This story starts in the spring of 1999 with the purchase of a second-hand metal detector and an unhealthy interest (according to my wife, anyway) in all things aviation. (I am a 'volunteer' for the 'Fighter Collection' at Duxford Air Museum and disappear there on any Sunday I can get a 'pass' from the 'C.O.' at home!)

I thought it might be interesting to see what could be found around an old airfield. So using the book "Airfields of the Eighth - Then and Now" by Roger Freeman, I looked for a likely candidate in my local vicinity - Cambridge. Not difficult, considering the profusion of old stations in the area. I eventually settled for 'Station 165' - Little Walden. The tower had been recently refurbished by an architects firm and was currently in use as their offices, and a fair amount of the perry track and odd buildings survived, so navigation around the area would not be to difficult. I then proceeded to obtain permission to prat about with my 'new' machine and a small spade. The Farmer who owned what I considered to be the most promising section of the old airfield - the bomb dump and two demolished dispersal areas, very kindly granted me permission whilst the crop was very low.

I tried my luck around the area of the old hard standings (long gone) and found very little - the odd .50 calibre cartridge and some scrap metal not in any way aeronautical. Still, no time to give up my new hobby. At the end of the day I showed the farmer the findings and what he said was the beginning of months of research. He asked if I could leave the airfield for the time being as the crop would soon be showing and offered me an old field in the village of Little Walden, which he did not use at the time. With the closing phrase of "there is supposed to be a crashed aeroplane in it ..." my eyes lit up a bit. I realised this could be just rural folklore but the field, I resolved, would be interesting anyway (for coins and such like) as it was close to the village centre, so why not give it a go.

I spoke again with the farmer for more background on the 'crash'. Someone who lived through the war in the village had told him that the plane had been "trying to land at the airfield and had been sent round due to an incident on the ground but ran out of fuel". He also heard that there where two crew killed in the crash but had no idea of the type of plane.

Fed with, and fired up by, this information I sallied-forth, spade in hand and fingers crossed. I took a straight line over the field, the long grass hampering my amateur efforts and found a couple of horseshoes at first. Deeper into the area, and a long walk too with finding nothing else, then - 'Bingo!'- Aluminium! I could not believe it!

It was crumpled sheet with, remarkably, dark green paint. So if it was from an aircraft it was top surface skin. Further on another find but this time it confirmed there was a plane in here. It was the business end of a .50 calibre shell, with no rifling marks so I guess it must have gone-off in the crash fire. This was confirmed with the find of several nuggets of melted metal. (All this in the top eight inches). Next came a green tab lever with a part number, so I hoped, at the time, to 'I.D' the type of plane from this piece. Several more bits of crumpled, painted sheet but this time with grey or red paint attached - the grey from the underside, but the red? Anyway, I had enough to go on with, so I went to Duxford, where I volunteer with the 'Fighter Collection' hoping to nail down the plane type. No such luck. It was generally thought that the tab lever was probably from a Mustang, going by the part number, and as the 361st fighter group were based at Little Walden for a period of time, this could have been possible - But Not Definite.

I then thought about asking the "Essex Aviation Group", based at Duxford, if they could help with the identification. We proceeded to go through their list of all recorded crashes 'in Essex' but to no avail. The only one in the area was a well-documented incident in which a 'Boston' crashed in a field in Ashdon, where a local woman was killed in the rescue of the crew of the plane, when it's bomb load exploded. (A trust fund was apparently set up by the USAAF for her child, in recognition of her heroic efforts).

Anyway, this was not 'my' plane.

In association with a couple of members from the Essex Aviation Group (EAG), and after a chat with the farmer, we returned to the site for a further 'ferret about' with detectors and spades. After about three hours of turning up more .50 cal' cartridges (dated at 1943) and all 'cooked off', with several small bits of elaborately shaped bits of aluminium and steel, hope was fading of finding anything substantial to identify the plane or warrant a bigger dig effort. Then - after digging up what appeared to be engine casing bits, the detectors still had a target deeper in the same hole. So down we went, first turning up a plate from the ignition shield, telling us the engine was a 'Wright Aero' product and then the base end of what turned out to be a propeller blade.

