Digging for Britain (2010) s08e04 Episode Script
WW2 Special
1
The United Kingdom
has an epic history,
and a wealth of secrets
still to uncover.
Every year, hundreds of
archaeologists dig,
dive,
and sieve
to find clues
to add to the great historical
jigsaw of our ancestors' lives.
You know, when people say, "What's
the best thing you've ever found?"
This!
I'm Professor Alice Roberts.
This year, we've uncovered
some astonishing finds
and made some truly
ground-breaking discoveries.
Wow, look at that!
Each team of archaeologists has been
armed with a dig diary camera
so they can record their
discoveries as they happen.
That is brilliant.
Dave, I love you.
Our roving archaeologist,
Dr Naoise McSweeney,
is out on the digs.
Who are we looking at?
It's royal.
And I'll be inviting the teams
to bring in their finds
for closer analysis.
That is absolutely beautiful.
In this special edition of
Digging for Britain,
we're exploring the archaeology
of World War II.
We're joining digs from across
the country to give us an insight
into the lives of those who
lived and fought during the war,
from the physical evidence
they left behind.
We'll witness the raising
of a World War II bomber
from the depths
of the English Channel,
the unearthing of one of
Hitler's feared V2 rockets,
and an excavation of a hostel
where young Holocaust survivors
were brought after the war.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
I've come to the Imperial War Museum
in Duxford, Cambridgeshire.
It was from this airfield
that the first Spitfires took off
for the Battle of Britain
in July 1940.
Countless allied missions flew
from airfields right across Britain,
heading for Nazi occupied Europe.
But some planes
never made it that far.
And we head now to the Solent,
where a chance discovery
has prompted a large scale
diving operation.
They're attempting to recover
the amazingly intact remains
of a Second World War bomber.
The excavation is located
500 metres offshore,
not far from Gosport Harbour.
It was here in 2018
that the National Grid planned
to lay an electricity cable
to France,
and they first needed to conduct an
underwater survey of the sea floor.
Right, that looks like something.
It's really hard to hard to tell.
It's been down here a long time,
whatever it is.
It looks like a section
of an engine.
Got cables there, have you?
That looks like the framework
of a wing, or something.
They'd stumbled upon
a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
A World War II bomber,
known as a Fairey Barracuda
that appeared to be
completely intact.
The Barracuda was designed by
British company, Fairey Aviation.
It was built as a torpedo
dive-bomber,
the first of its kind,
made entirely from metal.
It could carry a variety
of deadly payloads,
from six 250lb bombs,
to a 450lb depth charge,
or a huge 1600lb torpedo.
The Barracuda made its maiden
flight in December 1940,
and was operated by
the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm.
At the discovery site
under the Solent,
a team from Wessex Archaeology
have been brought in
to try to raise this extraordinary
plane from the sea floor.
The aircraft is buried
in a buttery type mud,
which is not easy
when it comes to excavation.
Above the seabed,
very little remains.
But as we are excavating down,
more and more
is becoming open to us.
More than 2,600 Barracudas
were built,
but not a single complete
plane survives today.
Dave Morris from the
Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset
is heading up an ambitious project
to reconstruct an entire Barracuda
using salvaged parts.
We have crash site remains
from a number of our Barracudas,
which have been recovered
over more than 40 years
of collecting now.
But they've all been subject
to very fast collisions
to high ground mountainsides.
This is the first time
that we've come across a Barracuda
which is largely still intact,
and in most of its original shape.
It will be a dream come true
for Dave's rebuild project
if the plane can be raised
in one piece.
It's pretty amazing.
You descend down the shot line,
and you see the remains of the
Rolls-Royce Merlin engine -
that is quite prominent
on the seabed.
As you go further back, there are
the remains of the fuselage,
the cockpit, and the wings
are still in place.
Records note that a Barracuda
took off on January 6th, 1944,
from HMS Daedalus, which is now the
nearby Lee-on-Solent airfield.
It suffered engine failure
and pitched into the sea.
The pilot managed to bail out
and survived the crash.
We know that it was
a fairly smooth belly landing,
rather than a violent crash.
We know the pilot escaped OK.
So there's a lot of information
we're putting together from records
and also matching that against
the evidence that we're finding
on the seabed now.
Before the plane can be raised,
a powerful underwater siphon pump
is used to suck the mud out
from around the fuselage and wings.
But working out how to raise
the plane intact
is proving to be
a significant challenge.
The divers realised the frame
is much more fragile
than they previously thought.
The mud is tightly packed
into the individual component parts,
making the plane very heavy,
and likely to break up on lifting.
We're going to have to dismantle
the aircraft underwater
because unfortunately, it is too
fragile to bring up in one piece.
Despite the setback, the divers
have managed to isolate a large part
of one of the wings, and are
carefully preparing it for lifting.
Slowly, the unbroken wing piece
is brought up from the sea floor.
Once out of the water,
the team needs to work quickly.
It starts to decay
as soon as it comes out.
It's been in the sea
for 75 years or so.
When you're trying to conserve
archaeological material,
you want to try and keep it in the
same conditions to how it's been.
What we're going to do
is wrap it up,
and then keep it at least wet-damp
to try and stop the corrosion
continuing.
The plane hasn't come up
in one piece,
but, as more parts are slowly
brought to the surface,
Dave Morris is optimistic.
