Fitful Head memorial to the crew of Halifax Bomber No 9438

On the night of March 30th 1942 Halifax bomber No. 9438 of 35 Squadron RAF was returning from a bombing mission against the German battleship Tirpitz that was at anchor in a fjord near Trondheim, on Norway's western coast.

Tirpitz. 

The bombing raid comprised 34 aircraft from squadrons 74, 35 and 10 taking off from RAF bases at Tain, Lossiemouth and Kinloss.

Halifax Bomber  

On reaching their target they found it obscured by cloud and many of the bombers had to jettison their bombs before returning to base.

For some reason that we will probably never know bomber No 9438 ploughed into the 1000' high cliffs of the eponymous Fitful Head on the western side of south Mainland Shetland killing all 7 of its crew

The location of Fitful Head.

The crashed aircraft and the bodies of the airmen lay undiscovered for over a week. Two local men, John Mainland and George Leslie, tending their sheep discovered the wreck and notified the RAF. More than 50 years later John's son, Willie Mainland would be responsible for raising the stone memorial to the victims.

Most of the bodies were found but the body of Ronald Meredith lay is such a precarious position that the authorities accepted the advice of the local men that it could not be recovered. His body had been wrapped in his parachute and placed in a cleft in the cliff and covered with aircraft wreckage. It is still there today.

What caused the crash is still unknown. It has been conjectured that they were trying to land at the nearby RAF Sumburgh air base because they were short of fuel as a result of damage to their fuel tanks. They were probably using Shetland as a waypoint for their navigation back to Kinloss but why were they so low as to crash into the cliffs? My guess is that they were trying to land for some reason and were a mile too far north to make safe landfall.

The site of the crash was initially marked by a wooden cross but through time and weather this eventually disappeared. In 1995 a more permanent memorial stone was placed on the cliffs. The memorial is not easy to find as it is hidden from view to anyone walking the cliffs along the fence line. If you go looking for it tread carefully as it is close to the cliff edge and it is located at NGR  HU 34682 12841. When I visited the site in August 2013 there was a white fishing net float attached to the fence near the point you need to cross but this should not be relied on.

The memorial stone at the crash site.
© JB Winterburn 2013

The cliffs of Fitful Head
© JB Winterburn 2013

The historic Quendale Water Mill which is just less than 2 miles from the crash site houses files of local history information including information about this crash and the erection of the granite memorial stone.

Quendale Water Mill



Acknowledgments and references. 

Thanks to the Aviation Research Group of Orkney and Shetland ( A.R.G.O.S) for the use of some historic photographs. Their informative web site can be found by clicking HERE

Sandy Pearson, Shetland Life May 2010.  Tragedy, bravery , mystery, controversy:The Fitful Head Halifax Tragedy. pp14-16. 

http://www.archieraf.co.uk/archie/9438tlh3031.html

The Imperial War Museum (London) and the University of Bristol are organising a conference on 

Materialities and Cultural Memory of twentieth Century Conflict.

Conflict and the Senses is the fifth in the series, and similarly covers the whole of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It acknowledges the recent increase of interdisciplinary interest in the role of the senses in human experience and cultural representation (smell, touch, sound). As modern conflict invokes the extremes of human behaviour, its relationship with diverse and multivalent sensorial dimensions suggests itself to be of critical importance in our understanding of conflict in the recent past and the present.


For more information and to see the Call for Papers click on this LINK

Beyond the Dead Horizon

I am very pleased to have been able to contribute to a new book, Beyond the Dead Horizon, edited by Nicholas J Saunders.

Hadrian and the Hejaz Railway: Linear features in conflict landscapes. Chapter 13.

The Hedjaz Railway was built by the Ottomans to take Hajj pilgrims from Damascus to Medina in the early twentieth century, though it probably also had covert military and geo-political functions. Completed in 1908, it was served by station buildings regularly spaced along its length, many of which were protected by blockhouses and nearby hilltop forts by the time of the Great Arab Revolt of 1916-18, during the First World War. In AD 122, during his visit to Britain, the Roman Emperor Hadrian commissioned his eponymous wall to run from the River Tyne near modern Newcastle to the Solway estuary near Carlisle. It formed the northern limit of the Roman Empire, and was defended at regular intervals by ‘mile castles’ and forts. The Hedjaz Railway and Hadrian’s Wall are iconic linear features in their respective landscapes. They are both liminal entities, designed not as impenetrable barriers but rather as stabilising and boundary-defining constructions for the military, for traders, and as ideological borders for state imperialism. This paper takes changing views of the environs of Hadrian’s Wall as landscapes of danger, military activity, romance, and tourism, and applies them to the Hedjaz Railway in order to generate a new narrative understanding of modern conflict along a linear conflict zone. 

See full details on the Oxbow web pages

Helles memorial , Gallipoli

A lone gun relic points to the Helles memoral

The Helles Memorial stands on the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula.  It is an obelisk over 30m high and dominates the landscape and can be seen by every ship entering the Dardanelles.

