Plane crash in Seekamp

"What happened to bomber JB 912?" the Nordkurier (newspaper) asked his readers two weeks ago on behalf of surviving dependents from Canada to find witnesses of that past time. Looking for people who remember the night of 21 April 1943, when a Canadian Halifax crashed over Eggesin with a crew of seven.

Author: Ralph Sommer
Eggesin. It is now 72 years ago but Wilhelm Kaps remembers it very precisely. “I was only 14”, he says. When 339 bombers that had taken off in England with a bomb load of many tons attacked the city of Szczecin, the surrounding villages activated air-raid alarm. That night, Kaps sat under a shelter made of rotten planks the family had built with the neighboring carpenter right behind their house on what is today Stettiner Straße 37 (Szczecin Street 37).
Less than 30 kilometers away the city of Szczecin fell under a blaze which destroyed almost the entire old town, more than 1,000 buildings and took at least 585 lives.
“About an hour after midnight, a burning plane suddenly approached from the west, flew across the Uecker (the river) and around us,” remembers the pensioner from Ueckermünd and shows the route on a map. Then there were two explosions in quick succession.
The distressed crew had nevertheless dropped two air mines quickly and uncontrolled. In Gumnitz the barn of a farmhouse collapsed, in Vosshütt another one was damaged. "All of a sudden the bomber moved to the left heading north," says Kaps. "Flying low and with burning engines it crashed a kilometer north of us with a loud bang in a meadow at Seekamp." He says he remembers very well that a German prop plane had landed near Eggesin Lake the next morning. Its pilot wanted to inspect the wreckage of the enemy aircraft. "Because the high-legged chassis of the Fiseler Storch (the plane) had sunk in boggy terrain, we boys helped to pull it up again," says the witness.
Today less than 200 meters away from Kap’s childhood home lives Peter Bösel. The 66-year-old is interested in these war events and put together a lot of material.
His now deceased mother Else had often told him that the plane wreck had then been guarded by the Hitler Youth. Farmers in the village had to move in with carts, so that the wreckage of the Halifax could be taken to the station and loaded into a wagon.
“My mother remembered that one of the men had died on the plane. His body was buried at the very end of the Eggesin Cemetery; he was later exhumed and reburied.” They said it was the 22-year-old British sniper Dennis Arthur Watkins. He died when the plane flew in the direction of the Baltic Sea heading towards Szczecin and was hit by an attack of a German night fighter.

The Canadian crew was apprehended

According to documents of the aircraft archaeologist Christian King the other six crew members had been able to rescue themselves with parachutes. This matches with what several locals reported who had heard of the arrests of these Canadians. Hanni Rosenow, for example, who was born in 1934 in Eggesin and who still lives there, observed how one crew member had been taken to the mayor's office at Bahnhofstrasse (Station Street) the morning after the crash. "The man had his arm and head in a bandage," says the former teacher. The night before the wounded man had knocked at the doors of family Kluge, who lived close to the now no longer existent Försterei Birkhorst (forest ranger’s office). "He there got emergency care until he was brought to the mayor’s office the next morning." The now 82-year-old Manfred Massow, who was then living in the Bahnhofstrasse (Station Street) and now lives in Lower Saxony (area of Germany), observed a crew member who had been brought to the mayor’s office in an open car on 21 April 1943. Statements of long-time residents of the city give further evidence that the Canadian crew was picked up in Greater Eggesin.
Another man had supposedly been picked up by a farmer who had brought him the mayor’s office. Another Canadian airman had been caught by a security guard of the explosives factory between Ueckermünde and Eggesin. According to documents from the Dutch Crash Research in Aviation Society Foundation survivors had been separately taken to POW camps for aircraft prisoners. Pilot Thomas E. Jackson from Prince Albert, navigator J. M. Carlton from Hamilton, bombardier J. R. Fry from Jordan, radio operator Thomas M. Crandell from Sutton, flight engineer C. J. Sebastian and Sergeant E. Jury survived the war. The descendants of the already deceased Canadian crew are now looking for the exact place where the Halifax JB 912 hit German ground, motivated by a successful initiative of other Nordkurier (newspaper) readers who helped locating the crash site of an English bomber at the former barracks of Gut Borken two years ago. Marcel Wodrig from Hoppenwalde might be able to take them to the exact place. His father Karsten, who passed away four years ago, had been looking for the debris with the help of a metal detector in 1998 with the permission of the Parish Church Council Eggesin, which had been the owner of the land at Seekamp. And he was successful. But the relics of the machine that probably could only be properly identified by an expert are lost. Contact
the author: r.sommer@nordkurier.de

Witnesses remember further crashes

Eggesin. During the years of war, more bombers crashed in the area of north-west Szczecin. Many locals still remember the events. Udo Herzfeld from Krackow, for example, witnessed the air raids on Szczecin with relatives in Stolzenburg (Stolec) south of the Szczecin Lagoon. "I have witnessed the crash of an airplane on a summer day," he says. The machine had been flying with high speed into Stolzenburg Lake. The German-Polish border leads through today’s castle’s lake. Reinhard Höwler from Penkun can still remember that he had recognized the wings of the crashed machine about 100 meters from the German shore in two to three meters deep water when he was fishing with his grandfather in the 1950s. His Grandpa himself had told him that he had even climbed the still floating wreckage of the four-engined British machine the day after the crash. The crew is said to have escaped the plane with parachutes. Höwlers mother had later let her wedding dress tailored from the silk of a parachute that they had found in the forest.
Manfred Krüger from Waren reports another crash. He had experienced a night attack on a dugout in Torgelow at the age of seven, he says. From there, his older brother had seen a German hunter shooting gunfire on a British bomber. The attacked plane had then raced towards Drögeheide and managed to even drop a bomb that exploded in the Schleusenstraße (a street). The machine crashed approximately 500 meters away from Sprechtberg.
Captions
Top right: Wilhelm Kaps traces the last route of the bomber 912 on a map. The 86-year-old pensioner has witnessed the crash.
Top left: William Kaps shows the place where the bomber of the Royal Canadian Air Force crashed 72 years ago.
Middle left: An excerpt of the logbook of the Canadian Halifax bomber 912
Bottom left: These are probably the last debris of the machine that crashed at Eggesin.
Bottom right: In Eggesin Heimatstube (Museum of Local History) there is a historical photo of the crashed machine.