Absolutely amazed to see, obviously,
a piece of the Barracuda
coming up after 76 years.
Yeah, you can still tap
on the aluminium.
I expected it to be
a lot more corroded,
considering it's been down there
for so many years.
Later on, we'll be following
the recovered parts of the plane,
which will be taken
to the Fleet Air Arm Museum.
For now, Dave still has high hopes
he can use these parts
to help complete his reconstruction
of this long-forgotten plane.
Our next dig is in the Lake
District, where archaeologists
are excavating the site
of a very special hostel.
It was a temporary home for hundreds
of children who were rescued
from concentration camps
in Nazi occupied Europe,
and brought to Britain
to start a new life.
On the shore of Lake Windermere,
in the heart of the Lake District
is the village
of Troutbeck Bridge.
The archaeologists here are hoping
to shed light on an incredible
wartime story of survival
against the odds.
The Holocaust isn't just something
that happened in Eastern Europe.
We have sites relating to the
Holocaust here on British shores.
So this is one of them.
We're excavating the remains
of what we think is
a hostel, where Jewish children
were brought at the end of the war.
The dig is organised by the
Lake District Holocaust Project.
It aims to remember the special role
this area played in helping
to rehabilitate children liberated
from Nazi concentration camps
at the end of the war.
Two boys that came here in 1945
were Ike Alterman and Sam Laskier.
That's me.
A cheerful little fella.
Life in Poland for these
Jewish boys changed dramatically
the moment Germany
invaded in September 1939.
We were lined up.
The assessment came
and started counting.
Father was in front,
and I was behind him,
and he said to me,
"Stand on your tiptoe
"to make you look
a bit taller than you are."
Next to him was my mother,
my sister, my little brother.
"All those on the right,
stay where you are.
"All those on the left, march out
through the front of the square."
That's my mother,
my little brother and sister,
never to be seen again.
Both boys were sent to a succession
of concentration camps
before ending up
in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
You had a number tattooed.
See, that was tattooed in Birkenau.
But then, in May 1945,
the boys were finally liberated
from a camp in Czechoslovakia.
We were in the wagon.
We didn't know what was going on.
But suddenly, I looked around
and there were no guards.
They just disappeared.
And that is the moment that
we realised we were free.
I am the one
waving his hat.
Everybody's so happy -
"We're alive! We're alive!"
We couldn't believe it.
On August 13th,
they were flown from Prague
and brought by bus up to Windermere.
Well, I knew
wherever they were taking me,
it's going to be much better
than where I was.
The boys were housed
in one of three hostels located
on what was the Calgarth Estate -
a town that had been built
during the war to house workers
from the nearby
Sunderland Flying Boat Factory.
After the war,
the town was demolished
and a school was built here.
This is the first time
the site has been excavated.
The team are hoping to find evidence
of one of the hostel buildings,
in the hope that they can
learn something about the lives
of the children
that were brought here.
We're finding huge amounts
still exist within the ground.
So that includes the sort of types
of material that the structures
were made from.
So we're finding bricks
and concrete and mortar.
We're finding
things like window glass.
300 orphaned Jewish children
were brought to the Lake District.
They were known
as the Windermere boys.
Many of the children who came
here had been in Bergen-Belsen
some had been in Auschwitz,
or other slave labour camps,
forced labour camps,
in ghettos across Europe.
So for many, many years,
they had experienced
terrible, terrible atrocities.
They were very much alone.
They didn't know how many
of their family members survived.
But not all of the Windermere
boys were actually boys.
In fact, 28 of them were girls.
Denise's mother Minya
was one of them.
My mum was very proud
to be one of the boys,
although they were in the minority
because they made a fuss
of the girls as well.
There were plenty of boys
to choose from!
Denise has been helping out
with the dig.
We found lots of pieces of tiles
and water pipes, or sewage pipes.
We're thinking that it's probably
some kind of bathroom.
I was thinking my mum must've had
to wash in the bathroom over there!
The team are finding lots of
evidence of the hostel building,
but precious few personal items.
One of the objects that we found,
quite a poignant one, we think.
It's a little, tiny plastic unicorn,
which may or may not have been
as a pendant round somebody's neck.
So this looks to be
a really interesting find,
a small penknife.
Looks like it's made of
mother of pearl,
but it's so corroded that the blade
can't actually come out.
It's the kind of thing
that a child would have had,
and really looked after and carried
around with them everywhere.
It may have been
more than 70 years ago,
but Sam and Ike's memories
of arriving in Windermere
are still vivid.
We arrived at night,
so we didn't see much.
The following morning,
you see the hills and the lake.
We were at our place,
near the lakes as well.
And we thought, "this is paradise".
This is the main hall.
That's me.
Over here.
There was beds, clean sheets,
pillow cases
We could run outside.
You know, we didn't have
the proper things to wear -
some went out in their underpants.
We were wild. We were wild.
It was the most fantastic feeling.
Although the rescued children
only lived here for six months,
it was a life-changing experience.
They were offered
counselling and schooling,
including English lessons, before
being resettled elsewhere in the UK.
It is a very positive story of hope
in a terrible time of despair.
And I think it's really important
to humanise the stories of
refugees.
Today, Ike and Sam
have come back to the village
as they're keen
to see the excavation.
It is very important, and it's very
important that we also tell people
what it was like.
Although a lot of things
have changed,
but we kept the memories.
