The Gunners

The story as told to a local historian-----
The incident took place in 1941, the worst year of the war for the Allied cause. Reg was one of sixteen local boys involved in an escapade which has become part of local folklore.
He set the scene by explaining how the Luftwaffe carried out their raids in Holderness, and how the plane that features in the story came to grief.
“One of the great developments of the war was radar, and so German aircraft flew in extremely low from the North Sea to get below radar cover,” said Reg.
“This particular pilot, however came in too low. They usually came over land at Easington where the cliffs were about 30 feet high, but he hit the coast at Dimlington, where the cliffs were much higher. The story at the time was that a searchlight was switched on as the plane came in, alerting the pilot to his mistake, but whatever the case, he realised his error and pulled back on the stick to gain height.
“However, the aircraft stalled and crashed into the ground on the top of the cliffs. It pancaked across a field, losing its tail in the process, and came to rest in a ditch.One of the crew was injured, but they all survived.”
In Withernsea the next morning the word went round that a German plane was down at Dimlington. This wasn’t unusual, Reg explained: “One night there were five aircraft down off Withernsea, and us schoolboys used to go along and see what we could find.”
That afternoon Reg and a group of lads – 16 of them - went on their bikes through Hompton to Dimlington.
The aircraft had crashed some distance from the road, and as they were nearing the wreck site there was a huge explosion.
“There were lumps of earth and shrapnel flying around,” said Reg. “The aircraft had been carrying land mines and a bomb disposal team had been working on one when it went off. I think three of them were killed in the explosion.
“After that we decided we’d be better off somewhere else, and went home.”
However, that wasn’t the end of the matter.
There was an air raid that night, and the practice was that if the siren sounding the ‘all clear’ went before midnight then the kids didn’t go to school until 1030am, but if it was after midnight there was no school at all in morning
As it happened there was a raid, and the lads’ curiosity got the better of them, so they went back to Dimlington the next morning.
The RAF procedure was to put a guard on crashed aircraft, but the boys could see no sign of them.
“We went along the ditch until we got to the wreckage.” Reg said. “The fuselage of the aircraft was straddling the ditch, and the tail, which had broken off, was some distance away, The cabin was intact, and there were two machine guns inside. The front gun was damaged, but the rear gunner’s weapon appeared to be okay. There was also a cannon, but I can’t remember where we found that. There were bits and pieces lying about all over the place, and we began picking them up. I got a Luger pistol, another chap got the radio transmitter, and others got the clock out of the dashboard, the altimeter a helmet and flying gloves. One of the lads had a hacksaw, and cut the swastika out of the tailfin.”
The boys then turned their attention to the machine gun. They unnbolted it from its mounting, unaware that the oddly-shaped object that they were clambering over to get into the aircraft was another landmine. They also took two ammunition pans and the cannon, with 200 rounds of ammunition for it.
“Why?” said Reg, “I don’t know. We were kids and there was a war on.”
The lads took their booty home fastened to their bicycles.
On the way they discussed what to do with the guns, and the answer soon came to them.
“I was in the church choir, and most of the other lads were,” said Reg. We had also been bellringers, but that had all been stopped – since bells were only to be rung in the event of a German invasion. I had the keys to the tower of St Nicholas’ Church, and we took the guns in there.”
“At the bottom of the tower was a large room which was the choir vestry, and above that the room where the bellringers pulled the ropes. Above that there was a third room, called a punny room, directly below the bells, and that’s where we hid them.
He went on: “After a couple of days we went back, took the guns out, cleaned them and checked their condition. In those days we were all in the ATC and had worked with machine guns, we’d flown from RAF Catfoss, and we knew how guns operated and should be stripped down. The barrels seemed to be straight, but we decided that the best way to check was to fire them.”
The lads trooped down to the beach with the guns, but to get there they had to go through a minefield. This was after the fall of France and all the beaches and the land behind them had been mined in preparation for a German invasion.
“However,” Reg explained, “when the mines were being laid we had watched the army at work, and the next day we had gone along, lifted up the squares of turf under which the mines had been laid, took out the mines and threw them into the sea to
cut a path through the minefield.
“We were daft as brushes.”
The boys went through minefield to the beach, loaded and cocked the machine gun and put it on a piece of sacking to make sure no sand got in.
