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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Maggie Smith from WM CSV Action Desk on behalf of Mr H Bennett from Stourbridge in the West Midlands and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr. H Bennett fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

In October and November 1941 I was an eleven year old boy living with my parents and elder sister at Felden lane Blackheath on the western edge of Birmingham. The house faced north and across the road was a field the largest open space around big enough and flat enough o hold two or three football pitches and used by the locals works league. It was free from anti invasion obstacles and although there were barrage balloons around it had served occasionally as a landing ground for the odd tiger moth which had then successfully flown out each time, annoyingly when I was in school! Two miles distant the northern horizon was formed by Turners Hill the highest point in the Black country and throughout the war the site of an anti aircraft battery.

The Saturday in question was grey still overcast typical of the season. Early that morning the sirens had sounded but nothing had developed and the all clear had followed at so far as a I remember about 1130am. At about one o’clock I was in an upstairs bedroom and heard the sound of an approaching aircraft. I went to the window and saw flying down the length of the field from east to west an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley MkV at a height which seemed level with myself. I remember clearly seeing the pilots head. And as it flew past in the familiar ground sniffing attitude of the Whitley I saw on its side, not the expected rounded but instead the black cross outlined in white. It so happened that my father was walking home from work with a friend and was in Long Lane at the western end of the field directly under the Whitley’s flight path. The friend a one time keeper of racing pigeons pretended to throw corn into the air as he would to entice down one of his birds. But as it’s under wing markings came into view with some appropriate remark like ‘it’s a bloody jerry’ they ran. I did not see the aircraft clear the houses which stood to the west of long lane but within about three hundred yards it would have passed over the escarpment of the Stour valley and would have found plenty of air under its’ wing. And that’s the mystery. In the middle of the day, in the middle of the war, in the middle of England, I saw an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bearing German markings. I have seen no explanation for this strange fact. A sort of postscript to this event occurred some fourteen years later the very next time I saw an Armstrong Whitworth aircraft bearing German markings I was working on it. I was by then a junior draughtsman with AWA and was a member of the team tasking with adapting the sea hawk to the requirements of the post war Kriegsmarine.

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