The dig has helped
local residents reconnect
with this unique and important time
in their village's history.
Archaeology speaks to people
in a special kind of way,
and I think we owe the survivors
and the children
the chance to put
their story out there,
and I think that's
what archaeology can do.
I've invited Kevin to come
and tell me more about the project.
Kevin, you've been digging
in the Lake District,
but your usual work
focusing on the Holocaust
takes you over to Eastern Europe.
So this is a very different
kind of dig for you.
Yeah, absolutely.
We do a lot in Eastern Europe.
Looking at the archaeology of what
happened during the Holocaust
takes us to Poland and Ukraine
and those sort of areas.
But this project gave us
the opportunity to do something
a little bit closer to home.
And you did find a selection of
quite personal objects. Absolutely.
I think this one really stands out
for me, the little horse.
So, we're not sure whether
it's a horse or a unicorn.
I think it's a unicorn.
It's an important object.
It dates to around late '30s, '40s,
so it's the right sort of period,
with a unicorn
being a mythical creature
associated with hope and magic
Yeah.
To find that on the site where we
were looking for evidence of what
these boys went through, and how
they lived their life in Windermere
that was a perfect start for us.
Yes, it's lovely. Is it a little
pendant? A little pendant.
Yeah, wear around the neck. Yeah.
What I find really kind of moving
about this is that, you know,
that might be something that I dig
up in my garden at home,
and it has very little meaning
attached to it.
In this context Absolutely.
it comes with all that meaning.
And then What's that?
Interesting. A tube. Curly Top.
So, it's a hair curling gel,
but it's made
for toddlers and babies.
Yes. It says "for toddlers".
For toddlers - Curly Top.
So it's to make your
baby's hair grow curly.
The natural hair curler
for toddlers.
So it would have been a culture
shock to these children
to all of a sudden
be in an environment
where you could curl your baby's
hair using a gel. Yes!
And then what about this buckle?
Quite important.
It's a belt buckle.
It's quite common to the period.
So we're talking sort of 1930s,
1940s, right through to the '50s.
It could well be that this
belonged to one of them.
What else have you got?
There's a bottle top.
Yes, Veno's.
That is a cough medicine.
It just demonstrates
that these children
went from having no medical care
whatsoever, to all of a sudden
to find themselves in a place
where if they got a cough,
they would be given some Veno's
cough medicine
by a nurse or a doctor.
It demonstrates how dramatically
their life changed overnight.
Yeah. And the care that was
suddenly around them. Absolutely.
Do you think finding objects
like this, does it make it feel
as though that time is more distant,
or closer to the present day
when you find these objects?
The sort of argument here
is that, why do we do archaeology
on such a recent period?
Because we already know the answers,
because we've got books
and photographs,
and all sorts of things.
But I think it's important
because archaeologists
look at evidence and data in
a slightly different way. Yes.
So we are asking new questions
of these archive documents
and these data.
So actually,
we can present new evidence.
That's what this project
is all about,
bringing to the forefront
this little section of Windermere
in the 1940s, just to see what
life was like for these people.
We now turn our attention to another
group of people who came
to Britain during the war.
In the build-up to D-Day,
military camps sprung up
right across the country.
As well as housing British soldiers,
these sites were home to
thousands of Canadian
and American troops.
Our next dig comes from Salisbury,
where a team of British
ex-military personnel
are hoping to find
the remains of a barracks
used by the 2nd Battalion
of the US Army's
506 Parachute Infantry Regiment,
otherwise known as Easy Company.
The men of this elite
American parachute unit
also came to be known
as the Band of Brothers.
They came to Britain
in September 1943,
and remained here for nine months,
preparing alongside other allied
troops for the D-Day invasion.
Their training camp was located
near the village of Aldbourne
in Wiltshire.
MoD archaeologist Richard Osgood
is on site with members
of Operation Nightingale.
This is an initiative using
archaeology to support the recovery
of military personnel
injured in conflict.
On the surface, you can see nothing.
This is just a sports pitch.
What we wanted to see if
archaeology could tell us anything
about what lies below this surface,
and link us to those men
from Easy Company,
and take us back
to those days of D-Day.
We know from military photographs
that in 1943 and '44,
this field housed
a number of wooden barracks.
This was the first time
these young soldiers
had left their base in America.
Some of them described it
as the best accommodation
they had in the whole war,
and others said they felt
like they were on a Hollywood
film set
because this village
is so beautiful.
But the paratroopers would soon
leave this quaint
Wiltshire village far behind.
In the early hours
of June 6th, 1944,
the men of Easy Company were dropped
behind enemy lines in Normandy.
Their mission, to seize key bridges
and clear routes leading away
from Utah Beach to allow safe
passage of US ground troops
who would arrive by sea
just a few hours later.
The plan went awry, with many
missing their drop zone.
But they still managed to capture
and destroy four German field guns,
saving countless allied lives.
Easy Company went on to become one
of the best known
allied fighting forces in the war,
even making it all the way
to Hitler's mountaintop retreat
in the Bavarian Alps.
Back at the dig, the team are hoping
to find some personal items.
They want to gain a glimpse
into the lives of these soldiers
when they were stationed
here during the weeks
leading up to the D-Day invasion.
One of the really exciting
bits about archaeology
is when you're able to put
yourselves literally
in the footsteps of people that did
incredible deeds in the past.