Reg explained the testing procedure: “We tied a long piece of string to the trigger and - sensibly - pulled it from some distance away. The gun went bang, so we had proved it would work
“We set up the cannon next, but it was nearly our undoing, for we weren’t as clever as we thought. The belts for the cannon were loaded in a sequence, solid ball, armour-piercing, incendiary and tracer, the latter being a shell which burned in flight to tell the pilot where his shots were going. They were painted in different colours so that the armourer loading the belts knew which was which.
He went on: “We intended to load ball ammunition into the breech, but loaded tracer instead.
“We only found out we’d got it wrong when we fired the gun and a damn great ball of fire went screaming out over the sea, attracting the attention of a passing aeroplane, which flew low over the area to find out what was going on, but fortunately didn’t see us.?”
The boys we took the guns back to their hiding place in church tower and took stock. They had an excellent machine gun with 300 rounds of ammo and an impressive cannon with 200 rounds – but what could they do with them?
It occurred to them that they were, in fact, in an ideal spot to do something. Hostile aircraft came in very low over Withernsea - right down to almost ground level between the church tower and the lighthouse.
So they worked out that if they put the machine gun on the north-east corner of the bell tower, they catch the enemy aircraft as they came in, and by mounting the cannon on the opposite-north west corner – they would catch them as they went out. Reg explained: “We knew the speed of the German aircraft, and knew the theory of how to shoot them down. The guns were fitted with ring sights, and the trick was not to fire at the aircraft, for by the time the bullets had arrived the plane was gone. Instead you fired in front of it and calculated that the plane and the bullets met in the same place at the same time.
“We worked out that we wouldn’t shoot them down in Withernsea –they would crash in Hollym Carrs.”
The boys lashed the guns down with bell ropes; they couldn’t move much up and down but had plenty of movement side to side. They then divided themselves into gun crews, two to each gun, and for a fortnight, after the sun went down four would-be gunners went up the tower and worked watches to keep the guns manned during darkness.
The Royal Air Force, meanwhile were wondered what had happened to the assorted pieces missing from the plane. Unknown to the lads the machine gun was a new type called an MG42, and was the first one to fall into Allied hands. The air force wanted to have a close look at it, but first they had to find it..
The amateur gunners kept up their night watches while the search went on for the missing weapons.
In these days there were special police and the inspector in charge was a local man named Stanners, whose son later had a shoe shop opposite the Midland bank. His brother, who was one of Reg’s co-conspirators (and who later emigrated to Canada) had picked up a brand-new German bomb sight from the wreck and had hidden it in the wardrobe at home.
“The fat went into the fire when his father opened the wardrobe and the bombsight fell out,” said Reg. “He was the last person we would have wanted to find the bombsight.
“Needless to say, he quizzed his son as to where the bombsight had come from, and bit by bit it all came out..…so and so’s got this, so and so’s got that…and the next thing I knew the police were round at my house. They got all sixteen of us, and boy, were they cross!”
“We were a in a lot less trouble than we could have been.
“We had been vigilant – we’d kept night watches for 14 nights, but it was a full moon, and no planes had come.
“ I don’t know whether we could have hit an enemy plane, but they would certainly have seen our tracer and given us a dose of our own medicine – and they were a lot better at it than we were. So we’d probably have got ourselves killed and got the town bombed as well.
At the police station our loot was gathered – and there was a lot of it. The table was piled high with the stuff we’d got. It included a German helmet from a plane that had crashed off Seacroft Road – and I’d actually stolen it from the police station. It wasa pretty gruesome relic, in fact – it had a hole in it surrounded by dried blood. There were also incendiary bombs – we used to take the fuses out of them and light the magnesium inside.”
“We appeared in court, and luckily we had a vicar in these days who said what nice lads we were-air minded , patriotic boys, and we virtually got away with it.”
But it didn’t go away
Three years later an older - and much wiser – Reg went up for his aptitude test as a Fleet Air Arm pilot.
“I couldn’t believe it when a naval officer said to me “You’re one of the lads that was involved in that machine gun business in Withernsea.
“The same thing happened at technical college when I went there, and years later when I became a deputy head teacher that was the first thing that the head teacher said to me. So forty years later the story was still going the rounds.”

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