South Bank Dornier: South Bank, Cleveland 15 January 1942 Paperback – 15 Mar. 2008

Nice condition

On 27 November 1997, a group of building workers clearing land for redevelopment at South Bank, Cleveland, unearthed the remains of a Second World War Dornier Do217 bomber of the German Luftwaffe unit Kampfgeschwader 2 (KG2). The aircraft had crashed there in January 1942, minutes after being hit by gunfire from a merchant ship anchored off Hartlepool and seconds after colliding with the cable of a barrage balloon flying high over the river Tees. The blazing bomber plummeted on to the railway sidings of a local steelworks, where it made a crater some twelve feet deep. At that time, the sidings were being used for essential war work and so, after the charred bodies of three of the four-man crew had been recovered, most of the wreckage was bulldozed into the crater and the track was re-laid. The body of the fourth member of the crew was not found - until 1997.

This book tells the full story of this German bomber's operation over the Tees on 15 January 1942 before it collided with the barrage balloon. It also describes the chance `rediscovery' of the wreckage and its occupant in 1997 and the latter's subsequent interment in a Teesside cemetery during a ceremony attended by the German Consul-General to Great Britain, the German Air Attaché, three local mayors, representatives of twenty-two ex-Servicemen's associations and some 200 members of the general public.