Already they're finding telltale
structures just beneath the surface.
Not many people get excited
by concrete, necessarily,
especially 20th century concrete,
but we've got one, two, three,
four pads of a building
that were put it into this field
in the 1940s.
And this is the remnants
of the platoon sergeant's building.
What have you got there?
It looks like some sort of iron
cooking pot?
Possibly?
It's a coin.
It's a 1944 half penny.
They're also finding artefacts
that directly link
to Easy Company's pivotal
role on D-Day.
Just pulled this out the ground
and didn't have a clue what it was,
but we borrowed Paul's book
and we found exactly what it was.
You see, the handle
for the emergency parachutes.
Yeah, fantastic. Oh, my God.
There are even finds that don't
often survive being buried.
Our military expert
has now identified this
as being parachute silk.
You're standing in a hut
used by Easy Company
and you're touching
a piece of parachute silk
used by those paratroopers,
and that That is amazing.
That is as good as a link to D-Day
as you're ever going to get.
Eagerly sought personal items
are also surfacing.
They're helping to paint a picture
of life outside of combat training.
This is a fairly fun piece
of evidence.
It's a bottle of Brylcreem
that they'd have put in their hair
to make themselves look presentable,
having had their training and got
themselves ready for an evening out.
One of the local buildings
was a place where the Americans
did a lot of their dancing
with the local girls.
The story goes that they made
such good use of that venue
that, at the end of the war,
they had to pay for the floor
to be re-laid.
The hall still exists today.
The floor's in really
good condition.
The dig is giving a unique insight
into the reality
of daily life for these brave men,
just at that moment before they left
Britain for D-Day in June 1944.
This particular room, and I'm just
standing by the entrance, looking
into the hut, is their last moment
of quiet, peace, tranquillity,
and probably
a great deal of reflection
before they dropped in on Normandy.
And that adds a real element
of pathos, I think,
to this particular site.
I've asked Richard to bring in some
of those personal items
for a closer look.
And you've got some of the finds
here from inside the hut,
including that,
which is extraordinary.
You know, the hairs
on the back of my neck,
when you find something like this,
and we're talking paratroopers,
this is the handle
of a reserve parachute
used by somebody in Easy Company.
So that's for your backup parachute.
That's right.
Your first parachute
is what's called a static line,
it's pulled by the aircraft
itself and it opens up,
and you parachute down, hopefully,
and if that doesn't work,
you've got that to keep you alive.
And you've got some smaller objects.
Talk me through these.
What have we got here? A badge?
Well, that's a little touch of them
being very human, in fact.
It's a basketball supporter's badge.
Let's get it under there. So there's
a little basketball on there
That's right. It says, "I support",
but tantalisingly,
we don't know who this individual
soldier supported.
So you've got you've got
a little trace
of them being keen
on life back home,
but just whom, we don't know.
And this looks like something which
you'd find on the head of a guitar.
I think it's a mandolin. Oh, right.
They're passing time
playing musical instruments,
one of the ways that they kept
themselves occupied in the evenings.
And what's this?
That is a nylon stocking.
Found in the hut.
I don't know
how far we go into that!
Maybe some chap had used
a lot of Brylcreem
and had done pretty well,
and his dancing skills
Had a small gift with him.
There are numerous histories
and anecdotes of the guys
giving kids sweets and chewing gum,
things like that,
and luxuries, like these stockings.
So it's all part of that
liaising with the locals
and getting them onside.
It's a nice,
tantalising touch again,
that this soldier might have had
maybe happier things happening
before they went to D-Day. Yeah.
And it is It is like we're
looking at a little
American colony in 1940s Britain.
That's right.
We've got one small trench,
but it's given us loads of finds
relating to a pivotal
moment in history,
and a really famous group
of young men.
And it is about Americana.
It's about what they're doing
to fight,
what they're doing to try
and stay human,
and it's just a small keyhole
into those days of 1943, 1944.
And, as such, I think it's actually
quite a fascinating
little collection of finds.
And I think what's interesting too
is that you're digging with veterans
who are bringing
their own experiences to bear
on the archaeology
they're uncovering. Completely.
We had several British military guys
with us who have faced combat.
So they know the sorts
of experiences and traumas
that these men have faced.
And for them, that was a really
important and powerful thing
because they could directly connect
to the men of Easy Company,
albeit from
a 21st century perspective.
And therefore, finding
this sort of thing, for them,
was quite an emotional experience,
I think.
We now return to the raising
of the Fairey Barracuda bomber
from the murky waters just off
the South coast.
All of the parts that were recovered
have now been transferred to the
Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset.
Our roving archaeologist
Naoise McSweeney is there
to see how the team
is attempting to reconstruct
this long forgotten bomber.
The discovery of an intact Barracuda
bomber was a world first,
but sadly, the salvage team
could not raise it in one piece
and had to bring it up in parts.
At the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Dave
Morris is head of an ambitious
project, to rebuild a whole
Barracuda using only original parts.
For the last 40 years,
they've been collecting fragments
salvaged from various crash sites.
But these are very difficult
to use in the rebuild
because they're so battered
and mangled.
This could all be about to change
with the treasure trove of parts
raised over several days
from the Solent.
So, Dave, where are we
so far with the project,
putting these giant multiple
jigsaw pieces back together?
