Pratt and Whitney engine of crashed USAAF C-47 42-108982, Bleaklow, England.
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C-47 42-108982, near Glossop, Peak District
In Ashton Clough, Bleaklow, Derbyshire.
The C-47 took of on July 24th 1945 from Leicester to Renfrew, Scotland. The pilot, First Lieutenant George L. Johnson, had been warned of bad weather along the flight path up central England, so he decided to take the more direct route and risk the high ground. The rest of the five man crew consisted of co-pilot, First Lieutenant Earl W. Burns; navigator, First Lieutenant Beverly W. Izlar; Crew Chief, Sergeant Theodore R. McCrocklin and the radio operator, Sergeant Francis M. Maloney. There were two passengers, Corporal Grover R. Alexander, USAAF and RAF Leading Aircraftsman J. D. Main. The crashed Dakota was found two days later at 5 o’clock.
The Dakota crashed on James’s Thorn, just metres away from where Lancaster KB993 had crashed a couple of months earlier. All crew members were killed. Much of the wreckage was pushed down the hill and into Ashton Clough, so that passing aircraft would not report it as a new crash.
There is no path in Ashton Clough, and this site is easier to reach by climbing up to it than descending (as I did) from the B29 Superfortress crash site on Higher Shelf Stones.
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Thank you for sharing
Ah these are from early on I guess and have been missed by me …all familiar sites 🙂
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/pasujoba44]
This was my first crash sites walk, went to Over Exposed first, then descended Ashton Clough for this. Totally missed the Lanc because I knew nothing of it.
Most contacts have missed these, hence no comments, I joined Flickr at the same time as I started visiting and photographing crash sites (and only got into advancing my photography techniques from sticking a pair of sunglasses over the lens of a compact camera as a result of this!)
So when I added these, I didn’t know many people and I also think people were a bit unsure as to how to take them, being such a morbid subject. Certainly I was unsure how people would react, wondered if it was all in dubious taste, you know. Such concerns don’t bother me much now, but I still have a whole bunch of photos from Auschwitz on my drive which I have never added to Flickr. I might take another look at them and bring them out, cheer everyone up a bit….
When we lived in the North, my elder brother took me to a crash site high on the moors above either Glossop or Greenfield (Chew Valley). I would have been about 8 or 9, which makes it around 1948/51. I think it was a civilian plane, and I remember only a baby had survived. We were there about a month afterwards, and my brother brought back some silver coloured fabric, and a torn page of the logbook. How could I trace where/when it was?
Hi David,
It’s all recorded on this page;
https://aircrashsites.co.uk/air-crash-sites-5/bea-dakota-g-ahcy-looking-towards-dovestones-reservoir/
The grid reference is SE 01493 02680
Ian
Many thanks. I was indeed 9-1/2. Bit young for my brother to drag me there “hiking” from Ashton.
The number of survivors differs, but then we were only going off rumour. There does seem to have been a baby.
David
I knew the which crash it was immediately from the description of your memory. There’s not much left to see now, but there are a number of crash sites in that area,