Salvaging Old Aircraft

Because of the global extent of the war, the wrecks can be found in a wide variety of situations. When the aircraft preservation movement began to gather momentum in the 1960s, enthusiasts discovered that certain mountainous areas of Britain were quite literally strewn with aircraft wreckage. The inaccessibility of the sites, however, made recovery very difficult, so attention turned to digging up aircraft that had plunged into farmland and become deeply embedded. There were, too, the underwater wrecks, sometimes perfectly preserved in mud or fresh water, though more often corroding on some bleak sandbank. Farther afield, the jungles and abandoned airstrips of the Far East, the deserts of the Middle East and many areas of continental Europe yielded more treasures of aeronautical history.

In some countries, the number of wrecks is surprisingly large. For example, during the Battle of Britain alone several hundred aircraft from both sides were shot down over southern England. Wherever possible the wrecks were cleared at the time, but in some cases, the craters could only be filled in and in others, the wrecks were not even found.

Thus it often happened that the pilots’ bodies had to rest where they lay. Because of this, and because of the presence of bombs and live ammunition in many wrecks, the British Ministry of Defence has drawn up a set of guidelines for the increasing number of groups that have been forming all over Britain to investigate crashed wartime aircraft. If a group wishes to tackle a site in the UK they must first send full details to a specialist department of the Ministry, known as S10 (Air), who will then decide whether or not to grant permission to recover what is legally Crown property. German aircraft also come into this category and responsibility for crashed American types has been delegated to the Ministry by the US Government.

In practice, the Ministry of Defence rarely withholds permission, except when it is known or suspected that the crew are still in the aircraft. In such cases, permission is not normally granted because of the distress that can sometimes be caused to next of kin when bodies are found unexpectedly.

To coordinate all this amateur activity, the Aviation Archaeologists’ Association was founded in 1973. This was later expanded into the British Aviation Archaeological Council, whose aims are to encourage and assist the efforts of those engaged in the research and recovery of aircraft wrecks from World War II, unite those with common interests and record their work. It was thought that the pooling of knowledge could only be of benefit to those concerned and reduce the possibility of duplicated research. Most important of all, the Council urges that all activities be conducted with due observance of the necessary formalities. There is also the advantage that a united front can be presented to the authorities to convince them that enthusiasts can be responsible and dedicated.

But how does one find out exactly where and why all these aircraft came to grief? In many cases, the answer can be found at the RAF’s Air Historical Branch, which has cards filed by date and aircraft type -but not by location -giving details of each of about 200,000 wartime accidents of varying degrees of severity. These are made available to researchers by prior appointment and one can also cross-check with the Operations Record Books of RAF units in the Public Record Office at Kew, near London. Having established the approximate location, it is usually easy to find a local inhabitant who remembers the actual incident. Then -with the landowner’s permission, of course – a search with a metal detector can soon determine the exact spot. In newly ploughed fields fragments of metal are nearly always present on the topsoil or lying in the adjacent hedgerows.

Few landowners refuse to allow recovery attempts, apart from postponements until crops are lifted. Most are curious to find out what is buried and there have even been cases where aircraft have been dug out from under lawns with the householder’s blessing!

Hand-digging is of course the cheapest and most common method of excavation, but the more affluent groups hire mechanical excavators to reach engines which are often embedded over 30 ft deep. Most recovered material is crumpled out of recognition, but smaller parts like control columns and cockpit instruments have been preserved virtually undamaged in the earth. These and other items, cleaned and renovated, form the basis of a number of museums around the country. Suitably captioned displays and models bring to life in a graphic way what to the layman would be a collection of scrap metal.

For obvious reasons, wreckage on high ground tends to be fragmented, but it is still a useful source of parts for non-flying restorations. The RAF Museum has obtained some for its Beaufighter in this way and the Fleet Air Arm Museum procured others for its Swordfish. The Royal Scottish Museum’s Flight Section at East Fortune near Edinburgh has most of the fuselage of a Spartan Cruiser, a pre-war three-engined airliner that crashed on the Ayrshire moors in 1938. All the occupants walked away and there it lay until 1973 when a Sea King helicopter lifted it out.

Help from the helicopter.

The helicopter is the answer to aircraft recovery from remote areas, but the cost is high and beyond the means of amateur groups. However, it can be justified in a limited way by the military authorities as a training exercise.

One of the most ambitious projects of this type in Britain involved the last known surviving Short Stirling. This four-engined bomber which preceded the better-known Lancaster and Halifax was extinct apart from the remains of one example on Mickle Fell, which at just over800 metres is the highest point in Yorkshire. The RAF Museum decided that, although the airframe had been cut up into large sections by the wartime salvage team and then partly buried, it was worth collecting for a partial restoration. In 1978 a Puma airlifted the remains to the nearest road about four miles away and they are now in storage for a future project.

The American rescue squadron based in Suffolk has provided an HH-53 Jolly Green Giant on several occasions as a combined public relations/training exercise. Twice, memorial stones have been carried up to mountain peaks to commemorate the dead, and the casings of some of Sir Barnes Wallis’s experimental bouncing bombs have been dragged from the mud at Reculver in Kent for preservation.

When a plaque was placed on the Cairns more of Fleet in southern Scotland in 1980, the Americans brought down an engine from a Heinkel He 111 which had crashed there in August 1940. The tail of the German bomber had been recovered in remarkably good condition some years prior to this and is now displayed in the North-East Aircraft Museum at Sunderland Airport.