If you were to look at, basically,
the plan form of a Barracuda
and think,
"OK, let's build one of those",
I think you would stop on day one.
It would just be too mind-boggling.
Chief engineer William Gibbs
has been working on the project
for five years.
He has to identify each specific
part, then work out where they go.
It's a complex process.
So we might put something together
and then it has to come apart again.
OK. Which is annoying,
but it's just part of the process.
So far, he's rebuilt the cockpit.
So just help me visualise
this a bit more.
You've got the pilot sitting here,
you've got the wings over here.
This is the nose of the airplane
going behind us The engine, yeah.
The engine would fit in front,
there in front of the pilot,
so the engine and propeller there,
and then the remainder
of the aircraft,
and the tail would be 30 or so feet
down in that direction.
So she's a big airplane.
It's This is a huge plane.
The project is already providing
a glimpse into the working lives
of the people who built these planes
more than 70 years ago.
On here, we've got drawings -
pencil drawings -
done in the factory.
We were the first people
to see those drawings
since they were doodled on
in the factory
In the factory! Pretty poor factory
behaviour. Well
You shouldn't go scribbling
and doodling on airplanes,
but this was wartime Great Britain,
and there was a little bit
of camaraderie and morale going on.
Dave is now pinning his hopes
on sections of the Barracuda raised
from the Solent, providing
a mountain of usable parts
to help complete the build.
We started finding there
were hundreds of really valuable
fittings, tube ends,
constructional details,
components for the Barracuda
that we could harvest.
You can't even begin to measure
how useful this is for the project.
As well as large sections, such
as the fuselage and the wing piece,
outside the hangar individual parts
harvested from the Solent wreck
are undergoing
chemical preservation.
So what have you got in these tanks?
What's the magic solution
to get rid of all this gunk?
This is just ordinary fresh water.
Tap water mixed with citric acid.
The citric acid helps reduce
the alkalinity of the sea water,
producing a more neutral
PH solution.
This helps to stabilise the parts
and reduce any further degradation.
Let's see what we've got. Yeah.
Oh!
It's a pipe, bit of connecting pipe.
Then we've got Ooh! Yuck.
And the rubber's incredibly
supple. Rubber? Yeah. Oh, yeah!
Oh, this one does not smell good.
There's a long way to go
before all the components salvaged
from the Solent wreck
will be ready for use
in the reconstruction of the plane.
But Dave has already made
some astonishing discoveries.
These are a pair of batteries
from the Solent wreck,
two 12 volt batteries,
dated June '43.
We couldn't resist putting a tester
on the batteries, and one of them
still has not a 0.86
residual volts of current in it!
It's absolutely remarkable,
after 76 years on the seabed.
Underwater. Absolutely.
So there are some remarkable,
quirky little finds
coming up from the Solent wreck.
I don't think I've ever seen
a conservation challenge
quite like this one.
I'm used to working out on site
with conservators to put together
ancient pottery,
or other kinds of artefact,
and that's extremely
difficult to do,
but this is something
on a different scale.
The complexity of it
is just ramped up hugely.
The rebuild project has many years
of work ahead, but Dave is now
confident that,
with the Solent wreck,
one day he will be able to wheel out
a complete Barracuda,
the very last of its kind.
We now move from British planes
to German military hardware.
One of the most destructive weapons
developed by Nazi Germany
was the V-2 rocket, the forerunner
to later ballistic missiles.
Each rocket bore a warhead
containing 900kgs of explosives.
It's thought that around 3,000
rockets were launched at allied
targets during the Second World War.
We now join two brothers
who are on the search for
a V-2 rocket, which fortunately
never hit its target
and ended up in a farmer's field.
The hunt is focused near
the village of Mardan in Kent.
Amateur military archaeologists
Colin and Sean Welch
are on the trail of a V-2
that struck here at 2:15 am
on March 9th, 1945.
Aerial imagery taken after the war
shows it came down in this field.
We've excavated several V-2 rockets
and V-1 flying bombs,
so I'm afraid to say
we've become experts.
The V-2 was the fore-runner
to rockets that would eventually
put a man on the moon.
It was invented
in Germany in the 1930s,
and later developed as an explosive
missile by the Nazis.
The key to its long range
was the innovation
of using liquid oxygen and alcohol
to propel the rocket.
At the dig in Kent, the brothers
hope that the remains of the rocket
could reveal clues to its trajectory
and how it detonated.
To help locate the impact site,
they use a portable magnetometer.
If there are large steel parts
in the ground,
that will then cause a disturbance
to the magnetic orientation
in the ground.
The magnetometer will detect
that and give us a signal.
Using the survey results,
they map out what they believe
is the extent of the impact crater,
now buried underground.
And they start to dig.
Just a metre down, and they're
already finding indirect evidence
of the detonation.
There was an orchard here
and obviously the trees
were destroyed, and the damaged
trees were pushed back into the hole
and buried with the infill,
and the one that you can see
standing up just there,
that's got a broken off top,
which would have been caused
by the blast of the device.
Strong magnetometer readings
down in the hole
indicate they're still on target.
The heavy clay soil makes
it difficult to locate small finds,
but it does have its benefits.
This is the tiniest little bit here,
and the aluminium looks almost fresh
in the find.
And that's because of the absence
of oxygen in the hole.
That's a good sign.
It means that any future
finds are going to be
hopefully in a good state
of preservation.
