On this day in 1943, a German Luftwaffe bomber plane crash-landed in a field at Ballydrennan near Ballycommon, Nenagh.
It was a relatively mild for the time of year when on the evening of December 13, a German Fokke-Wulf 200 Condor class reconnaissance plane was spotted descending perilously close to the ground over Dromineer. According to eyewitnesses, at about 7pm the plane crash-landed and erupted into flames in Seymour’s farmland near Ballycommon village.
The stricken aircraft had been seen and heard by several people in the locality, and it wasn’t long before a tide of bicycles and the Nenagh fire brigade were rushing to the scene of the crash.
But the investigation job fell to the trained volunteers of the Local Defence Force (LDF), the armed security outfit charged with back-up policing the nation as a preventative measure against invasion during the war years. Converging on the burning plane, the LDF men could hear voices from the German crewmembers – all still alive – calling out from behind cover having already escaped the plane.
What the local militia didn’t realise was that the Germans were warning them to stay back from the plane, as there was still the risk of a serious explosion emanating from within its fragmented remains. One LDF man, Jack Loughnane, ventured too close and caught the edge of the blast from a bomb that exploded as he was peering through the cockpit. He suffered a serious head injury and ended up losing an eye. Another man, Tommy O’Meara, sustained a less serious leg wound from the blast.
The German crew, among them a pilot, navigator and gunners, rushed to the aid of both Irishmen with their first aid kits. After an ambulance arrived and commotion had abated slightly, the airmen, realising they were in neutral Ireland, surrendered themselves to the LDF and were conveyed to Nenagh firstly before being interned at the Curragh.
After that the ever-swelling crowd of on-lookers descended upon the still-smouldering wreckage and salvaged everything from bits of metal to batteries and empty cartridge cases, as machine-gun ammo exploded all around them. The following day a detachment of Regular Army soldiers was sent from the Ardnacrusha base in Co Clare to secure the entire area and the plane, and the excitement was over.
Little is known of what exactly happened to the four-engine Fokke-Wolf. The eight-man crew would not give any details of their mission, only saying that two dead engines and a shortage of fuel had caused the forced landing. No bombs of any type were found and army intelligence presumed that their mission was a reconnaissance sweep over the North Atlantic. It would most likely have taken off from either Oslo or Bordeaux, and is thought to have got into difficulty somewhere over Iceland.
All eight crew members survived both the crash-landing and the war and lived to tell the tale.
Sources:
Nenagh Guardian, 02/09/2006, p6
https://www.independent.ie/regionals/wexford/new-ross-news/searching-for-that-german-warplane/27440853.html
