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A twin-engine Dornier 217M bomber in flight, showing a German military cross and swastika on its dark-colored fuselage.

Dornier 217M (Wikipedia)

Old Chesterton Allotment Society

History of Old Chesterton Allotment Society

Michael Bowyer records in Air Raid! pub. 1986 the incident of the crash-landed Dornier in the Chesterton allotment site on 23/4th February 1944.

By dawn the news had spread through the town, a Dornier had come down  on allotments close to St George’s Church, Chesterton. It had missed by inches the roof of Chestererton Institution to belly land in the extreme north-east corner of the open ground. Only the second Luftwaffe aircraft to visit Britain in such style, it had arrived almost completely unharmed carrying plentiful petrol and its full bomb load. How, just how, did it come to make an almost perfect belly landing.

A camouflage-patterned aircraft lies on its side in an open field near a residential house with a tiled roof.

Do 217M crash landed on Chesterton allotments (RAF Museum)

By the weekend the authorities had, as ever, been worn down by the sheer number of those who wanted a close look at the first Do 217M-1 to land intact in Britain.

……

A week later I watched it leave for Farnborough, in large pieces on a ‘Queen Mary’ trailer heading along Maid’s Causeway.

 

 

 

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  • world war two

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Chesterton

10 Ainsworth Street

7 Station Road, Dullingham

Moretons Charity Almshouses, Little London Almshouses, 25 – 41 Rampton Road, Cottenham

10 Leys Road

14 Searle Street

26 Highfield Avenue

30 Searle Street, Cyprus Cottage

152 High Street Chesterton, White Horse Inn

71 De Freville Avenue, Brockenhurst, Cambridge

Chesterton Road / Elizabeth Way junction

13, West Croft, and 14, The Elms, Church Street, Chesterton

173 (61) Water Street

58 Hertford Street, Cambridge