Halifax Recovered

[Geoff Winnington-Ball (RIP)]

...with the remains of its crew. The article got a few things wrong, but RIP to the laddies.

December 1, 2006

Polish historians find Second World War bomber wreck

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA

WARSAW, Poland (CP) - Polish historians have recovered a Royal Air Force Halifax bomber from the Second World War and some of the remains of its Canadian and British crew, a find yielding treasures for a Warsaw museum that could also provide closure for families of the doomed airmen.

The badly-damaged hull of the bomber from the 148 Squadron RAF, documents and personal belongings, and some human remains were recently found buried under a field near the southern town of Dabrowa Tarnowska, project manager Piotr Sliwowski told The Associated Press.

The Canadian airmen presumed to have died in the crash were identified as Arnold Blynn, George Chapman, Harold Brown, Charles Wylie and Arthur Liddell. The two British airmen were identified as Frederick Wenham and Kenneth Ashmore.

According to records, the Halifax JP-276A took off on its final flight with a crew of five Canadians and two Britons from the Italian city of Brindisi around 8 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1944. Canadian pilot Capt. Blynn was leading the mission to drop supplies of weapons and ammunition to the Polish underground as the Warsaw ghetto uprising raged.

But it was shot down by Poland's Nazi occupiers and remained buried for more than six decades until local residents located it earlier this year. The Warsaw Museum of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising started recovery work about two months ago, Sliwowski said.

In 1944, a small amount of human remains from the crash were found scattered and they were buried in Poland, museum officials said.

Local media also reported that residents of Dabrowa Tarnowska buried some remains of the airmen at a local cemetery. They were later removed by the Communist government to a military cemetery in Kracow, about 257 kilometres southwest of Warsaw.

Veterans Affairs Canada lists three of the Canadians - Chapman, Wylie and Brown - as buried in Kracow but has no information on the other two.

It was not immediately clear whose remains were recovered by the Polish historians.

All elements are now in the museum in the capital undergoing conservation and restoration, said Sliwowski, who heads the museum's history department.

"This is an extraordinary, rare find," Sliwowski said. "There are only three Halifaxes in museums around the world."

On the human dimension, Sliwowski said: "These were boys aged 28 or 30. Their remains were for decades in the ground; now they will be able to return to their homelands."

The historians also found documents, notes and maps and personal items like a folding knife and an well-preserved aviator's badge, "looking like new," Sliwowski said.

"It takes you back 62 years and you start thinking, what were they like, what did they look like, did they have girlfriends."

The historians have contacted the British and Canadian embassies in Warsaw.

The plane was part of the Allied effort to supply Poland's resistance near the end of the Second World War. Although its mission came early on in the Warsaw uprising, the planes were banned by British Air Marshal John Slessor from flying over the capital because of the danger and ordered to drop their supplies elsewhere, Sliwowski said.

Containers of weapons and ammunition were found aboard the crashed Halifax.

There are only two restored Halifax bombers in the world, one on display on Britain's Yorkshire Air Museum and the other at the Royal Canadian Air Force Museum in Trenton, Ont. A third Halifax is on display in its "as-recovered" condition at the Royal Air Force Bomber Command Museum in London.