They discover the remains of Lieutenant Montgomery, who died when the bomber crashed on an English farm

Bombardment Squadron 844 flew strategic bombing missions to Germany in July and was mainly 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 Allied forces in France during August and September, and brought food and ammunition to the Netherlands in late September.

A B-24 Liberator with that squadron nicknamed ‘Johnny Reb’ was shot at by flak during a bombing raid on a German airfield near Versailles on June 22, 1944, and managed to hobble across the English Channel before it began to lose . height off the coast of Sussex.

Seven of the 10 crew on board managed to get out of the plane on its return journey to England, but three – Pilot Lieutenant William Montgomery, Sergeant John Crowther and Engineer Sergeant John Holoka Jr – died when it crashed in a farmer’s field. near Arundel. Castle.

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

Speaking to authorities in June 2017, farmer John Sellers recounted the accident he witnessed when he was a schoolboy. He said: ‘At around 9pm, I was starting to get ready for bed when there was an uproarious scream of a plane going into a power dive and then crashing to the ground.

“About 15 minutes later I got out and went behind the farm buildings as far as I could see the crash site (about 300 meters away). The fireball had long since died down, the only sign being the burned area of ​​ripening barley in the field next door. There was little sign of debris in the grassy field, just the dirt around five craters.

‘There was very little smoke coming out of the craters by then. The next morning I walked up the road past the site about 75 yards away and could hear the munitions exploding underground. Later that day, the farm dog returned with a severed forearm on which was a bracelet (not dog tags) with a name on it.

‘My father got his arm back and took off the bracelet. He arranged for the bracelet to be turned over to the police. He then buried his arm in the hole where the rest of the remains were.

A guard was posted to keep people away while ammunition still went off from time to time. The holes smoldered for about 10 days before a last burst appeared and then died down. Once he was safe, I took the first opportunity to inspect the crash site. I found that the plane had descended almost vertically, the wings at about 45 degrees to the ditch and fence.

This was confirmed by the excavator driver who excavated it in 1974. One wing hit the ground before the other when a lateral outer wing crumpled into a groove in the ground, while the other clipped off and shot some 40 meters away. through the neighbor field. I found a piece of brim about 6’x2′, by far the largest piece of debris on the entire site.

“There was also more small debris picked up from the barley field than the grass filed where the plane landed. The pile of debris collected from the grass field grew by some three times as ‘all hands’ set out to clear the field of barley ready for harvest. I would estimate that 90 percent of the plane ended up on the ground. My father told me that at least three of the survivors managed to get to see the site and talk to him.

A B-24 Liberator with the 489th Bombardment Group took flak during a bombing raid on a German airfield near Versailles on June 22, 1944, and managed to hobble across the English Channel before it began to lose altitude. sussex coast

Mark Khan, a veteran who served in Northern Ireland, helped launch the project after meeting military aviation researcher Andy Saunders at an archeology conference in Dorking. They discussed the plane crash, and as an Arundel resident, Khan was willing to take it further, including a thorough investigation.

He told the West Sussex County Times: “The farmer’s father was a young lad at the time living in the nearby cottages, so when he crashed he was quickly on the scene.” He wrote a firsthand account and there has been extensive research.

‘It’s a very evocative story. The bomber was based in Suffolk and was on a mission to Versailles. It was hit over the target and damaged by anti-aircraft fire. They lost most of their flight controls, but regained them in the bomber stream.

“They were following a one-way system so they couldn’t go directly back to base. It was a tremendous feat of aeronautical prowess.

‘As it approached the English coast, the pilot gave the order to bail out. While he was flying over Arundel, something happened that caused the plane to crash, we don’t know what, and the three remaining crew died.

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

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 several aircrews became prisoners of war.

Since their first combat mission was to Oldenburg, Germany, on May 30, 1944, just before the D-Day landings, the crews of the 489 carried out saturation bombing raids of Nazi-occupied territories before the final Allied advance on July 1944, and dropped food and ammunition to France and the Netherlands.

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