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I was born in March 1930, so early in 1944 I was 14 and lived at Beacon Hill, Hindhead , Surrey. Following a night raid on London a German heavy bomber, the Heinkel 177A-5 was intercepted by fighters and was severely disabled. It jettisoned it’s bomb load locally (only minor damage and no casualties), and crash landed about half a mile away, tail up in a back garden.

The news got round and I, together with other lads, arrived on the site in the morning, well before the local bobby and RAF personnel from the local radar station. There were parts of the plane scattered everywhere, but what interested us was the cannon ammunition, broken belts of which surrounded the wreck. They say ignorance is bliss, but we hoisted up some of these belts over our shoulders and carried them home to a school friend’s garden shed. Prize souvenirs, we thought, although realising they were potentially dangerous in their present condition.

We decided to disarm them and make them safe. Can you believe it, 14 year olds? Each round was 20 cm long, 20 mm in diameter and comprised a cannon shell in a case, the shell having a nose cone housing a striker, an explosive charge shaped like a roller bearing and a pink compound set at the bottom. We set to, putting each round in the vice, unscrewing the nose cone (carefully), taking out the charge and scraping out the pink mixture. We did this with many rounds and I can remember having a jam jar each for striker pins, charges and pink mix. We then reassembled them less charges and pink mix and rendered them safe as souvenirs.

The climax of it all, and our downfall was we noted that the pink mix would glow red hot when a match was applied so we decided to put a fair amount in a jam jar, get it going red hot and then put a charge on top. The whole was put on a sheet of corrugated iron in our friend’s back yard and we retired to a safe distance across the road. As you may imagine it wasn’t long before it went up, alarming the neighbours and leaving quite a large crater. I can’t recall any reprimands but the incident alarmed the authorities, and through the school appealed to those who had these cannon shells to hand them in. They did!

In the panic that resulted I buried my collection (all very safe) in a powdered milk tin, under a tree at the bottom of my parents garden and thought nothing about them for about 40 years, when a back access drive to the property was to be formed. The tree had long gone and I hired a metal detector to locate my ‘horde’ but to no avail, rusted away I presume.

For this article I have researched the Internet, and details of the bomber can be found on page 14 of www.ww2guide.com/germanb.shtml. On researching the ammunition it was high explosive.

In retrospect we were very lucky.

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