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It was the 10th of May, 1941 and I was living in Kennington near Ashford when a plane came down nearby.

It was in the middle of the night when we heard the sound of a low flying plane, and then a loud bang. A German bomber had completed a bombing run on London, but had then been shot down by a night fighter over Maidstone on its way back to the coast. It finally crashed down in ‘Camp Field’ in Kennington, not a quarter of a mile from where we lived. One engine had caught fire, and then it had crashed down to the ground before scraping along the field for about 300 yards. My father knew the field it went down in well, and we rushed to the crash site. When we got there we saw two others who arrived at about the same time. Most of the German crew had been flung forward into the nose of the plane in the crash, three of them, and there was a gunner collapsed on the floor in the rear. When the plane had come down it had skidded between two trees, each hitting a wing and stopping it in its tracks. Otherwise it would have carried on and hit the farmhouse and done a lot of damage, so that was a bit of luck. We carried the crew out and laid them down on the ground as they were all injured. A German commander appeared through the top hatch of the plane, I remember he was tall and had ginger hair, and he was wandering around the crash site. Mr. Swan of the Home Guard was there, and he spoke German, so he talked with the commander. There was a hissing noise coming from the plane, and we were all worried that it was a bomb about to go off, but it actually turned out to be a burst oxygen tank. That was quite a relief! Eventually the army took the crew to a hospital in Canterbury, and later they were sent to Canada.

When it crashed the plane had torn down a garden fence, and thirty years later there was a knock at the door of the farmhouse. It was the German commander, he’d remembered what had happened and come back after all that time, just to apologise for destroying the fence!

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by James Barton and has been added to the website on behalf of Peter Rainer with his/her permission and they fully understand the site’s terms and conditions.

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