Generally, there is more hope of finding a well-preserved high ground wreck in soft peaty moorland, as total disintegration was the usual result of a collision with the hard rock of Snowdonia, the Lake District or the Western Highlands. A bog in Sutherland harboured the intact fuselage, wings and engine of a Fairey Albacore, an antiquated torpedo-carrying biplane of which no examples survived for very long after the war. The crew had got lost in bad weather on a patrol from the Orkneys and force-landed successfully. Subsequently, the machine was abandoned as it was considered uneconomic to salvage it. Thirty years later it flew again – suspended beneath a Wessex helicopter – and is now in store for the FAA Museum.

Raised from the water

The RAF itself does not engage in official recovery work for wartime aircraft except where they present specific hazards, but individual RAF groups sometimes become involved in such activities as part of their adventurous training.

In this way, the RAF Museum has acquired most of a Gloster Gladiator which sank in a Norwegian lake after the ice that formed its improvised airfield had melted. Also from Norway came a Halifax bomber which had made a crash landing on the ice after attacking the Tirpitz in 1942. The crew escaped and it sank in about 30 ft of water. In 1973 an RAF diving team raised it, the last known survivor of more than 6,000 built. Despite the long immersion was in remarkable condition with guns, ammunition, instruments and other equipment in good order. When connected to a battery the cockpit lights illuminated. The aircraft was returned to England and given anti-corrosion treatment pending a long-term restoration. It will now join the new Bomber Command Museum at Hendon.

Other famous RAF types which failed to survive for posterity include the Hampden and Whitley bombers. Many large sections of Whitleys exist at crash sites in the Scottish Highlands to this day, some worthy of preservation but almost inaccessible. In 1977 a Hampden missing since 1942 was found on a mountain in Lapland with the remains of three of its crew still aboard. It was sadly smashed and after some initial hopes of recovery, it was left once more to the snow and ice. Several others disappeared on the same ferry flight to Russia from the Shetlands and may yet lie in the same wilderness.

In direct contrast, the tropical vegetation of parts of Southeast Asia hides aircraft, that both Japanese and Americans, left when the war moved on. Papua New Guinea is a major source of such relics and many were shipped to Australia and the USA before the local government banned exports of what it saw as the island’s heritage. One of the most interesting aircraft from a historical point of view was a Zero fighter, proved by its identification numbers to have taken part in the raid on Pearl Harbour. The jungles, too, conceal many crashed aircraft and a recent expedition uncovered the remains of the Betty bomber in which Admiral Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet was killed. He was shot down in April 1943 by American Lightnings.

The deserts of North Africa were littered with aircraft after the war but as soon as the more valuable abandoned relics had been salvaged, the local people turned their attention to those aeronautical. Some were not so easily reached, however, and languish there to this day. The most famous was the liberator Lady Be Good found by an oil exploration team 20 years after she crash-landed in the Sahara. The unfortunate crew, lost returning from a raid on Naples, baled out into the darkness just before the fuel was exhausted but perished trying to walk to safety. Their bomber came down intact and was perfectly presented in the sand – guns and equipment still in place, coffee still drinkable in flasks. One of the propellers was removed to the USA as a memorial to the crew.

The most prolific area for lost aircraft is Holland’s Ijsselmeer, formerly known as the Zulder Zee. Lying on the main route for Allied bombers attacking Germany, it became a grave for many of them and their crews. The tremendous task of reclaiming land from the sea has brought many of these hulks to light. Since many, there are bombs and bodies still aboard, the Royal Netherlands Air Force has been solely responsible for all salvage work. To date more than 150 have been dealt with, mainly British and American heavy bombers. One oddity was a Gotha G IV of the type used to raid England in the First World War. Most of the Dutch wrecks have been disposed of as scrap, but many components have been presented to museums or dedicated as memorials.

Underwater wrecks

Britain, too, has its underwater wrecks, hundreds of them in coastal waters, but official records rarely give the accurate locations essential to pinpoint them. Amateur divers have come across remains occasionally and some are said to be in remarkable condition. More accessible are the aeroplanes exposed by the tide in numerous river estuaries. The Solway Firth, for example, was known in the RAF as “Hudson Bay” because of the number of Hudson aircraft that ended up in it from the training base at nearby Silloth. At least two can be reached with care but are so corroded as to be beyond restoration.

Lough Foyle in Northern Ireland could be described as one of the largest open-air aviation museums in the world. The southern shores are fringed with former wartime airfields and inevitably some aircraft ditched or crashed in its shallow waters. At low tide, several are revealed on the sandbanks – one at least, a Royal Navy Corsair, in quite good condition. The others include two more Corsairs, a Firefly, a Barracuda and a Coastal Command Liberator. An American Flying Fortress on delivery ditched off Magilligan Strand, short of fuel. All the crew were rescued and it was still where it sank. Half-buried in the sand on the Eire side of the lough is the stripped hulk of what was once a brand-new Liberator. During the closing stages of a ferry flight from Canada near the end of the war, the crew became lost and force-landed on the beach.

Throughout the world, there must still be hundreds of missing aircraft awaiting discovery. Among them, a number could be intact and one day may find their way into museums. As long as aviation holds its fascination there will be no shortage of volunteers to recover them.