At the time it was too big to move and time was running out, so, marking the hole, I returned around three weeks later and recovered the 'blade. It was in remarkable condition, painted black with the yellow tip still prominent. There was a large patch of corrosion around the area that data was usually painted onto the blades, rendering that illegible, but considering the impact of a crash it was 'straight', although sheared off at the hub. I showed the blade to the farmer, and explained that there may be more in the hole, hoping that he would allow the 'EAG' to do a large dig in the field, but he was reluctant about this and so it was not to be.

I then turned my attention to identifying the aircraft involved. It was obviously not a 'Mustang' now, so what was it? I checked with the local newspaper, whose archive microfilm is held at Cambridge Library, and trawled through that. Nothing, not even a mention of the known incident at Ashdon. What or where next?

I was getting more intrigued as to the fate of the 'unknown' plane and its crew, and then resolved to construct some sort of memorial to them, and others who did not make it, from the propeller blade and the bits recovered. This would be erected in a public place in the village, so the 'rumour' and 'folklore' of the whole incident is fact, and not forgotten. But I still needed details.

I wrote to the Imperial War Museum at Lambeth with the gathered information and received a very swift reply. Unfortunately they had no information regarding the crash and suggested I write to the Airforce Historical Research Agency in Alabama. This I promptly did, along with a phone call. They needed a date for the crash and an aircraft type. Bugger!!

I had another chat with the farmer, to try and persuade him to even allow a small dig, to which he agreed, but on the proviso that only he and I did it. He would even supply the JCB and drive it - being concerned with the correct replacement of the top and sub-soil material, so that a subsequent crop would not be affected by the disturbance. This was great news for me, although a disappointment for the EAG, but if I wanted to 'dig' this was the only way forward. So a date was arranged and I met the farmer, in the field, one fine Sunday in July.

We started by scanning the area, where the 'blade was found, with the metal detector, to try and establish the area of the debris. We then took scrapes from the surface, about three inches at a time, scanning the exposed layer for deeper objects. More "cooked" ammunition was found, along with some type of drain valve with 'Gopher' stamped on it, but nothing large. Deeper and deeper, proceeding carefully so as not to miss anything, the finds disappeared after the topsoil layer. Nothing more was found down in the subsoil at all. The search area was expanded and the process repeated, but with the same results. It did not look like a high impact, through the lack of deep finds, and the objects we had, did not tell us a definite type of machine. At the end of the day, the hole was filled and I went away not really any the wiser.

After a lot of thought and reading I could roughly guess that the plane might be a 'Boston/Havoc A20'. (The British and the Americans knew A20's as either). This was through the fact that some where based at Little Walden from March to September '44, as part of the Ninth Airforce, 409th Bomb Group, and they were fitted with 'Wright Cyclones'. It was a start, anyway.

Another phone call to Alabama, but they still needed a date and suggested I look at Police and A.R.P. reports of the area, for the time in question. This I guessed at being sometime in '44, going by the dates on the cartridge cases recovered ('43) and the period when the 409th were stationed at Little Walden, so off I went to Chelmsford Record's Office for an afternoons browsing.

I started off looking through the ARP reports for 1944, but apart from a lot of instances of 'Flying Bombs' in the county, all the aircraft crashes reported did not include this one. I then scanned through the Essex Constabulary Situation Reports for the whole war, held on microfilm. They made very interesting reading anyway, with report headings of 'Objects dropped from the air', 'Crashed aircraft and grounded barrage balloons' and 'persons injured by explosives' (incidentally, these were mostly children 'playing' with munitions found or with fire arms owned by parents in the home guard - kids don't change).

Then, there it was. On the 30th July 1944 at 11:00 am - "a US Havoc crashed at Little Walden and was burnt out. Crew of three killed." So this was the one. (See copy of the report below.)

