The Exbury Junkers: A World War II Mystery - Part III
By: John Stanley
Alternatively, it was suggested that the plane may even have been carrying secret agents. Well, this certainly captured my imagination, and as I walked out of that exhibition I was a changed man. Something had taken hold of me, and I just knew that I had to get to the bottom of this wartime riddle if at all possible. What I didn't know then was that this would involve me spending most of my spare time over the next 6 years investigating it.
I will be forever grateful to Jock Leal for setting me off on this journey. Jock sadly passed away some years ago now, but I'm particularly delighted that his son-in-law Barry Price was able to come along today from the Isle of Wight. Thank you Barry for your help and support. I've really appreciated it.
In the following weeks and months, the more I discovered about the mysterious circumstances surrounding this incident, and the considerable speculation to which it has given rise over the years, the more I resolved to discover exactly what had caused the Junkers to make its ill-fated flight to the Hampshire coast shortly before D-Day. It surely could have been no co-incidence that the Ju 188 had made a bee-line for an area where much of the Allied invasion force was being assembled.
At the time, the Solent and the Beaulieu river was becoming packed with landing craft and other support vessels, and Exbury House, in its guise as the naval base HMS Mastodon, was closely involved in the planning and preparations for the Normandy landings. There were thousands of sailors and Marines temporarily based at Exbury. A good number were camped out in tents on the estate, or quartered in Nissen huts which had been erected to the east side of Exbury House. In ending up at Exbury, then, the German bomber had certainly flown into a veritable hornets' nest. At this point, I should like to thank Cyril Cunningham for allowing me to use in my book some background information from his work The Beaulieu River Goes To War. This is a most comprehensive account of the preparations for D-Day at HMS Mastodon and the Beaulieu river area. I'm delighted that Cyril could be with us today. Thank you for your help.
At this stage it's probably saying that, although there was a very precise geographical backdrop to this strange wartime happening, there is a much wider significance to this story which makes it more than just a "local history mystery" as I have heard it described in some quarters. For months, the Allies had been weaving an elaborate plan of deception codenamed Operation Fortitude, designed to fool the Germans into thinking that the main thrust of the invasion would be mounted from south-east England against the Calais area of the northern French coast. It was vital therefore that the Germans were not able to conduct reconnaissance of those regions of south and south-west England where the real invasion preparations were being concentrated. It is a sobering thought then that on the 18 April 1944, a German bomber was able to fly to the Hampshire coast and circle directly over a number of sensitive military installations that would be critical to the success of the Normandy landings.
