On the 19th of April 1944, the Spitfires of the 313 sq had to escort the B-26 Marauder bombers for a bombing on the railway-workplaces of the city Mechlin.

This to prepare for D-Day. On their retreat the bombers were detected by the 4./Jagdeschwader 26.

Because of this, Hauptmann Wolfgang Neu came into fight with the Spitfire of Mrtvy (according to the log of Neu, the Spitfire was hit above Brussels at 18h55).

During this long air-fight, the aircrafts ended up in the atmosphere of Herentals.

According to eye-witnesses, 2 fighters were chasing a 3rd one. The eye-witness report of A.Verwimp declares: "The gun-cases fell out of the sky, on the fields we were working on with our parents. All of a sudden, one of the airplanes got a deadly shot. Dad yelled at us to take shelter behind the barn."

As it turned out, the Spitfire of Mrtvy had been hit by the Focke-Wulf 190A-6 "Blue 16" of Neu. Mrtvy still tried to jump, but his parachute refused service and the unfortunate pilot landed 300 m from us in a field.

When the first eye-witnesses reached the victim, he had already passed away.

Almost instantly, the scene of the crash was blocked from the public, by the 12 SS Pantser Division who had been manning a Flak site.

During the night of the 19th of April 1944 and the 20th of April 1944 a large part of the wreck plane was salved (almost the entire body and wing). Because the rest of the plane was buried to deep, they put branches and straw in de hole and filled it up with sand.

Exactly 63 years later (on the 19th of April 2007), "the planehunters" salved the first part of the wreck, one of the two machineguns buried 1 meter below soil.

Fourteen days later we were already 5.5 meter deep, where we recovered most part of the cockpit, the turbo, the pistons and many more engine parts.

Because in the meanwhile the media was alerted of this digging, we got a visit of the real estate agency. We were forbidden to continue the salvation, meaning that the rest of the engine and the 20 mm canon are lost forever (this was very upsetting, knowing we only had 1 meter to go to recover these).

Most of the parts have been donated to the museum "Broken Wings" in Erembodegem, where they will be nicely displayed for the visitors.

More photo's about this project you can find here

With many thanks to the Bahaat team

Benny Ceulaers