Worthy of further exploration?

Anon,

The photo was published in one of the issues of The Eagle – the magazine of the Glider Pilot Regiment Association. I know I’ve got it on the bookshelf somewhere but give me a couple of days I’ll find it. Theres about a thousand bookmarks stuck to the pages to wade through.

Theres quite a few Horsa’s in UK museums althought mostly their of the Mk.II variety as those were still in service into the 1950s. Generally speaking if you inspect them in details they tend to be late service models based on the modifications on them. There are few Mk.I fuselage sections as those were popular for various uses post-war so tended to survive.

To the best of my knowledge and research, the Army Flying Musuem at Middle Wallop has the only existing original Mk.I cockpit in existence. It’s an interesting example as it was built by Elliots of Newbury and seems to have never been fully completed so acts as a hugely informative and useful reference to how the gliders were constructed.

If you want to see a very early (1943) spec Mk.I cockpit being built, we’re in the process of scratch bulding one at the Jet Age Museum, Gloucester.

As stated before permits are needed to metal detect etc the old LZ’s. in part because these are also still the sites of ‘missing’ field burials.

The Wolfheze museum is excellent, and houses many original parts and complete sections of gliders (many were found locally over the years having been used for chicken coups etc on local farms).

If you know where to look, there’s a lot to be seen without disturbing the soil. Beware that most old LZ’s are on private land and owners have had bad experiences with people metaldetecting on their properties without permission…

The area around Wolfheze appears to have, in part, been planted up with forestry at some point. There isn’t a lot of wide, open fields. Young forest plantations might bring debris to the surface, but the ground might have also been quite heavily worked to plant the trees. If they’ve planted stands of coniferous species then the soil will also be getting more acidic over time.

There is a nice 2D representation of a Horsa glider here: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.0089222,5.7954107,3a,75y,152.83h,86.25t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s4GvlHxCdxUVJzzWXfh0aTQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656.

The field in which it sits has some paler areas, as viewed on Google Earth. This might correlate with poorer crop growth, indicating soil contamination. Having had a drive around, again thanks to Google, there appears to be areas of what appears to be raised bog as well to the South West of the town. There are a lot of Google ‘Street View’ panoramas of this area, called “Wolfhezerheide”, and again it has paler patches when viewed on Google Earth.

Would be interesting to compare to modern online aerial imagery

Mike,
the Horsa and Hamilcar bits in my photos are in the collection of the Museum of Army Flying. They all came from the same pit on an airfield where the glider were operated from. All parts show signs of the airframe being burnt before burial. the burial was also shallow as some of the Hamilcar parts arrived at the museum with nettles growing on them. Sorting, identifying and cataloguing the parts was a fun game but I can say that they consist of at least two Horsa MkI and a single MkII, and over 90% of all the metal that went into a Hamilcar.
Your point about the parts having some similarity with the Oxford is interesting as the Horsa was designed after de Havilland had taken control of Airspeed and as such the Horsa followed the Mosquito on the drawings boards at Salisbury Hall.

Many years ago I followed up on a rumour of two aircraft that lay derelict in Blackburn, Lancashire just after the war – It turned out they had been Horsa assault gliders and I even managed to trace the owner – who also owned a well known (at the time) model shop in the town. After the war, she had wanted to re-open the business, but could not source plywood as it was restricted for housing use only, so she hit upon the idea of buying two surplus gliders locally and stripping them – apparently they were available at around £1 each and over the next two years they were systematically stripped for plywood on an area of waste ground – the plywood rather fittingly going on to be resurrected in hundreds of model aircraft built by enthusiasts in the town. When finally stripped of all usable plywood the last remains were burnt on bonfire night I believe and when I went to the site there was still a largish bare patch with no vegetation growing on it – I found a few very rusty fittings possibly off the Horsas, but they literally crumbled to the touch – the fire and years of exposure having taken their toll – an the site is now built on. It did make me wonder where locally the Horsas had been stored and sold off? I know many Hadrians were stored at Warton and later scrapped or sold off and whether any other were bought locally and re-used – could there could still be a Horsa garage or allotment shed somewhere local?