The British Commonwealth memorial has the dual function as a memorial to the entire Gallipoli campaign and as a commemoration for the servicemen who died and have no known grave.
The memorial bears more than 21,000 names of those who died there or were buried at sea. The United Kingdom and Indian forces named on the memorial died in operations throughout the peninsula, the Australians at Helles. There are also panels for those who died or were buried at sea in Gallipoli waters. The memorial bears more than 21,000 names.

Imperial Camel Corps Memorial, London. 

Imperial Camel Corps memorial, London

The Imperial Camel Corps ( ICC) monuments stands in the Victoria Embankment gardens in London. I believe it was erected in 1927 to commemorate the dead of the ICC and their actions during the First World War.

My research into the landscapes of Jordan during the war has taken me to Mudawwara , a small railway station and fortified landscape in the south of the country and close to the border with Saudi Arabia.  The ICC carried out a spectacular raid here in August 1918 and this is commemorated on this monument.

A Line in the Sand

I have recently read a great book by James Barr about the Middle East in the  early 20th century.

 ‘A Line in the Sand’,is a sequel to  Barr's  ‘Setting the Desert on Fire’ and uses recently released archives to relate the involvement of Britain and France  in the arbitrary ‘carve-up’ of the Middle East during the first half of the twentieth century.

     He presents his interpretation of the intriguing story of the period when Britain and France controlled the Middle East in the aftermath of the First World War. The book resembles a gripping spy thriller populated with well known political and military figures and improbable characters engaged in ‘venomous rivalry’, political posturing and state sponsored terrorism. However, this was not fiction but violent reality. 

In December 1915 the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, summoned politician Sir Mark Sykes to Downing Street to advise him and the war cabinet on the future of the Ottoman Empire; an issue that threatened Britain’s alliance with France. Sykes wanted a dividing line from the Mediterranean coast to the Persian frontier- ‘from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk’. Later, Sykes met with the French civil servant François George-Picot and they fashioned the secret Sykes-Picot agreement; territory to the north of the arbitrary line would go to France and that to the south to Britain. This agreement lead to the post war creation of mandates granting Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan to Britain and Syria and Lebanon to France. It was intended to shore-up the Entente Cordial, however the agreement ignited Arab Zionist conflict, provoked thirty years of rivalry and animosity and a short war as Britain and France settled old scores. 

This is an expertly researched and authoritative book that is easy to read. It reveals new narratives about the formation of the Middle East and how Britain curtailed French ambitions in the Levant by supporting Zionists’ claims to Palestine. 

Modern Conflict Archaeology New book

Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology

 An extract from  the Oxbow web site:-

The new interdisciplinary study of 20th-century conflict archaeology has developed rapidly over the last decade. Its anthropological approach to modern conflicts, their material culture and their legacies has freed such investigations from the straitjacket of traditional 'battlefield archaeology'. It offers powerful new methodologies and theoretical insights into the nature and experience of industrialised war, whether between nation states or as civil conflict, by individuals as well as groups and by women and children, as well as men of fighting age. The complexities of studying wars within living memory demand a new response - a sensitised, cross-disciplinary approach which draws on many other kinds of academic study but which does not privilege any particular discipline. It is the most democratic kind of archaeology - one which takes a bottom-up approach - in order to understand the web of emotional, military, political, economic and cultural experiences and legacies of conflict. These 18 papers offer a coherent demonstration of what modern conflict archaeology is and what it is capable of and offer an intellectual home for those not interested in traditional 'war studies' or military history, but who respond to the idea of a multidisciplinary approach to all modern conflict. 240p, 90 col & b/w illus (Oxbow Books, 2012)

Full details HERE

Kinmel Camp Riots

Servicemen buried at Bodelwyddan and the Kinmel Camp Riot.

More information about the Kinmel Camp Riots is available on the BBC Northeast Wales web site. Click Here to view

The Kinmel Camp riots of 1919

An interesting story about the Kinmel Camp Riots of 1919 has appeared on the BBC Wales History  website. Click HERE  read.
This is a Modern Conflict Archaeology  story about how unrest lead to a riot within  a transit  camp due to the concerns of Canadian soldiers largely being ignored by the officers.
The article was written by Phil Carradice who "is a broadcaster, writer and poet. His blog posts provide a distinctly Welsh perspective on major events in world history, as well as revealing some little-known events from the Welsh past." Someone who's posts  I shall be following in the future.

John B Winterburn

john@winterburn.info

Modern Conflict Archaeology

Conflict in the Air

Today I am writing a chapter about the conflict landscapes of southern Jordan. In 1917 and 1918 a remarkable band of pilots flew reconnaissance missions from their airbase in Aqaba to Turkish targets along the Hejaz Railway. They included places such as Ma'an, Wadi Rutm and Uneiza.
This was one of  the first air wars and used aircraft that were slow and underpowered. Climbing over the mountains to the north of Aqaba meant that they had to ascend to 5000 feet which was at the limit of their performance. To gain adequate lift they had to take-off before the air temperatures rose too much and so most flights took off  before 5 am.
Some interesting ideas to get to grips with associated with the pilots engagements with landscape.