WWII Aircraft Wreckage Found Near Watten?

[MadPict]

Over on the forum for the Flypast magazine someone posted this (http://www.keypublishing.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16013) about an article in the 8th Sept edition of the P&J


Wreckage from a World War II fighter plane recovered from a Caithness peat bog has been positively identified.
Detective work by several aviation experts and RAF records have confirmed that the engine came from a Bristol Beaufighter which crashed soon after taking off from Wick, in December 1943.
The plane was fully armed and fuelled for a mission when an engine failed and it ploughed into moorland on Strath Farm, Watten........

Can anyone shed any light on this item of news? I am going to link to this post so if you have any information please post it here.

Thanks

[George Brims]

Well I have a wee bit of information about this plane crash. Actually it's not as if the plane crash site was unknown, more that the people who knew about it have died or moved away (in my case, all the way to California).

First some family history. My dad was born and grew up at Flex, the farm above Strath, then farmed at Strath from the early 50s until 1968. I lived the first 14 years of my life at Strath until 1968, when we moved to Watten.

The day the plane crashed my dad happened to be driving to Wick and was just passing through Strath (on the Watten-Lybster road that passes the Camster cairns). He noticed this plane coming by, trailing smoke and steadily losing height. He stopped the car and watched it crash-land on the moorland to the West of the river. The crew were able to climb out but the plane itself burned. The site, when I was last there, had a depression in the ground where the heather had burned off and some of the underlying peat had burned too. I don't know how badly hurt the crew were, and have always wondered. I noticed there was no mention of this plane in the "Wings over Wick" book. Perhaps it was an episode the crew members didn't want to recall!

According to my dad, the Air Force sent out a low-loader to collect the remains of the airframe, but ahead of it two half-track vehicles came out from Wick. Instead of going all the way up the paved road to Strath and crossing the river there, they crossed at Pennyland farm and made a beeline across the moor to the crash site. Not only were they dumb enough to break through the boundary fence between the two farms (there was a gate at the end by the river), but they drove side by side so they broke it at two separate places! Needless to say the goverment ended up paying for the fence to be fixed.

Then as they crossed the moor, the driver of one half-track turned to call something to the other, and realised there was no vehicle alongside him any more. Looking back, he saw the other vehicle sinking in a bog. He went back and gave the other driver a hand to get out, and they tied a rope to the sinking half-track to see if it could be pulled free. As they realised that it wasn't going to stop, they started to mark the rope every foot to see how deep the thing would go. When it finally stopped, they were able to add the length of the rope to the height of the vehice where they attached the rope, and got a depth for the peat in that moor of 38 feet! Most of the airframe was hauled away on the low loader, but one engine had sunk into the peat. Despite a lot of effort with a block and tackle they weren't able to retrieve it.

I used to go and play around the crash site and retrieve bits from it, along with my friend Robert Swanson (his dad was shepherd at Strath for many years). That side of the farm was a very featureless gradually sloping open moor, making it hard to pick out the site from a distance, so we had a hatch or door from the plane that we propped up to help us find it again. The hole with the engine at the bottom was at least ten feet deep and filled with clear water. As the years went on sphagnum moss was gradually growing in from the sides, so it got harder to see the engine cowling. Among the artifacts we reclaimed were a number of cannon shells, by then pretty corroded. They were ammunition for many an imaginary plane. One day my father found me with a hacksaw, determined to investigate the innards of one of them, which was clamped in a vice in the farm workshop. Silly man seemed to think this a bit risky and promptly confiscated the lot, the big spoilsport.

That's all I can recall for now, except that I had always though the plane was a Beaufort torpedo bomber, not the Beaufighter version. If it was late in the war, it would probably have been a Beaufighter. It could carry a torpedo in place of the Beaufort, which was gradually phased out as the primary torpedo bomber for Coastal Command from 1943.

[squidge]

Wow George

that was really interesting

Squidge

[MadPict]

George,
Many thanks for that 'eyewitness' account. Certainly made interesting reading - I was beginning to think no-one was going to reply!


http://hometown.aol.co.uk/MadPict/images/flaminblob.gifMadPict
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[George Brims]

Well I was very pleased to find out after all these years that the crew were OK. I sort of vaguely recalled my dad telling me that one guy pulled the other out, but wasn't confident enough of my waning grey cells to put that bit in! I wonder if they are still alive?