World War II Nazi bomber trove enthralls

IWAS misled by the title of the new History Channel series, World War 2 Treasure Hunters, expecting precious metal and jewels retrieved from torpedoed ships. But no. The treasure was archaeological, involving the location, excavation and minimal restoration of a Nazi warplane shot down near Liverpool at the height of the Liverpool Blitz.

Bet you’ve never heard of the Liverpool Blitz. Me neither.

It seems that this was as devastating to the civilian population as was the London version. Unlike the London Blitz, wartime censorship virtually eliminated mention of the Liverpool Blitz.

Running the show was a team of military experts and painstaking archaeologists.

Having located the buried aircraft in the marshes of Merseyside, the excavation began. Professional, detailed, careful and with a sharp eye on health and safety, the site was cordoned off, a mechanical digger commissioned and slowly the bits of old warplane were revealed.

Bits indeed they were, having been shot out of the sky in flames in 1941 and buried in salty mud ever since. The first exciting fragment was one of the twin engines, then parts of the airframe and the bomb cradle.

This device was designed to carry two 500kg bombs, each one capable of destroying all life and buidings in an entire street.

So when the digger carefully dumped one of the bombs on the side of the excavation, there was quite a lot of running around and general flight. Filmed from the air, the rapid but orderly evacuation of the site was quite spectacular to watch, as all wore bright, Effstyle hard hats and Hi-vis jackets.

In time (“Please hold. Your call will be answered”, said the Army bomb squad), a military explosives expert arrived and declared the bomb safe. Wild scenes, all in real time.

What about the crew? It seems two of the four crew died in action, while an observer and a pilot survived. Both were badly injured and required careful medical care; in the case of the pilot, over an extended period.

The doctor’s schoolgirl daughter brought the pilot fresh flowers every day. We cut to a flashback in which the wounded Nazis are surrounded in their crashed plane by angry British villagers. These folk wanted to kill the Nazis. British police prevented them from doing so.

Another flashback from the same movie: we see British flying aces, like Douglas Bader, making Nazi airmen and prisoners-ofwar welcome and comfortable. There’s feudal jabber about shared chivalry between the two sides. But medieval chivalry had and has nothing to do with war criminals bombing civilians with high explosive.

Back to the recent present. The makers and stars of the series travel to Germany where they meet the middle-aged son of the Nazi pilot.

The film people present the pilot’s son with a restored fragment of his Dad’s bomber, specifically an exhaust valve from one of the engines.

The son, in fluent English, chats with some reserve about the war and what it was that the exhaust valve truly represented for him.

And so the movie ends, an extraordinary achievement in its own right, with archaeology, military history, old black-andwhite newsreels and the final meeting with the late pilot’s son.

Catch the next episode this and following weeks.