing new in that. One Hurricane pilot who survived his crash complained that souvenir hunters had begun their pillage while he still sat trapped in the cockpit, his body heavy with shrapnel.
When the new archaeology hit full stream, up came Spitfires and Hurricanes, Heinkels, Dorniers, Lancasters, and Junkers. Most were empty, but not all. Up, beneath the spades of men, came the bones of youth. Among one Lancaster crew the navigator was identified by the dental plate inside his skull. He would have been a mature, professional man; no other member of the crew could have been old enough to need false teeth.
Up from an Oxfordshire meadow came the bones of a Wellington’s terrier mascot. Up from grassy fields and hillsides came young Englishmen, Czechs, Poles, and Germans. It was not easy to look at. Stomachs were stirred; minds were jolted.
When it touches death, a little reality goes a long way. Other truths, too, revealed themselves to the dreamers. Aircraft had remained where they crashed because they were in inaccessible places where digging was hard and miserable work. Often the only reward for days of toil was a sprinkle of mud-clogged shards which it took days more to clean, identify, and restore.
The glory boys did not last long. Those who remained were men of serious purpose. But what was their purpose?
It cannot be doubted that their activities do arouse some ill feeling. “Better left alone,” is the kind of pencilled comment that will appear in the visitors’ book at the Kent Battle of Britain Museum, where the biggest single collection of relics is kept. Fear of disapproval does prompt some men to shroud their hobby in packages of academicism.
Take off the wrapping, however, and what remains is a simple fascination with the machinery of war. No disrespect is intended; nor, in most cases, is any offence taken. For instance, it was at the request of surviving relatives that the Kent group recently traced and exhumed the remains of a young Spitfire pilot for reburial in a churchyard.
What matters most to the discoverers of a new wreck is the precise identification of the machine and the story of the pilot. The history of a recently discovered Messerschmitt is typical. The crash site had long been known to the Kent Battle of Britain Museum. Hop-pickers had watched a BF109 slice into a field at Mountain Street, near Chilham , Kent, on September 2, 1940, and their memory of it was clear. This is the classic method of site identification: by patient inquiry, tapping local knowledge.
Before excavation can begin, two permissions are needed: from the Ministry of Defence, and from the landowner. In those cases, now relatively few, where human remains are likely to be present, it is also necessary to inform the police. In this particular case the landowner would give his consent only on condition that the recovery was made by an Army bomb disposal team.
Territorials of 590 Explosive Ordnance Disposal Squadron RE (V), from Rochester, homed in on the wreck with a Forster bomb-locator — a powerful metal detector, ironically of German manufacture.
An aeroplane can sink through soil at up to a foot a year and it is not unusual to have to burrow 30 feet or more. This time, however, the tip of the tailplane was only four feet down and the propeller boss 12 feet, brought up short by a substratum of chalk. Eight feet, from nose to tail. Eight feet, smashed down from twenty-six.
The machine guns were bent like bananas; the back armour, from behind the seat, was crushed into the engine. The pilot was a few small pieces of ivory, resting on some rotted shreds of Luftwaffe grey. No one enjoys finding him; he is accorded every respect. The bones become the responsibility of the local coroner’s officer and, two months later, still rest in the mortuary at Ashford.
An inquest must eventually decide who the man was, and how he died. His few personal belongings have little evidence to give: a rotted wallet, a kidney-shaped leather purse, two campaign medals, some Belgian money, a chromium expanding wrist strap and — sign of a prudent man — a French-made Dunlop inner tube, his personal life support system for use in the event of ditching at sea.
But the Messerschmitt itself is more eloquent. Its starboard undercarriage leg yielded an identification plate, bearing a clearly legible works number: WN 1574. This was supplied to the Ministry of Defence which in turn passed it on to the West German Embassy, still trying to make an identification.
