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Crashlanding!

To the best of my recollection, this account is as accurate as my father’s recounting of it to me, on several occasions between about 1953 (when I was aged 8) and his death in 1984. In addition, there is physical evidence, of which, see later.

My father, John Norman Jenkinson of Louth in Lincolnshire, served in the RAF during WWII — specifically, in 21 Squadron (2 Group) flying Bristol Blenheim IVs and, later, Lockheed Ventura light bombers.
Having spent a year in South Africa being trained as an Observer (this comprising all four qualifications of Navigator, Wireless Operator, Bomb-Aimer and Air-Gunner!), he returned to England in late-1941 and was assigned to 2 Group, in Norfolk.

Almost his first experience of Blenheims was a training flight, the objective of which was the ‘splash’ bombing of targets in the Wash. Having expended all their 25lb practice bombs, the pilot turned south for home: a base in West Norfolk.

What the crew of three did not know was that this aircraft was a bit clapped-out (hence retired to training) and — much worse — some idiot on its ground crew had failed to replace the oil filters in its engines; later investigation showed that he had merely reversed the filters in their housings. Whilst this had the desired effect of drastically increasing the oil pressure in the Mercury radials, each clogged filter simply emptied all of its accumulated debris back into the engine oil-circuit!

Approaching the Wash coast, the crew heard both engines start to cough, stutter and finally fail as both seized up in midair. The pilot immediately put the plane into a moderate glide to maintain control and my father tried to identify a safe place for an emergency landing.
There was no chance of reaching an airfield so my father advised the pilot to try a ‘wheels-up’ landing in what he took to be a flat piece of marshland or meadow just inland from the Lincolnshire coast — this is called, ironically, Wingland Marsh.
Silently, five tons of bomber soared over the hedge at the extreme edge of the landing site and touched down…in excess of 160mph! (No engine power not only meant no hydraulic landing gear but also no way to deploy the flaps which increase the wing area to reduce the landing speed).

As they skated along the ground, the crew were just about to rejoice at getting down at all when my father — who was strapped into his bombing position in the long, glazed nose, realised that what had seemed from several thousand feet altitude to be bushes were in fact full grown trees. The crippled Blenheim was closing on an orchard at around 140mph.
Even worse, beyond the orchard, about 500 yards away, loomed the twenty-foot high causeway of Sutton Bank which carried the main road to King’s Lynn.

Usually, undoing one’s straps and leaving the nose position via a cramped, two-foot square tunnel took the best part of a minute; in this case, my father swore he was sitting alongside the pilot, tightening his seatbelt, in well under ten seconds!

As the airplane careered for a quarter of a mile through the orchard, it shed its tail-plane and most of its outer wings in a blizzard of leaves and branches; the 56-foot wingspan being rapidly reduced to two mere stubs carrying the engine nacelles.
The fuselage remained intact, leaving behind a trail of uprooted apple trees as it gouged a path of destruction towards the implacable obstacle of Sutton Bank.

My father estimated that they hit the bank at some sixty mph; he based this conclusion on the way the entire nine-foot-long nose section had vanished — buried completely in the earth - so that both he and the pilot rested their feet on the grassy bank.
The front part of each engine nacelle had also been buried — it was their impact that had finally stopped the crash.

My father and his comrades owed their lives to their seatbelts and to the rugged airframe of the Blenheim.
Slowly, they left the battered hulk and looked round at the devastated orchard.
In his inexperience, my father even stood by with a fire-extinguisher — as a precaution, he claimed — whilst wisps of vapour rose from both nacelles as fractured fuel pipes sprayed petrol onto still overheated cylinders…he admitted that later in the war he would already have been running for his life!
Fortunately, there was no fire, so they climbed to the top of the bank to await rescue (their location having been sent as an SOS just before the crash).
The only casualty was my father’s expensive camera — a Voightlander — that he had acquired in South Africa: it had been in the nose and therefore it is still buried under Sutton Bank.

Oh yes, the physical evidence: for many years, on family outings to Norfolk, as we travelled along Sutton Bank my father would point to the orchard, with its curiously stunted swathe of restricted growth - about twenty yards wide - running from seaward to the foot of the bank…

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