LAN R5679 crashed west of Grønhøj on 27 SEP 1942. All
7 airmen perished.
Pilot L.W. Morrison was the uncle of David Geddes, see
Photos and texts from David Geddes.
KARUP WEEKLY has been involved via innkeeper Gregers Laigaard,
Grønhøj Kro.
See 26 SEP 2012: My uncle fell down in Grønhøj
by editor Knud Gaarn-Larsen.
A very important source of this article was the
first email from David Geddes to Gregers Laigaard.
This is the article one week later, in week 40 on
3 October 2012. Go to the Danish edition Lokale
oplysninger om flystyrt i Grønhøj for 70 år siden to see photos.
Captions: The lighter
is
indented, but could easily be made functional.
Warner Dürr with the lighter he has inherited.
Week 42 on 17 October 2012. Go to the Danish
edition Lancaster lokaliseret to see photos.
Captions: Names from the left. A toothed wheel from the plane has just
been found. The small plug with thread is particularly well-preserved. Pieces of
wreckage found on 8 October 2012.
Lancaster located
by Knud Gaarn-Larsen UGE-AVISEN KARUP.
On Monday 8 October a team with metal
detectors assisted by residents of the area succeeded in finding the site
where
a Lancaster crashed on 25 September 1942.
Pieces of wreckage and cartridges on a forest
road revealed the site. Anders Straarup from Randers and his friends Tom
Christensen and Carl Otto Sørensen from
Aarhus found the many pieces, and there
are certainly more.
Anders Straarup was assisted by Kirstine Filbert,
a neigbour of the site. Kirstine's husband Gunnar Filbert and his brother were
the first Danes at the crash site but
they had to take themselves off when the
German soldiers from Karup arrived. Much has changed since 1952 when Kirstine first had
the site pointed out by her
husband, so it was difficult to point out the exact
site, but during the search Kurt Mikkelsen, the present owner of a neighbouring
farm, joined them and he was able
to locate the site. "My Dad always said that
it was right over there!" Kurt stated pointing at the trees and then metal
detectors were used.
When part of the wood had been searched and the
party came to a forest road all of a sudden there were deflections, and then
there was an abundance of pieces of
wreckage
of the huge aircraft. There was a small
piece of Perspex, a toothed wheel, many small plates and a number of cartridges,
both complete and blown up.
It was obvious
that the plane had been in flames and
that the collision with the ground had been so fierce that pieces of wreckage
were scattered over a great area.
On the road
It was almost exclusively on the forest road that pieces of wreckage were found due to
the fact that the area between the road and the field had been ploughed at one
time. Thereby
other
metal parts had been buried so that it is impossible to find them with ordinary
metal detectors. However, enough pieces have been found to
establish the crash
site area.
So another piece has been placed in the puzzle that
started when the nephew of one of the crew members sent an email to Gregers
Laigaard to get more information concerning
the death of his mother's brother. The
Englishman had found an article in which Gudrun Laigaard had told about the
air crash in the way she had
experienced it
from Grønhøj Kro. The nephew had picked
up a clue when he had cleared the home of his parents. Both of them had so
traumatic reactions to events
of the war that
they did not want to talk about
them, but after their deaths a great number of documents appeared showing when
and how his mother's brother had disappeared.
An article in KARUP WEEKLY gave a number of
approaches from residents of the area. Both from Warner Dürr and maybe
particularly from Kirstine Filbert, Bent
Krath, and Kurt Mikkelsen who all had
the same idea of the crash site.
- Please do remember to thank the residents of the area who have given helpful
information. If anyone knows more of this or other Allied planes I would be very
interested
so that I can develop my website airmen.dk about planes and airmen
shot down over Denmark, Anders Straarup states.
Aircraft Museum
Also E.V.H. Jensen of the Aircraft Museum at Gedhus has
contributed excellent information from the extensive collection of the museum. The
pieces of information became pieces of a great puzzle, and together with other
pieces they were placed so that the picture of the events in 1942 becomes sharper.
|