Sgt. John Edward Woodwart
Royal Air Force 408 Sq Hampden
The Hampden document In October 2006 I found some photos again I received from my father of a plane crash in October 1941 in the vicinity of Venlo (The Netherlands). I recognized a Hampden and on the tail I could read the registration EQ-D. I have some pictures of the plane but also a picture of a man lying in a hospital bed and at the backside of this picture my father had written that it was captain Thompson, one of the crewmembers of the Hampden.
With the aid of the internet I found out that the plane belonged to the 408 RCAF Sq and on a veteran site I contacted the webmaster to ask if he knew anything about a Hampden with the EQ-D registration and a crewmember named Thompson. I received an answer about the Hampden EQ-D that crashed in Limburg (province of The Netherlands and Venlo lies in that area) on 8/9 November 1941, but the crewmembers were:
P/O E.L. (Bill) Houghton (RNZAF) P/O J.C. Monkhouse (RCAF) Sgt A.J. (Jack) Gallan Sgt J.E. (John Edward) (Jack) Woodwart
This had to be the Hampden I was looking for, so I asked the webmaster if he would put a question on the site to see if there were any relatives or crewmembers who were interested in my photos. A few days later I got an email from a guy in The Netherlands who was interested in WW2 crashes and he told me that a book existed about the former German Airfield near Venlo and in this book I could read more about the plane. He also gave me a name and address of a person who had the same passion and knew everything about WW2 crashes in Limburg. I obtained the book and there I read:
The Hampden with 4 other planes took off in the evening the 8 of November 1941 at 17.19 local time from Syerston for a bomber attack on the Krupp steel factories at Essen (Germany). They set course to checkpoint Skegness and then to the isle of Texel (The Netherlands) Then they set course to the target, dropped their bombs and made a course at 270 degrees back home. At 22.30 they reached the airspace of Venlo and were engaged by a ME 110 nightfighter flown by Willi Dimter of Nightfighter Sq 1 Venlo. It appeared that both engines of the Hampden were hit and Bill Houghton made a perfect belly emergency landing (a masterpiece in the darkness) in the neighbourhood of Renkensfort at Maasbree (about 10 km away from Venlo)
At the landing 3 crew members were unharmed but one was injured (broken leg) and because of that it was impossible to transport the wounded and therefore the rest of the crew decided to stay together, waiting for the arrival of the Germans. However before the arrival of the Germans one of the crewmembers handed over the documents they had to one of the earlier arrived locals. Willi Dimter crashed on September 17th 1942.
Two weeks later I visited Mr 't Zandt in Venlo and he gave me copies of the photos he had. A picture of the original crew (instead of Sgt Woodward, P/O Bill Bishop belonged to the original crew), another picture of the plane and copies of the documents that were handed over to one of the locals at the crash site. About a month later I got an email from Judy Greers from New Zealand who was a daughter of Jack Woodwart and she told me that her father died in 1990 but had not talked much about the war. She knew that he had been a POW for 3 years after a plane crash in The Netherlands in 1941. On that plane he was a replacement in that crew. During a evacuation of the camp, Woodwart managed to escape and at the end of the war he got back by boat to the UK where he later graduated as a optician in Manchester. There he met his wife and in 1956 the family emigrated to New Zealand, first to Christcurch and then to Timaru.
I mailed the whole story and photos to Judy Greer and she told her mother about it and 2 weeks later she mailed back with another interesting story:
“My mother relates an interesting event that happened in the 1970's - my father was working as an optician in Timaru and had agreed to do some optical work in Greymouth on the West Coast. He flew over and that evening was sitting at dinner with the other people in the hotel including the flight crew. He heard a page over the hotel intercom for a "Mr Houghton" and when he saw this man was one of the group he was sitting with, he asked if he knew or was related to the Houghton (in the crash). Amazingly this man was the same Houghton - who was a New Zealander. Also amazing was that this flight to the West Coast was the first flight my father had been on since the crash in 1941 and the pilot was the same Houghton!!!”
About a year later I bought a book about the Hampden bomber and in the book again I was confronted with a picture of the EQ-D with its crewmembers. So now I’m eager to hear more about a perhaps continuing story?
