A CRASHED World War II aircraft site high above Loch Ness is playing its part in helping Britain remember those fliers who gave their lives for their country.
Although Corryfoyness, in the hills above Bracla, was not the scene of a fatal air crash, American archaeologist Terence Christian of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Battlefield Archaeology hopes the lessons learned in investigating the de Havilland Mosquito will help in his work in identifying and recognising crash sites across Britain.
Despite being off the beaten track — or, to be more accurate, just off the Great Glen Way — the Mosquito was an attractive proposition for an archaeological investigation as it allowed the opportunity to investigate a wreck without the risk of disturbing human remains or unexploded ammunition.
"This site was nice because we know the crew parachuted out and survived the war and we knew they were flying a photo-reconnaissance Mosquito," Terence explained.
"In the bomb-bay where you’d normally have the bombs, they had a camera instead, so there was no ordnance to worry about."
Mosquito MM244 was one of a flight of six aircraft which left RAF Benson in Oxfordshire on 25th November 1943 on a training flight to the Hebrides. However, as the planes were heading back, MM244 developed engine problems.
"That was not unusual. The early Mosquitos had all sorts of problems," Terence pointed out.
"Of the flight of six, only two made it back to RAF Benson."
While the others were able to put down at other airfields, MM244 was not so lucky and by the time they reached Loch Ness the two-man crew of pilot Flight Lieutenant Joe Burfield and navigator Flying Officer Alex Barron decided they had no choice but to abandon the aircraft. Both men exited the aircraft safely, but landed on opposite sides of the loch.
Burfield came down on the west side, where he found a local farmer to take him — by horse and cart — to the nearest police station. However, because the Highland farmer and Australian pilot had mutually incomprehensible accents, the farmer regarded this arrival from the sky with the utmost suspicion and kept a shotgun within easy reach until he could hand him over to the authorities.
Across the loch, Glaswegian Barron managed to reach Foyers Post Office where he was able to report that he was safe and catch a lift to Inverness with a passing milk van.
Their aircraft crashed into a rocky outcrop at Corryfoyness where, after an RAF recovery crew removed what was salvageable, it remained largely undisturbed.
"It’s accessible with a bit of effort," Terence said.
"Certainly other enthusiasts have found it, though there’s not much on the surface. If you were looking for an instrument panel, something that will look good on the side of the pub, you’re not going to find it."
What Terence’s team did find, using their test ditch, included the CO2 canister from the aircraft’s rubber dinghy and Perspex from the canopy cover, allowing the team to calculate where the cockpit would have been.
"The Mosquito is made of wood and a full two-thirds of what we found was wood, so we have great preservation in the wood, great preservation in the metals and we even found some canvas. It was certainly more than we were expecting," Terence said.
However, beyond the findings at the site itself, the exercise was also important to Terence in his aim of trying to establish a standardised, but flexible approach to aircraft archaeology which is much less potentially destructive than other techniques.
"Enthusiasts tend to take the approach that you take a JCB and dig down until you hit an engine or another large piece, then get a heavy lifting arm and yank it out," he said.
"There were a lot of aircraft, but a lot of them were scrapped or crashed, so the data set has dwindled down. By ripping things out of the ground you are reducing that further and you can’t excavate a site twice. There’s a tremendous wealth of expertise you can draw on, but a lot of excavation work isn’t being done by archaeologists."
Terence acknowledges there is a different mindset to the investigation of crashed aircraft sites from the archaeology of earlier ages. Aircraft archaeologists are working to recover 20th century machines which are already well documented with existing plans, manuals and even some flying examples.
"A lot of archaeologists don’t like that because you don’t have that leap of imagination," Terence said.
The more human element to Terence’s work, however, comes from looking at the aircraft as a whole.
As an example, he gives the B17 Flying Fortress bomber which crashed on Beinn Edra in Skye in March 1945, which he is also investigating.
"If you are looking at a plane produced in 1941 and one produced in 1945, you have very different attitudes about how to fight the war," he explained.
"Nobody knew when the war was going to end, but it’s a matter of time. There’s not that trepidation from the strategic bombing phase where you would fly maybe six missions before you go down, if you were lucky.
"It’s only when you stop looking at this impersonal airframe and start talking to the families that these personal histories come out. A bit of the guesswork is taken out of aircraft archaeology because of the historical record, but because you don’t have to go through that leap of fiction, you can go straight to the more personal and more interesting stories from the crews and their families."
Which was part of the attraction about the Loch Ness site. Both Burfield’s son in Australia and Barron’s son in the UK had visited internet sites to tell their fathers’ story and the Loch Ness crash also featured in a book written by a fellow Mosquito crewman based at RAF Benson.
"We had two people who were very keen to share the memories of their fathers, which was very important to us," Terence said.
"If we look at an airframe just as a sterile piece of metal, that’s not terribly interesting. Having that access to the oral history was quite important."
"Having that, we looked at it from the opposite direction as an airframe, asking what information we could get from it, would it be useful to future archaeologists and so on. Eventually all of us with a personal connection to these sites will be gone. In 50 years they are going to be important historical resources and should be given the same protection as a stone circle or medieval castle. They tell an important part of Scotland’s and Britain’s history."
At least a quarter of Britain’s crash sites still contain human remains. Terence hopes his work will help secure the political will to recognise these sites and extract any remains for reburial if possible or erect a memorial cairn on site.
There are an estimated 5000-plus crash sites in Scotland while the Highland Council’s Historic Environment Record database returns 68 hits for "aircraft crash site". These are only the known ones. Many more have yet to be recorded, Terence points out.
Terence, who was brought up in Maryland, admits there is a personal impetus behind his work.
"My grandfather was a crew chief on a C47 (Dakota)," he revealed.
"Their job was to mark landing zones and he was involved in pretty much every major US Army campaign from North Africa to the victory landings."
Though he survived the war, his original crew were killed when the Dakota crashed in the south of England.
"I would love to go down there on American Veterans’ Day and lay a wreath, but I haven’t been able to locate them," Terence added.
A year from now, Terence wants to involve Glasgow University’s Officer Training Corps in remembering
"They study the Crimea and the Somme, but I want to remind them there were battles much closer to home," he said.
"But my ultimate dream is to have something happen across the country. There are sites lying essentially forgotten in fields across Britain. We want to identify them so people do remember that some poor 18 or 20-year-old was prepared to fight for his country, but had bad luck or a bad airframe and never made it."