The V-2 had a maximum range
of 320km,
and travelled at over 1000 metres
per second.
It was travelling so fast
that you could be stood on the spot
and not know that a V-2
was approaching.
You wouldn't see it coming.
You wouldn't hear it coming.
Launched at Britain from sites
in the Nazi-controlled Netherlands,
the V-2s caused an estimated
9,000 British civilian
and military deaths.
As the brothers dig deeper,
recognisable pieces of the rocket
are now starting to emerge.
This is one of the support brackets
for either the oxygen tank,
or the alcohol tank.
That's quite a nice find.
Let's just see what my brother
concurs.
Right, well I know what it is.
That's one of the clamps
for the fuel tanks.
I just said that I'd get
you to confirm it with me.
OK. So you haven't?
I've told them. OK, well
that shows what
a pair of nerds we are,
that we know every bit
of a V-2 rocket!
Deeper still, and key parts of the
supersonic engine
are coming to light.
Doesn't look like much at the
moment, but this is a burner cup
from the combustion chamber
of the V-2 rocket.
I can tell that it's a burner cup
because of that little
bit of brass there, which was
an injector nozzle.
So alcohol was pushed through that
to squirt a feed
into the combustion chamber.
There were 18 of these, and this is
the first one out of our excavation.
3.1.
As the excavation continues,
the brothers make an intriguing
discovery, linked to the
precise moment of impact.
When we look down in there,
we can see the clay itself
has changed colour - rather than
the nice bright yellow, orange
of the surrounds,
it's a horrible grey colour,
which I think is due to the
carbonisation of the materials.
The V-2 was exploding
as it travelled into the ground
at three times the speed of sound.
The detonation couldn't keep
up with how fast it was travelling,
so it got in at least
five feet into the ground
before it actually detonated.
This is a fascinating revelation.
The original intention was to try
and create something like
a blast weapon on the surface.
What they didn't bargain for,
the supersonic speed took the rocket
further into soft ground
than they might have expected.
This V-2 rocket had clearly gone
off target when it hit the field,
and it only detonated
once it had penetrated the ground.
The blast from its warhead would
have been absorbed by the clay.
Six metres down,
the brothers finally reach
the bottom of the impact crater.
The plan now is to clean
and preserve the finds,
and scan them
to create a digital archive.
I quite enjoy the physics
of the excavation.
I particularly enjoy
building a representation
of what it was
that happened at the site.
We've found a lot about the geology
and what it does to the finds.
I think we've done pretty well.
Colin and Shaun's excavation
is part of an ongoing investigation
into the role this terrifying weapon
had on Britain during the war.
Prior to D-Day in June 1944,
the allied forces staged a number
of rehearsals of the landings,
all in top secret.
One of these was called
Operation Tiger,
and it would end in
absolute tragedy.
But, because of the secrecy,
very few people knew about it.
Then in the 1970s, one man
uncovered evidence of the event
and fought to bring
the story to light.
Naoise McSweeney met his son.
The incident took place
off the Devon coast,
near Slapton Sands.
Operation Tiger may have remained
a forgotten moment in history
if it wasn't for the amateur
archaeological sleuthing
of a local man named Ken Small.
I'm meeting his son Dean
to find out more.
When did your father
first begin to suspect
that there was something out there?
He was beachcombing and
he came across things like
tunic buttons, empty shell cases,
identity bracelets Oh, right!
Various parts - all these bits -
knives and forks, spoons,
parts of them, and he thought,
"This is weird.
Why would this be on a beach?"
A local fisherman
added to the mystery.
He told Ken about a spot
just out from the beach
where their nets would snag
on something large underwater.
In the summer of 1974,
Ken persuaded a diver friend
to go down and take a look.
My dad took him out in a boat.
He dived down.
He came up and he said to my dad,
"It's a tank."
My dad said, "What, an oil tank?
A water tank?"
He said, "No, it's like
an Army tank."
My dad just thought,
"This is crazy. How can this be?"
Ken started to search local records
and military archives for answers.
It was then that he stumbled
across a wartime exercise
codenamed Operation Tiger.
Operation Tiger
was carried out in April 1944.
It was one of a number
of practice exercises
involving troops from Britain,
the US and Canada
that all took place in preparation
for the Normandy landings.
30,000 US troops were sent
to Slapton Sands
to rehearse their part in D-Day.
All of this stuff
was completely covered up,
so there was very little evidence
as to what went on,
the actual exercises themselves.
Determined to find out
more about the tank,
in May 1984, Ken took amateur
maritime archaeology to a new level.
With the help of friends
and local divers,
he raised the tank
off the sea floor.
They got a big bulldozer,
they strapped a cable to it
and they started to pull it
along the concrete slipway.
And amazingly,
the tracks started to turn.
It's incredible. Yeah.
And then all the crustaceans, and
stuff that had grown on the tank
over years of being under the water
all started to break away
and crumble, and you could actually
see grease still on the thing.
It's just amazing.
The tank was immediately jet cleaned
and sprayed with rust preventer
to protect it from decay.
So, this is it!
This is the tank. It's enormous!
It's amazing to think
about this under the water.
And of course they were snagging
their nets on it! Yeah.
Dean, this is crazy for me.
I'm used to, when I dig up,
you know,
iron objects from the Iron Age,
they come up as
really crusty, corroded
It's hard to tell what they are, but
this, it's in fabulous condition.
