The day a Lancaster bomber crashed on my Wednesfield street - killing its crew
80 years ago a Lancaster Bomber crashed on the sleepy farming village of Wednesfield, near Wolverhampton. MARK ANDREWS recalls chatting to a man who witnessed it.
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Bob Westworth pointed to a line of trees behind his childhood home, describes the horror of the scenes he witnessed.
"I was not quite eight years old, and I had been scraping butterfly eggs off the cabbages we were growing in the garden," he recalled. "This plane came down, it was about the height of the top of the trees you see there. The engine was misfiring, it was going ‘bang, bang', and there was black smoke as it went out of sight. The engine stopped, and there was a short silence, followed by a terrible crash."
On May 17, 1945, the youngster watched in horror as a Lancaster bomber crashed just yards from his home in Wednesfield, Wolverhampton, killing all seven of its crew. It is thought to be the only death of servicemen in Wolverhampton throughout the whole of the war, and was all the more tragic that it happened nine days after Germany's surrender and an end to the war in Europe.
On Saturday, the people of Wednesfield were joined by relatives of some of the airmen for a memorial service to commemorate the crash, with a Lancaster bomber flying over the site.
A few years earlier, young Bob had stood on the doorstep of the house in Neachells Lane with his grandfather watching the sky glow red as German bombs rained down over Coventry. But that was very different, it was a long way away. This time he found himself face-to-face with one of the airmen.
"I saw a man in sandy-brown overalls in the doorway, or a hole, behind the right wing," he said. "He looked as if he was contemplating jumping."
Bob did not know why the man and his fellow crewmen did not jump to safety. About 35ft above the ground, it was probably too high, but the plane was obviously losing height at a rapid speed. Maybe they felt the need to control the plane to prevent it causing devastation to the village, which at that time was still a quiet farming community.
"I went into the house and told my mum," said Bob told the Express & Star six years ago.
"She got her Hercules bike out of the shed with the child seat on the back, put me in it, and a few minutes later we were at the crash site in a field belonging to Dickie Lewis, a local farmer."
