Founding Curators of the Wings Aviation Museum, Dan and Kev travelled to Belgium in September 2024 to help unveil a memorial to the crew of a 100th Bomb Group B-17 that crashed in the village of Kasterlee on 4th February 1944.
The 100th Bomb Group has been the subject of TV series Masters of the Air, so it was a great privilege to unveil a memorial to one of the “Bloody Hundreth”. During our visit we also had the opportunity of visiting the other memorials to check on their condition and we were very pleased to see that they were all being looked after by the local people. This is something typical of Belgian and being an occupied country during World War Two they have never forgotten the price of freedom.
The two brothers along with their father have over the years worked with the Belgian people to unveil eight memorials to both British and American air crew that crashed around the town of Kasterlee in Belgium. The artefacts discovered during the investigations of the crash sites are on display in the museum helping to tell the individual stories of those crashes and in particular ensuring that their memories are never forgotten.
With the memorial service complete we travelled to Holland to meet a local historian of the battlefields of Operation Market Garden and we were incredibly honoured to excavate a fox hole of an 82nd Airborne Paratrooper and some remarkable finds were discovered.
The first item to come to light after 80 years was several M1 Garand bullet clips and some BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) magazines. At the bottom of the hole we discovered a large section of camouflaged parachute silk in remarkable condition. As the wind blew the fabric that had just seen the light of day after 80 years, our thoughts drifted back to the parachute drops that took place by the 82nd Airborne in September 1944. It was quite remarkable to think we were in the exact same position as an American soldier all those years ago! This experience will stay with us for the rest of our lives and we are so thankful for our friends in Holland in giving us this unique experience.
After this we went onto the Battle of Bulge and an area we were able to search for long lost relics of battle. We spent 2 days searching the forest and we found the evidence we had been looking for. One of the most special finds was a beautiful chrome razor marked “Gem Micromatic Reg US Pat Off Made in USA” and still as shiny as it was all those years ago! We also found several packets from coffee rations that were marked with Café XX and as we examined these finds fresh from the earth our thoughts were taken back to an American GI that was dug in, desperately trying to keep warm, during the Ardennes Campaign, his coffee ration providing a brief moment of normality during the chaos of war.
We found dozens of spent American .3006 rounds some fired from the famous M1 Garand rifle and some fired by the Browning machine gun and M1 Carbine. A simple German cooking pot peppered with shrapnel holes was found laying on the surface. The trip was an incredibly fruitful trip and it is always nice to take time out of the day to day running of the museum, to go back to a time of war and reflect over a beer just how lucky we are now to not be living through those dark times. And it is always an honour to bring artifacts back to the museum for public display.