Ken had recovered an American
amphibious Sherman DD tank.
So what happens
is, all around the tank,
there's this flotation collar,
and it's raised
with compressed air upwards,
and it forms a complete skirt
around the tank.
Fantastic, so it's
a fully amphibious tank.
Tank, boat, tank.
While the DD tank
was ahead of its time,
it could be quite unreliable.
Several of them, including the one
Ken raised off the sea floor,
were known to have sunk
during the D-Day rehearsals
due to mechanical faults.
But, as Ken investigated further,
he discovered that Operation Tiger
wasn't just blighted
by technical problems.
Something far more deadly
had occurred.
By early 1944, the Germans
knew allied forces
were planning to invade
Nazi-controlled France.
They just weren't sure
where or when.
By listening in to the
allied radio chatter,
they got wind of Operation Tiger.
On April 28th 1944, nine German
E-boats were sent out on patrol
and headed for the coast of Devon.
Armed with torpedoes,
these were highly manoeuvrable,
deadly attack craft.
That night, allied ships taking
part in Operation Tiger
came under attack.
Two US tank landing ships were sunk
and three more badly damaged.
More than 700 US servicemen
drowned, or died of hypothermia
as they waited to be rescued.
In 2012, two wartime shipwrecks
known to lie off the Devon coast
were formally identified as the
two tank landing ships, or LSTs,
that were sunk
during Operation Tiger.
As part of a project to grant
the wrecks special status,
maritime archaeologist Graham Scott
is heading out to survey them.
What's really important
about these wrecks
is that they're associated
with D-Day,
and they're associated with
practices for D-Day.
Historic England have asked us
to investigate these wrecks for them
and to advise them
what's left of them,
and how important they are.
Now anchored over the wrecks,
they prepare to send down a remotely
operated vehicle, or ROV.
Equipped with sonar
and specialist low light cameras,
the team can stream a live feed
from 50 metres down
direct to the control room.
OK, mate. That's us.
We've got a visual.
We'll just work out
what we're doing.
Let's orientate ourselves.
Let's move along to the west.
Today, Graham is concentrating
on one of the ships.
He wants to assess
what state it's in,
what equipment it was carrying,
and any potentially live munitions
still on board.
We are wondering
whether we have found a gun here.
We are rather hoping that this is
evidence of the ship's armaments.
We could be wrong.
Start tethering easy.
Tethering easy.
One thing we have to be careful
with on a wreck like this
is the presence of ammunition.
We don't touch any of that.
We back the ROV away
to a safe distance.
We've no real idea whether
these things are still viable.
We've got to treat them as though
they could still potentially explode
if we blunder into them.
Moving along the boat, the ROV
camera captures a lifeboat crane
a cargo net
and the engine.
The hull is upside down.
These were very
shallow drafted vessels,
and they tended to capsize
when they sank.
We now know that on the night
of the attack, chaos ensued.
The men on board the landing ships
thought that the firing
initially was part of the exercise.
And it was only when
one of the ships was torpedoed
and they saw this massive
explosion that they realised
they were actually under attack.
And then all hell breaks loose.
Everybody starts firing everywhere.
Very confusing.
Following the deadly Nazi attack,
the Operation Tiger disaster
was quickly covered up.
It remained largely unknown
for decades,
until Ken Small found,
and raised, his tank.
While the tank was not sunk
in the enemy attack,
it now stands as a permanent
memorial to all the US servicemen
who lost their lives
during the D-Day rehearsal.
Ken's son Dean still has his
father's collection of artefacts.
These didn't come out of the tank?
Yeah, they did.
Yeah, they Seriously?
Yeah, they did.
This one here is a range finder.
And this, I believe,
is used to work out
the elevation for the main gun.
The main gun in the turret
of the tank. Yes.
Line of fire. Line of fire, yeah.
In recognition of Ken's
determination to bring the story
of Operation Tiger to light,
and remember the American soldiers
who lost their lives, he received
a letter of gratitude
from the President.
"Dear Mr Small" Yeah!
"..On behalf of all Americans,
"thank you for your kind
and generous efforts.
"Sincerely, Ronald Reagan".
Yeah, yeah!
I think it's
a really important story
that deserves to be
much more widely told.
I mean, it's a big kind of part
of the preparations for D-Day,
which we just haven't heard about.
It took someone like Ken
to get that story out there,
and to give those people who died,
and their families,
and the survivors, a voice and
something to kind of remember it by.
During the war,
Northern Ireland had 28 airfields,
home to both RAF and
US Army Air Force crews.
Whether through combat damage,
mechanical failure or pilot error,
not every plane returned home.
For our final dig, a team of
archaeologists has been joined
by an army of volunteer
schoolchildren
from both sides of the Irish border,
and they are excavating the site
of a crashed American fighter plane.
On December 17th, 1942,
22-year-old American pilot,
Second Lieutenant Milo Randall
was returning to the Royal Naval
Air Station at Eglinton
when he went off course.
As part of an ongoing project
to highlight the role played
by Northern Ireland during the war,
aviation historian Johnny McNee
has been trying
to find Randall's plane.
Eyewitnesses said a plane
crashed in this direction.
What we're trying to work out
from the archaeology,
is that correct?
And the orientation of the
aircraft - did it go in vertically?
