During the 1970s, an excavation at the crash site of a Messerschmitt 410 near Eastbourne, East Sussex, unlocked the mystery of the disappearance of two Luftwaffe fliers as Andy Saunders explains.
CONFLICT ARCHAEOLOGY
he residents of Eastbourne on the East Sussex coast were used to aerial attack, but the sound that resonated above the town at about quarter-to-eleven on a rainy November night in 1943 was quite terrifying. First, above what was a distant and high-altitude droning hum of aero engines, there was a short thump-thump-thump. Cannon fire. Those who were brave enough to venture out saw red and orange flashes flickering in the clouds, which then glowed with a bright orange light. Then, there followed the roaring of a diving aircraft, its engines screaming at full throttle and building to a deafening crescendo. It seemed to go on for minutes before a fiery meteor plunged through the bottom of the low cloud base in a vertical trajectory. The climax - when it came - was a sudden and earth-shaking thud. It was followed by a momentary and eerie quiet. The screaming engines, though, had been silenced.
Seconds after the thud, away out to the north of the town in the Hampden Park district, a brilliant flash was followed by a tremendous thunderclap of an explosion. The blast echoed off the South Downs, rolling back across the town and rattling roof tiles and windows in its wake. Whatever had screamed earthwards had impacted with an awful ferocity into the marshy farmland to the west of Friday Street. However, winter darkness and the waterlogged land, criss-crossed with deep drainage dykes and ditches, made any investigation impossible until first light. By dawn, it was visibly apparent that something cataclysmic had taken place.
The scene meeting the first investigators was one of almost unbelievable destruction and carnage. There, in the corner of a field, a vast crater had been blown – approximately one hundred feet across and estimated at about forty feet deep at the centre. Thrown up all around were huge clods of blue clay, some of them described as the size of a small car. The bottom of the huge crater was also rapidly filling with murky and oil-flecked water.
Strewn about the whole of the surrounding marshland were tiny fragments of aluminium alloy and other items clearly recognisable as mangled aircraft parts. Intermingled with the widespread mud and
