GUY GIBSON’S CRASH

with help from Ted Sturgess and Ron Oliver

The Trust has recently had a piece of information concerning the wartime hero, Guy Gibson. He was flying back to his base from Manston in the early part of 1943, after watching tests on the bouncing bombs at Reculver. Barnes Wallis invented these bombs which were used in the Dambuster raids on the Moehne, Kder and Sorpor dams in the Ruhr in May, 1943. Gibson was killed in July, 1944 after flying into a low hill in Holland after another raid on the Ruhr.

On April 11th Guy and a colleague called Bob Hay took off in a single engine Magister aircraft to fly from Manston back to Scampton, their main base airfield.  When they were about 300 feet above Margate the engine stopped.  As Guy later wrote, "When an engine stops in a four-engine aircraft you don't have to worry too much - but when it happens in a single-engine aircraft, then the long finger of gravity points toward Mother Earth – and so we began coming down!"

The problem was that all the open land in Thanet at this time was  filled  with  anti-aircraft  landing devices, to prevent unwanted enemy landings. But these played havoc with our own crippled aircraft as well, when they desperately looked for a safe landing site.   Eventually Guy's plane drifted towards Birchington and  crashed in the field at the top of Brooksend Hill, just beyond the last houses on the south side of the road. As luck would have it, 13 year-old Ted Sturgess, who lived at the far end of King Edward Road and his friend, Harry Castle, saw the plane's troubled descent and ran as fast as they could across the field behind Ted's home to reach the plane just as  the  two  men  were  gingerly climbing out of the wreckage. Seeing that the men were "shaken but not stirred", they realised that their help was not needed.

The RAF rescue unit from Manston arrived shortly afterwards, but the wreckage of the 'Maggie' was not recovered till a few days later. Neither of the boys realised the significance of the pilot and his crash until many years later. They had seen some of the dummy runs with the Lancasters  and  the  'bouncing bombs' along the coast, but again were in complete ignorance as to their purpose.