One cold November afternoon in 1940, the Second World War paid an intimate visit to the village of Blewbury in the shape of a badly damaged German Junkers 88 aeroplane with thick smoke trailing behind it.
Children playing in their gardens were among the eyewitnesses who saw this plane flying low above the tree tops.
Its war ended at 13:45 with a crash landing up on Rodens Down, just a couple of miles south of Blewbury and east of Brown’s Firs.
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The exact landing site is close to The Ridgeway just near to where a path to Aldworth branches off.
The crashed Junkers 88 on the Blewbury Downs
Very quickly the Blewbury Home Guard were on the scene to apprehend the three German airmen, who had survived the crash.
They caused quite a stir at Didcot Police Station a few hours later when they proudly turned up to hand them in.
The desk sergeant must have thought that they were pulling his leg when they said that had ‘three German prisoners outside ready to hand over’ and he told them that he would ‘go and get his wife to cook a hot meal for them then’!
Nigel Parker, who is the author of 10 Second World War military aeroplane crash books, lives nearby in Crowmarsh Gifford, and he recently created a small memorial to the fourth crew member, Hans Bossdorf, aged 22, whose body was found inside the wreckage.
Memorial to Hans Bossdorf who died in the Junkers 88.
This was one factor that prompted the Blewbury Local History Group to undertake further research into this intriguing incident.
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They have uncovered an extraordinary set of accessible and very detailed records.
These confirm that the Junkers contained a highly specialised crew, who had flown over the Channel on a lone mission, from the Chateaudun airbase in occupied France.
There is also a detailed report from an RAF intelligence officer who interviewed one of the surviving crew members a couple of days later.
The story that he was given that ‘they had been on reconnaissance over Bristol’ is completely at odds with the detailed account of the 611 Squadron Red Section Spitfire pilots who were scrambled from RAF Digby near Newark, and successfully attacked the plane just west of Nottingham.
They claimed the ‘kill’ and reported that the Junkers 88 was flying just 20ft from the ground, as it limped away, with one engine badly damaged, flying south from the East Midlands area.
Documents recovered from the crash scene confirm that the mission was intended to target the De Havilland factory at Lostock Hall near Bolton, and, as this was the day before the massive German bombing raid, which destroyed much of Coventry, it is highly likely that the plane was also collecting reconnaissance information related to that.
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The war was now effectively over for the crew of four, all aged under 26, but the plane was put on display in St Giles in Oxford a couple of weeks later, and then was exported to the United States, where it starred in a number of ‘War Shows’ including one at Franklin Field, Philadelphia in 1942.
The Mayor of Oxford, Alderman C.J.V.Bellamy inspects the Junkers 88, which was put on display in St Giles.
Eighty years later we are left to reflect on the short life of an exceptionally well designed German plane, which had only come out of the Junkers factory a few months before, the chronic loss of young human lives that occurred in that tragic period of world history, and the memories that are buried up in the beautiful Berkshire Downs that dominate the countryside between Blewbury and Newbury.
Hans Bossdorf, who was the only son of a German farming family, was buried with full military honours in Harwell Cemetery, just a few miles from the crash site.
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His grave there was treated with great care and respect by the villagers, some of whom were most upset when in the 1960s it was exhumed and relocated by the War Graves Commission to a large German military area in the Cannock Chase Military Cemetery. Does anyone know what happened to his three POW crewmates?
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