The Exbury Junkers: A World War II Mystery - Part VI
By: John Stanley
I left that LCT (Tank Landing Craft) at the same hard as the Canadians and got in to my truck and drove away. Only a few miles on I came on an enigma of this curious war, in a small country lane with fields on either side, very near the sea. A German aeroplane, a Ju 188, had crashed across the road that morning; it had spread itself over the field in the manner of a modern aircraft, so that no part of it was recognisable or more than one foot high above the ground, save for the rudder. There had been fire, of course, but no explosion, for it was not carrying bombs.
All the occupants were killed outright save one, who died ten minutes later without speaking. And when they came to count the bodies there were seven; seven men in an aeroplane that normally is manned by four, that only had seats for four in a cramped cockpit, with no other space in the machine. They must have been sitting on each other's knees.
Nevil Shute was obviously intrigued by the mysterious circumstances surrounding the incident which he had chanced upon, as he drove along the Lower Exbury road, and he summed this up in the final few words of his article, which actually sounded remarkably similar to those voiced by Jock Leal of the Royal Observer Corps:
What duty brought these seven NCOs to England in full daylight, without bombs, and at that suicidal height ? Why seven ? Or had they stolen the machine, and were they trying to escape to England to surrender ? It may well be that we shall never hear the answers.
This curious enigma , as Nevil Shute called it, was to have a lasting effect on his imagination. Having first woven the episode into an earlier unpublished novel, it appeared as the centrepiece of Shute's book "Requiem for a Wren".
In this book, Janet Prentice, a crack-shot Wren who services Oerlikon guns on tank landing craft in the Beaulieu river, shoots down an incoming Ju 188 bomber. Her elation soon turns to anguish when she learns that the seven men on board were Poles or Czechs, who were thought to have stolen the Junkers in order to escape to England. Janet Prentice views the series of personal tragedies, which subsequently befall her, as divine retribution for the awful deed which she has done. She finally commits suicide, believing that justice will not fully be done until she has taken her own life.
As well as giving prominence to the shooting down of the German bomber at Exbury, much of the backdrop to "Requiem for a Wren" is the build-up to D-Day at HMS Mastodon, in the Beaulieu river and on the Solent.
In chapter seven of my book, I provide a comparison between the real-life Junkers incident and Shute's fictional account, demonstrating that in some cases his version of events was pretty accurate. But in other cases, it was pure invention - particularly the main element of the plot, whereby the Junkers is shot down by a Wren.
