Someone’s Sons
A wartime memory and the lesson that endured
Photograph of the wreckage from local newspaper coverage
I would like to share a very poignant story about a conversation I had with an elderly man about an event he witnessed as a boy 85 years ago and the lesson his mother taught him that day.
A couple of weeks ago, my best friend and I had a day off work and decided to make the most of happy hour at our local pub. Space was limited, so we ended up sitting with some older men and exchanging small talk. One of the men was a gentleman named Bill. My initial reluctance to chat to strangers quickly melted away as they told us nostalgic yet fascinating stories of the past.
My friend and I travel together a lot. As the conversation moved on, we spoke about how we often visit monuments and museums linked to the Second World War, trying in some small way to understand what life might have been like then.
Bill seemed to light up when we said this. He explained that he had a story of his own that he would like to share with us, if we had the time to listen to him. My friend and I agreed without hesitation. We were enthralled.
Bill told us that when he was a young boy, he was out walking with his mother when suddenly they saw a bright light in the sky. Looking up in the air, they became aware of a German bomber in flames and descending rapidly. Soon afterwards, they heard a crash as the plane hit the ground and exploded.
It was not the facts of the crash that had lingered with him all these years, though.
His enduring memory of that night was the way that his mother cried. It seemed natural that she was upset. This was the enemy after all, and the unfolding drama had been frightening. Through her tears, though, Bill’s mother gripped his hand tightly and said something that he wasn’t expecting. She explained to him that she was upset because the men in the plane were someone’s sons. That somewhere, in a place far from where they stood, their mothers were waiting for them to return home.
Upon further research, I have been able to find out a little more about the incident. The plane was A German Heinkel He111. It was shot down on the night of 7th to the 8th May 1941 as part of the Luftwaffe air raids on the Greater Manchester area. The plane crashed in a field in Hazel Grove, Stockport.
No lives were lost that day. Maybe that is why the story has nearly been lost to time. The crew all managed to eject from the plane and landed in different locations across Greater Manchester. The radio operator was found nearby and taken in by a local couple before the police arrived. In typical British style, they gave him a cup of tea and a sandwich. He told them it was his twenty-first birthday, showed them a photograph of his girlfriend and expressed concern for his parents. The couple tended to his injuries and, for a brief moment, treated him not as an enemy but as a young man far from home.
Bill went on to tell me that he had collected a piece of scrap metal from the plane. He had taken the metal to school and given it to a friend. Only later did he regret that decision. He wished he had kept it. Not for what it was, but for what it symbolised.
As I was doing my own research about this story, I realised something. In a few days’ time, it will be almost exactly 85 years to the day of this incident. Despite the passing of time, this lovely gentleman told the story as though it had happened yesterday. Some things, it seems, are too important to fade.
Bill is obviously advancing in years and expressed that he has always wanted someone to tell his story. I hope I have done it justice, with the very limited information that I have managed to gather and the wine-hazed memories of our conversation that day. Hopefully, the fact that I have managed to capture these brief details means that the story will not be lost to time altogether.
I left the pub that day thinking less about the incident and more about the people involved. I thought about a mother who, in the middle of war, refused to see ‘the enemy’ as anything other than someone’s sons.
I think we all have something to learn from that.
A newspaper article documenting the incident
