Where paths of History Cross (pt 2).

One summer weekend about ten years ago my wife’s cousin visited. Our family reunion was interrupted by a telephone call from our neighbour who wondered what he should about a piece of ordinance he had found hidden up on the top of a wall plate in an out house. It was about 6 inches long and about ¾ of an inch thick, with a pointed end. My wife’s cousin happened to be an Artillery man so we all trotted down the lane to inspect the object. Observed from a distance the expert opinion was soon being voiced that it was clearly live, lethal and could by now, be unstable. With such things it is always better to fear the worst and do the best, in this case calling bomb disposal. Things moved quickly, even on a sleepy hot afternoon. A truck arrived and the dangerous object removed.

By contrast, Christmas Day 1944 was foggy and most families were sitting round the wireless listening to the Kings Christmas message. In one farm house two girls were playing upstairs and granny was downstairs in the kitchen. A loud thump suddenly broke the quiet of the farm, and one or two other farms in the area. ‘Will you two girls behave yourselves, and stop jumping off that bed. You’ll have the plaster down!’

Even these two fit country girls could not have made such a crash, for crash it was. A bombing mission over Germany had ended on our common a few yards from another occupied farmhouse. The farmer had been called in from tending his cows to hear the Kings Message and the cows he would have been tending were killed when an American Liberator Bomber came to earth. The crew had bailed out in two stages. The flight deck first as the plane was on fire. They landed in Germany, but due to a break in communications, the fire now out, the rest of the crew remained on board. A brief inspection had shown the flight deck empty, the plane on automatic but all the dials on danger. They jumped over France. Bold Venture lived up to its name and flew on, ran out of fuel and its unsupervised glide path passed over RAF Madley to its crash site. The policeman who had arrived first asked the village boys to take a quick look to see whether there were any crew on board, as they were more agile and smaller. As a result various souvenirs were brought home before a round the clock guard was mounted and the wreckage cleared. You guessed it; some shells went home with the boys. Their reward was a good walloping by their concerned dad. It would seem that someone had hidden one shell before the rest were returned to the wreckage.

And the other path of history that crossed that glide path? It was into the same airspace from RAF Madley that Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess took off in October 1946, to face trial in Nuremberg before serving a Spandau Prison. He died on 17th August 1987 only to leave this world with yet another puzzle at the end of a puzzling life. Did he hang himself or was he strangled?

Dacier

(With acknowledgements to The Hereford Times 22/12/2004 where a full account of the crash can be found)