42-30104 - Luftkriegsarchiv Köln

On the return flight from the bombing raid on the refineries in Gelsenkirchen, the bomber formation was attacked by several German fighter aircraft.

The B-17 was fired upon by Lt Kurt Ibing of 4./JG 1 and caught fire. The pilot gave the signal to bail out, but this was not understood by all crew members as the internal radio system had been damaged during the attack.

The aircraft crashed in ‘Haus Oelgarten’, a hamlet in the town of Hennef in the Rhein-Sieg district of North Rhine-Westphalia. Haus Oelgarten consists of just two houses on a wooded hill between the villages of Hennef-Geistingen and Dambroich.

Four members of the crew had managed to escape by parachute before the crash and were taken prisoner by the Germans, some of them wounded. The remaining six crew members were recovered only after they had died and were buried in the cemetery in Geistingen.

In some cases, several bodies were buried in a single grave, which led to problems during the subsequent exhumation. Consequently, the body of T/Sgt Hollingworth could not be identified; he is still listed as missing today.

The crash site of the Lancaster 42-30104 in Hennef Ölgarten.

Left:

The pilot of the B-17, 1st Lt George Blackburn Keck

The co-pilot, 2nd Lt Raymond A. Gaither

The German ‘loss report’ regarding the shooting down of the B-17 and the burial locations of the crew members killed

Extract from the anti-aircraft diary containing the entry on the shooting down of the B-17