The search for Whitley N1476 now at an end?
Further to post #102 and after 10 years of searching we now seem to have located one of our Whitley’s in the Channel. This is Whitley N1476 – it ditched at 04.30 on 20 June 1940 after what can only be described as an epic flight to bomb the Wanne-Eickel marshalling yards near Essen. The crew were:
P/O A W Dunn (pilot)
P/O C D Montagu
Sgt B L Savill
Sgt J M Dawson
P/O W J Watt
The Whitley was attacked by a pair of Bf 109s on the bombing run. In the first attack the Whitley was hit many times and the air observer and front gunner were wounded. The rear gunner got a good burst in and sent one of the attacking fighters down in an inverted dive. Pilot Officer Dunn pressed home his attack and scored hits on a blast furnace from 8,000 feet. The port engine then caught fire but this was extinguished. It caught fire a second time and had to be shut down. The Whitley lost height as it crossed the sea and the captain ditched the aircraft successfully off Hasting’s Pier.
An eye witness account by Mr D B Hume (from the Robertsbridge Aviation Museum):
“In June 1940 I was stationed in St Leonards in the Marine Court Hotel, along with several hundred other future pilots and navigators. Early one Thursday morning, a Whitley bomber ditched at high taide, about 250 yards from the promenade. The aircraft stayed afloat for 1.5 to 2 hours during which time the Hastings Lifeboat came along with smaller vessels and picked up the crew, two of whom were wounded. An average swimmer could easily have swum out to the aircraft, indeed I got within 50 yards of the Whitley which appeared in perfect structural shape.”
Following their rescue, the entire crew were decorated for gallantry which was an extremely unusual event in Bomber Command. This was P/O Dunn’s fourth crash in five weeks. He sadly lost his life after another ditching in September 1940 in Whitley P5046, this time in the North Sea, along with Sgt Savill.
The Hastings Whitley was divable until it became silted up in the early 1990’s. An undercarriage leg was raised prior to this and is now on display in the Robertsbridge Aviation Museum and it is well worth a visit. We have been searching for this Whitley for over ten years – The aircraft defied all attempts at relocation until the latest search a few weeks ago revealed a Rolls Royce engine nut in the sand. Sonar shows a concentration under the sand at this location. This very likely marks the remains of Pilot Officer Dunn’s Whitley and an application is now underway to get permission from the MoD to explore further.
Centre section coming back together
I am using an epoxy primer on the Whitley – it is an excellent hard wearing coating – just right for protecting these old parts. The flat headed rivets used on the centre section were extremely hard to source and in fact caused a considerable delay.
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