Not so the Kent Battle of Britain Museum. Even before the excavation began, its copies of British wartime intelligence reports had led museum officials to suspect the number of the plane they would find, and the identity of the pilot. They had already contacted the man’s brother in Germany and had been given a photograph (reproduced above left). For confirmation, they took down from their bookshelf one large, heavy volume: “Battle Over Britain,” by Francis K. Mason, They turned to page 341, where Mason tabulates Luftwaffe losses for Monday, September 2, 1940. And there it was: Messerschmitt BF109 E-4 (1574), recorded as a 100 per cent loss.
The pilot was Oberleutnant Schelcher, of Staff 111 Gruppe. Jagdgeschwede 54, a well-known fighter wing based at Guines in Belgium and known as Grunherz (Greenheart). He had been killed at 6.25 in the evening by Pilot Officer M. Feric, of 303 (Polish) Squadron, Northolt, who was himself shot down in the same engagement but managed to make a safe landing just north of Dover.
How is it, then, that private enterprise can summon more efficient military intelligence than the authorities of two governments? Is it believable?
The answer lies behind an apparently derelict shopfront in the tiny country town of Watton, peacefully asleep in that isolated part of the Norfolk flatlands that still seems to have more aerodromes than villages.
Here Frank Mason has his office. Mason is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Associate of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He is author of “Battle Over Britain” and it is his connection with World War Two military archaeology which, as much as anything, gives it solid respectability.
The book is a kind of Wisden of the Battle of Britain. A day-by-day account, immaculately detailed: who was shot down by whom, where and at what time, with battle histories of the individual men and their machines. British and German alike. It is a triumph of research, the product of 12 years’ obsessive hard work: 636 pages of words and pictures But when Mason claims knowledge of German aeroplanes that have not even been excavated, and of which the Ministry of Defence know nothing, can he be relied upon?
Mason's answer is that his information is as good as Goering's own. At the end of the war the British captured eight of the nine original copies of the Luftwaffe’s Quartermasters’ returns, cataloguing the Germans’ own records of their aerial losses: which plane, which pilot, where and when. These became available for public inspection in 1966 and Mason, then unemployed, spent every day for nine months copying them out in longhand. Shortly afterwards, the Ministry of Defence, at the Germans’ request, returned the records to Bonn. Which is why the only available copy, detailing every aerial loss from 1939 to 1941 which was known to the Germans themselves, lies behind a whitewashed window in Watton High Street.
In Mason's handwriting, Schelcher’s name is clear; and he has yet to find an error either in the German records themselves or in his own transcription of them. However, the original lists were typed in German by French girls and spelling mistakes, particularly in unfamiliar foreign names, are an obvious possibility. But still: if the name was not Schelcher, then it had to be something very like it.
And Feric? He was the only pilot to claim a victory in the right place at the right time: circumstantial evidence, but of the strongest kind. It convinces Mason, and that’s good enough for the Kent Battle of Britain Museum, which considers the story of WN 1574 now to be complete.
When the authorities in their turn have an identify anon they can be satisfied with, and when an inquest has been held, the fate of the pilot's bones will be decided. Any specific wish of the surviving relatives will be honoured. Otherwise Obit Schelcher will be buried at the Cannock Chase Luftwaffe cemetery. The Kent museum collection is on permanent display during the summer months at Chilham Castle. There are wings ripped from Spitfires and Messerschmitts; there are parachutes, first aid kits and bullets and bombs; there are photographs of the pilots, with extended captions telling their stories, kept up to date by those who survived. (Luftwaffe veterans eagerly accept invitations to be present when their aircraft are disinterred).
There are Hurricane engines and instrument panels: there is Dowding's uniform: and there is much else besides. It is a haunting, chilly and evocative place, at once a tribute to the heroism of the men who flew, and a brain-stopping glimpse, for those too young to remember, of what it meant to be alive at a time when it was the men to take to the sky daily business of young and kill each other.
THE PRESS, 27 DECEMBER 1977
