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History enthusiast Tony Webb still has the inscription plate from a German aircraft he swapped with another schoolboy during the Second World War.
Here is the remarkable story of the history of that doomed bomber...
For almost 80 years I have had in my possession an aluminium inscription plate from a German aircraft, the result of a schoolboy swap during the 1939-45 war.
The cost to me was a Dinky toy and some sweets from my ration. The plate had been acquired by my friend’s father while he was guarding the wreckage of a crashed Junkers 88 near Boxley, Maidstone in March 1943, with G Company, 11th Battalion Kent Home Guard.
My friend, Alan Large, was killed the following year.
He was struck by a vehicle while riding his bicycle over Maidstone Bridge. His father died later the same year and his mother and younger sister moved away.
The aircraft from which the plate had been recovered was on a mission to bomb London during the early hours of March 4, 1943, when it was caught in the beam of a searchlight and hit by flak from anti-aircraft defences in the Medway area. The crippled aircraft jettisoned its bomb-load almost immediately in an effort to gain height. The first of the bombs fell in Luton in Chatham, killing Mr and Mrs Ellender in Listmas Road, and injuring their son.
Flossie, the family’s pet spaniel, was buried for 28 hours before her barking alerted neighbours.
RSPCA Inspector C. Higgins, together with Police Constable Gunn and three others, tunnelled under the debris and some two-and-a-half hours later located the dog in its kennel under two tons of rubble. The dog had been saved by a large house timber and a household mangle that had fallen across the kennel protecting it. Flossie was obviously frightened by the long hours of being trapped and she cowered at the far end of the kennel and had to be captured with a net.
Further away in Gillingham, an elderly couple in First Avenue, Mr and Mrs Belsey, and their grand-daughter Peggy Harrow, were also killed when their house received a direct hit. A further 98 residents had to be accommodated in a rest centre, due to structural damage to their homes.
Other bombs fell harmlessly on open land at Capstone and on Darland Banks.
Having cleared the North Downs, the crew abandoned their burning aircraft by parachute, shortly before it exploded in mid-air above Thurnham. The stricken aircraft crashed in a field near Boxley Abbey at 4.15am.
Shortly after dawn, a gamekeeper discovered a member of the crew suspended from his parachute entangled in trees at the rear of Castle Cottages, Thurnham. The airman was dead.
Another crew member of the ill-fated craft was discovered in Detling Reservoir together with his parachute. He also was dead. By now the military had mounted guard on the wreckage and further reports were received that the central gondola section, complete with machine gun and ammunition, had come down near the Black Horse pub at Thurnham.
The two remaining crew members had landed in the Boxley Warren area.
A little after dawn, Ob/Lt Arthur Leckschat, the pilot, made his way to Boarley Farmhouse, the home of Sandling farmer Bob Beeby. Mrs Beeby answered his knock and Ob/Lt Leckschat said in perfect English: “I am sorry to disturb you. I want to surrender, take my pistol please.”
Mrs Beeby rang the local bobby, Ted Kirby.
PC Kirby, who had fought in the First World War and had no fondness for Germans, upbraided Mrs Beeby for having made tea for the pilot who was duly handed over to the military for interrogation.
Meanwhile F/w Erhard Unger, the bomb-aimer, was found seriously wounded and taken to Barming Military Hospital. He never recovered and died on June 20, 1944.
The two other airmen were later named as Ob/Fw Ernst Bunkenburg, the flight engineer, and F/w Manfred Badstubner, the air gunner and radio operator. They were buried with full military honours on March 9 in the churchyard of St Martin’s at Detling and remained there until 1962 when the German War Graves Commission made arrangements to transfer the graves of all German servicemen to a new cemetery at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire.
Apart from memories of those far off days, little remains today except that inscription plate that survived the years. Other wartime incidents, fading with the passing of time, go unrecorded, never to be told.