I’m half familiar with those big stainless steel spar joints as I’ve seen pictures of them at a glider crash site in Wales. Were those in your pictures, aeronut, from Holland or were they just found in a UK scrap yard? I’ve also seen similar parts at Airspeed Oxford crash sites – the similarity is likely to be there as the company designed and built many of the gliders used.

There must have been quite a bit of equipment in many of the gliders which will have added to the “scrap” content though, as you say, cleared away years ago. In my own experience of such sites I’ve leart that there is often substantial stuff to be found in nearby woods and hedgerows which doesn’t affect farming operations so is largely ignored.

I hope to be visiting Holland in September this year to have a look for myself, anyway. I’ve just seen the film A Bridge Too far this afternoon. Some scenes are excellent, such as the C-47’s taking off and their overhead formations dropping paras but there are, as is to be expected, quite a few howlers (I consider myself an expert now having read the book on the Glider Pilot Regiment so was able to view the film with a critical eye!). 😉

Thanks for your input so far, chaps, it is most interesting. Do you think you can locate that post-war photograph of the LZ, OneEightBit – or point me in the direction I might find it? I’d like to see it.

Anon.

As Jed says Horsa metal parts are hard to identify, I know I’ve done it. There is very little alloy on either the Horsa or Hamilcar most metal is steel and considering the wood wasn’t the highest quality I doubt the steel was either although the Hamilcar used a large amount of Stainless Steel in the highly stressed areas.
The following photos are of some Horsa parts and as Jed says they do look like agricultural scrap.
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As I said the Hamilcar used a lot of stainless steel and these parts were from the same dump as the Horsa ones above, as you can see they tend to survive far better.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]259203[/ATTACH]

Very interesting, thanks for that, OEB. It hasn’t diminished my desire to have a look for myself, to take in the atmosphere of the place, and try and imagine the events which took place there.

I shall also be seeking out the Wolfheze Museum to pay a visit.

Anon.

I’ve seen the photo in question, it’s interesting certainly and the identity of the gliders themselves was figured out. If I had a scanner I could probably upload a copy.

Yes, the Germans torched some gliders, some caught fire due to landing accidents and others were purposely torched by the occupants when they got into difficulties to stop equipment falling into enemy hands. The Horsa was fitted with a “destructor box” in the rear fuselage specifically for that purpose.

Metal detecting/digging on the old LZ’s is strictly controlled and you need special permits to do it. Last I heard it was only a handful of locals who actualyl had the necessary permits to do it. Quite a bit of stuff has turned up over the years and most of it is in various musuems or private collections. There was one chap who had a fairly large collection of data plates at one time which he’d picked up from the LZs.

To be honest, there aren’t that many interesting parts left after a total burn of a Horsa glider and the surface stuff pretty much went decades ago. There isn’t much you’d want to put into a “display” unless you’re pretty fanatical. All the good stuff in terms of recognisable parts you can find at the Wolfheze museum.

Horsa parts I would say are pretty rare, specifically Mk.I parts and early Mk.II parts. The issue is that being designed as disposable aircraft there was very little metal in them and what was was very simple. The wooden structure didn’t last long left out in the elements and even during their service life they had issues stopping them falling apart while being stored in the open. Some fuselages lived on as chicken coops and the famous “Horsa Holiday Homes” but again, being basically doped 1/16th inch ply the longevity was poor. When they were scrapped there was minimal salvage and the rest just burnt.

As for fixtures and fittings, the metal parts are often really hard to identify because there were so few and made so simply – most of the parts hardly looked engineered and would easily pass as argricultural scrap. Everything else was bog standard, often already obsolete, AM parts so apart from say the cable angle indicator, nothing was type specific. You’ve really got to know what you’re looking at to spot a Horsa part – case in point, I picked up a fuse box recently sold as a generic AM part but knew it was from a Horsa Mk.I because of the labelling of the fuses on the lid.

I can understand your fascination with this, as finding items in exactly the same spot as where history itself took place is indeed a very sobering but also very exciting discovery – also knowing that you are quite possibly the first human being to touch them since that time in history.

Just out of interest how rare are Horsa glider parts?

Rob