Armed with this information, I phoned Alabama and told them the date, with which they said they could help very quickly with the crash report. Meanwhile I went to the American Cemetery at Madingley, Cambridge, and asked if they could give me a list of the casualties they had interred from the 409th Bomb Group. They very kindly gave me this, and from it I noticed that several groups of two or three were killed on the same day, including the 30th of July '44. This gave me some names, but I had only to wait a week before I had an envelope arrive from the Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, to confirm the identity of the crew.

I was very pleased with the amount of information that they sent - I received copies of the original Ninth Air Force Accident Report, including three witnesses statements and even the photos taken of the wreckage in the field. (It could be seen from these, even though they are photocopies from microfilm, that there was not a lot left, only surface debris, explaining why we found little in the field 'today'.)

The Report

On the morning of 30th July 1944 a flight of A20's from 640th Squadron, 409th Bomb Group, was returning from France to Little Walden after a Combat Mission in support of ground troops attacking an enemy strong point south of Caumont, using fragmentation bombs. The weather at the time was poor. The cloud ceiling was estimated at 400 feet, wind direction was from north-north west with a speed of 13mph and visibility was 1 to 2 miles. Runway 34 was in use at the time.

The pilot of the aircraft involved, 2nd Lt William Watson, had made an approach for landing in his position in the formation, but pulled up to go around because his landing interval had been too close. Just prior to turning onto the base leg, at an estimated 300 feet, just below the overcast and with his undercarriage lowered, a formation of B26's appeared from the cloud, approaching at 90^o to him and at the same altitude.

He was witnessed to then abruptly manoeuvred to the left and up, in an attempt to avoid the B26 formation. He had apparently reduced his airspeed to lower his landing gear, and the abrupt manoeuvre evidently caused the aircraft to stall, start a partial spin and crash in the field.

The accident happened at 10:48 and was fatal to the pilot and both gunners, S/Sgt George Helland and S/Sgt Alfred Webb. (I found out later that S/Sgt Helland, just one month previously on the 22nd June, had survived a crash a few miles from the airfield in which his pilot, Lt. Paul G. Benson, had perished.)

It was summed up in the report that:

"No part of the responsibility should be charged to the pilot, in consideration of the major cause, weather, the immediate cause - near mid-air collision, and the pilot's instinctive effort to avoid the approaching formation."

As a result, it was also recommended that:

"especially during periods of adverse weather conditions, when formations whose destinations are of close proximity and ETA's are within 30 minutes of each other, that these formations be advised by the common control unit and sufficient interval be agreed upon between landing procedures and/or penetrations over the base."

One witness account records that the B26's were

"Evidently part of a formation of the 344th Bombardment Group, as they were the only ones to report a crash that day, although aircraft from Rivenhall, Great Saling, Matching and Great Dunmow were also landing from approximately 11:00 onwards."

I think that at the time, six weeks after D-Day, when things were hectic in France to say the least and with the close proximity of other airfields both British and American, along with the contributory factor of a typical English summer with low cloud, it is a great wonder that this sort of tragic accident did not occur more frequently.

Or maybe it did? Considering the trouble I had finding out about this seemingly "unknown incident", in local circles at least, maybe it did happen more often. With this particular one tragically happening on the return from a combat mission, to have survived hostile territory only to crash within sight of "home base", the 'powers that be' possibly kept it quiet for the sake of other crew and public moral.

The bottom line to all this is that it is unknown and unreported no more.

I recently made a second visit to Madingley, and managed to locate the graves of the crew among the many hundreds buried there. This place, I think, is a superb monument to that sacrifice, but I shall be discussing the construction of a suitable local memorial, using the parts I recovered, with the village parish council. The intention being to find a suitable site in the vicinity of the village so that this crew and others of the 409th Bomb Group that did not return to Little Walden, AAF Station 165, may be remembered.

I have tried, via the Research Agency in Alabama, to locate or contact the next of kin and friends of the crew so that they may be made aware of my intentions but so far this has been in vain. I hope they approve if I eventually find them.