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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 pletiful petrol and its full bomb load. How, just how, did it come to make an almost perfect belly landing.

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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