I guess it's me..... so continuing on from where Dave left off -
According to the German authorities of that time the Lancaster Bomber is said to have been brought down near Daensen at 2.02 a.m. on the 3rd of August 1945 . The crew still had explosives and incendiary bombs on board as well as canisters of phosphorus. This was shown by the weight of several fire bombs. “It exploded on crashing,” Pintatis and Alsdorf were convinced. According to eye-witnesses the plane was also being chased by night fighters; the explosion was heard in Daensen and Pippenhausen. The wreck, with the dead inside it, sank in a field at the edge of a wood in a crater of around 30 metres diameter. A rescue party from the air force in Stade, night fighters were stationed at the military airfield there, searched around the area on the same day. Body parts are said to have been visible. Parts of the wrecked plane had spread as far as 400 metres.
After the war scrap metal collectors attempted to salvage the rest of the wreck using pumps and pulleys. In the end the pumping out failed and they had to borrow a motor. Very soon the cockpit with the dead pilots became visible, as eye-witness Walter Johannsen from Pippensen reported a few years ago in the TAGEBLATT before the ordnance disposal team examined the site of the crash. Later the crater increased in size, and a part of the huge waterhole was filled with rubbish, reported Dietrich Alsdorf. Today the crash site is protected as a war cemetery and monument.
In 1976 Alsdorf found the tube from a pilot’s oxygen mask there. Around 100 Allied and German planes had crashed in the Stade district between 1939 and 1945. On their return flights home British bombers would drop their remaining bombs on villages such as Apensen, Hollenbeck and Ahlersted to gain height. Airmen who crashed but survived were sometimes badly treated and robbed.
In 2013 Pintatis and the relatives of the crew members held a discussion in an internet forum. The Aderstorfer (Pintatis?) was certain, following excavations approved by the town archaeologist Dr Bernd Habermann, that it must be connected with the downed bomber, even though the plate with the engine number was lacking. The proof: only one of the three Lancaster planes downed on that night had a Packard-Merlin engine, also Pintatis had dug up a flap from a machine gun (Browning 303 MG) with the legend W5000 and a bomb release mechanism.
Jan Stosiek, Peter Lyon, Roger Gibb and Tony Clifford laid a wreath for the dead at the memorial stone on Saturday. Clifford spoke movingly about how important it was for all of them to have certainty about the circumstances of their relatives’ deaths and Peter Lyon also stressed that there was a place of remembrance for them. Pintatis emphasized that the men had fought against Nazi dictatorship and for freedom. Both the Germans and the Britons emphasized how happy they were that peace had now ruled for over 70 years.
