Family of US airman killed when his bomber ploughed into English farm visit crash site 77 years on

The 844th Bombardment Squadron flew strategic bombing missions to Germany in July, and primarily engaged in bombing strategic targets such as factories and oil refineries and airfields in Ludwigshafen, Magdeburg, Brunswick and Saarbrücken among other cities until November 1944.

The squadron dropped food to liberated French and to Allied forces in France during August and September, and carried food and ammunition to the Netherlands later in September.

A B-24 Liberator with that squadron dubbed ‘Johnny Reb’ was shot up by anti-aircraft fire during a bombing raid on a German airfield near Versailles on June 22, 1944, and managed to limp back across the English Channel before it started losing height off the Sussex coast.

Seven of the 10 crew on board managed to bail out of the plane on its journey back to England, but three – pilot Lieutenant William Montgomery, Sergeant John Crowther and engineer Sergeant John Holoka Jr – were killed as it crashed in a farmer’s field near Arundel Castle.

Sergeant Crowther’s body was found and repatriated, but nothing was found of the two others apart from Lieutenant Montgomery’s identity bracelet. The crash site was largely forgotten about 2017, when farmer John Sellers – who witnessed the crash as a boy – contacted the authorities. 

Speaking to authorities in June 2017, farmer John Sellers recounted the crash he witnessed as a schoolboy. He said: ‘At about 9pm I had started to get ready for bed when there was a thunderous scream of a plane in a power dive then bump of it hitting the ground. 

‘About 15 minutes later I slipped out and went behind the farm buildings to where I could see the crash site (some 300 yards away). The fireball was long gone out, the only sign was the scorched area of ripening barley in the next field. There was little sign of debris in the grass field, only the dirt around five craters. 

‘There was very little smoke coming from the craters by then. The following morning I walked down the lane past the site some 75 yards away and could hear the ammunition exploding underground. Later that day the farm dog came back in carrying a severed forearm on which was a bracelet, (not dog tags) with a name on. 

‘My father retrieved the arm and removed the bracelet. He arranged for the bracelet to be given to the police. He then buried the arm in the hole where the rest of the remains were.

‘A guard was placed to keep people away whilst the ammunition was still going off from time to time. The holes smouldered for about 10 days before one last flare up and then going out. Once it was safe I took the first chance to inspect the crash site. I found that the plane had come down near vertically, the wings at about 45 degrees to the ditch and fence. 

‘This was confirmed by the digger driver who excavated it in 1974. One wing hit the ground before the other as one side outer wing was crumpled in a slot in the ground, while the other had sheared off and shot some 40 yards across the neighbouring field. I found a piece of wing about 6’x2’, by far the biggest piece of debris on the whole site. 

‘Also there was more small debris collected from the barley field than the grass filed where the plane landed. The pile of debris collected from the grass field grew by about three times when ‘all hands’ were set to clear the the barley field ready to harvest. I would estimate that 90 per cent of the plane ended up in the ground. My father told me at least three of the survivors did manage to get to see the site and speak to him.’

Mark Khan, a veteran who served in Northern Ireland, helped get the project off the ground after meeting military aviation researcher Andy Saunders at an archaeology conference in Dorking. They discussed the plane crash and as an Arundel resident, Mr Khan was keen to take it further, including extensive research.

He told the West Sussex County Times: ‘The farmer’s dad was a young lad at the time, living in the cottages nearby, so when it crashed he was quickly at the scene. He wrote a first-hand account and there has been extensive research.

‘It is a very evocative story. The bomber was based at Suffolk and was on a mission to Versailles. It was hit over the target and damaged by flak. They lost most of the flying controls but nursed it back in the bomber stream. 

‘They followed a one-way system so they couldn’t go straight back to base. It was a tremendous feat of airmanship.

‘As it neared the English coastline, the pilot gave the order to bail out. As it flew on over Arundel, something happened that caused the aircraft to crash, we don’t know what, and the three remaining crew were killed.’

The 489th Bomb Group was a unit of the United States Air Force that flew tactical missions in support of Allied ground forces in northern France during the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944.

After training in the United States, the 489th was stationed at Halesworth, Suffolk between April and November 1944 and flew 106 operational missions in their B-24 Liberators. Twenty-six aircraft were lost in combat – including the so-called Arundel Bomber – and a number of aircrew became prisoners of war.

From its first combat mission was to Oldenburg, Germany on May 30, 1944, just prior to the D-Day landings, the crews of the 489th carried out saturation bombing of Nazi-occupied territories before the final Allied breakthrough in July 1944 – and dropped food and ammunition into France and Holland.  

The 489th’s final mission was on November 10, 1944, when the group was then redeployed to the US for training for the Pacific theatre of the war with Japan. However, many of the aircraft and personnel were reassigned to other bombing groups in the 8th Air Force.