It's A Small World

It's still amazing to me how the world wide web has made the world shrink. Last week I received an e-mail from Stuttgart, Germany.

my Name is Bernd. I`m 51 years old and live in Germany near Stuttgart. I am mechanical engineer and reserve officer.

My friend Rolf grew up in a small village in the south of Stuttgart. A few years ago he told me about a crashsite of a bomber in the SCHOENBUCH forest northern TUEBINGEN.  At the place in the forest I sew no parts of a plane.

Rolf told me, that when he was a boy, big parts of a plane lay there. In the late sixties the last parts were scrapped. Body and wings were scrapped in war. His grandfather found a type plate on a motorpart. BRISTOL Hercules. a radial motor.  At the moment the plate is lost in Rolfs cellar -

We searched  surface of the place and found small alluminum parts of a crashed british plane: I found a .303 case with headstamp dated 1943.  Rest of a 4 lbs incendiary bomb. Then I found the most important artifact: a part of a fuel tank gauge. 1-114 GALLONS with a Serial number. I started a investigation and the result: this Instrument was only used in LANCASTER Bombers in the flight engineer`s panel.

LANCASTER  with  BRISTOL Hercules radial motors? I never heard or read before.

The LANCASTER BII Version used by RCAF was right.

I searched for all planes of this version,  lost on raids  to STUTTGART in 1943 or later, with unkown crashsites. I found only 3 airplanes. One crashed in France on it`s way back, the second was downed by a nightfighter near the STUTTGART Airport.

Only your father`s  LANCASTER DS829 remained.

At 15/16th March 1944  863!" bombers started to STUTTGART.  From England they fley to the LAKE CONSTANCE then turned left to the north direction STUTTGART.  The crashsite is about 25 miles south of the target. Do you know where your father bailed out?

I replied that Dad remembered bailing out into the Black Forest.

hanks for the Information.  In my opinion  your Dad remembered right, because the Black Forest is near to the crashsite. No problem for a falling plane.