Did it bounce across the field and
then sadly bury itself in a corner?
Randall parachuted
safely down into Northern Ireland
and returned to base,
but his plane hit the ground
somewhere near the town of
Castleblayney in County Monaghan,
just south of the border in Ireland.
While parts of the plane were
recovered at the time of the crash,
it hit the ground so hard
that much of it still lies buried.
We're fairly sure these are engine
parts - lots of cables,
clamps, ducts, bits of very
contorted and smashed up metalwork,
with a distinct aroma of fuel
off it.
It looks to be part of the outside,
we're thinking,
because it has
that greenish paint on it.
I'm 100% sure.
We have a long, hinged object here.
Could be a door. Could be
It's very light material.
Records reveal that Lieutenant
Randall was flying
a US fighter plane known
as a Lockheed P-38 Lightning.
The P-38 was the first fighter
aircraft to fly faster than 400mph.
With its four nose-mounted
machine guns,
and 20mm cannon,
it was feared by allied enemies.
The Japanese called it
"two planes, one pilot"
because of its unusual design.
The Germans knew it
as "the fork-tailed devil".
Back at the dig, Johnny is now
finding clues that can be
traced back to where the plane
was manufactured.
We're finding lots of these
little fuel clamps.
These clamps hold the insulation
and rubber tubing
around various parts.
You can see the manufacturer,
a patent number
so it's Witex Manufacturing Company,
Chicago, USA.
And look at that.
Still threaded, still working.
We know that Witex made
fuel clamps for the P-38,
so the team are definitely
digging in the right place.
Johnny is now recognising other
specific parts of the plane.
That's a serious bit of sheet steel.
That must be five, six,
seven mils thick
You know, so it's not like
aluminium. It's there for a purpose,
and that purpose would be to stop
bullets hitting the pilot
or the engine components.
Confident they have found
Rundall's P-38 Lightning,
the layout and condition
of the wreckage
is also providing clues
as to how it crashed.
The debris that we're getting
here suggests that the aircraft
did enter the ground, but almost,
I would say, at about
a 70, 80 degree angle
into the ground.
You've got to imagine this
iconic design, twin engines,
without a pilot,
roaring from across the sky,
running low on fuel, from the West.
It's come in almost vertical
into a stony field,
and this iconic design has been
turned in a matter of seconds
into this crumpled pile
of metal that you can see.
For the schoolchildren volunteers,
the dig is giving them a tangible
connection to the brave young pilots
that were based near here
almost 80 years ago.
So it is bringing history to life.
So it's like relating the artefacts
to what we're learning,
and we can see really what happened,
and how it would have looked from
an outside perspective.
I've asked Johnny to bring in some
of the finds to see what else
we can learn about this plane
and its pilot.
So, what have we got here?
Where do these parts belong
on the Lightning?
You've got little inlet
exhaust valves from the engine,
broken bits of the cockpit - that
locks the cockpit latches down
when you shut it and go flying.
You can see the little
serrated buttons here,
just for locking your cockpit
closed. Yeah.
We've some of the Perspex,
still with the distinct wartime
olive drab paint on it. Yeah!
And some of the very fearsome
nose armament
was also recovered.
We have two 50-calibre bullets.
There are four 50-calibre Browning
machine guns on the front,
plus a 20mm cannon.
And then there's a plate here. Yes.
That was one of the star finds
by the pupils.
I mean, they really were
forensically going through the soil.
And one of them said, "Oh, I've got
a little plate with writing on it."
And you can see there all
the drawing information -
the contract, the date,
it tells you the oil capacity.
And then right at the bottom,
"Lockheed Aviation Corps".
So that 100% proves that
we were dealing with the crash
of a Lockheed P-38.
That was a good find.
What on earth are those?
They came out, if you can imagine,
in our profile with engine wreckage,
cockpit wreckage
and engine wreckage,
these were in the cockpit.
There was a lot of head scratching
amongst the team.
People were suggesting
they were like butter paddles,
or they were something agricultural.
Yeah.
And we put some articles into
the P-38 Association magazine
in America and said, "Does
anybody know what these are,
"before we make some grand
announcement and look stupid?!"
And a guy came back and said
the plane was going to fly
in the Mediterranean theatre
of operations.
Those go into the air intakes
to stop that sandy wind
from blowing in and
clogging up your engines.
You can see traces of yellow paint
on the handle.
They would flag up as you're doing
your walk around in the morning -
"Right, I'd better take these out."
You don't want to fly with
them still in, do you?
No. That would be a bad thing.
And what happened to
the pilot himself? Yes, so
Second Lieutenant
Milo Randall from Iowa,
he then goes to Tunisia,
and less than a month later,
he was shot down and he ends
up being captured,
and then taken to Stalag Luft III,
and he was there for the rest
of the war, and he was there
during the time when the
great escape was taking place.
Is he still with us? No.
Sadly, he passed away in 2006.
But, as his daughter tells us,
he was a great patriot,
loved the P-38, and he did a lot
of flying after the war as well.
But a lot of time for the P-38.
When I said, "What do you think
he would think of what we
"and the pupils are doing here?"
They said, that generation,
he would have laughed and said,
"What are you doing, you know, looking after
my old P-38? What's all the fuss about?" Yeah.
He was just that generation,
that type of a character.
Although the Second World War
happened just 80 years ago
and we have plenty of
historical records of the time,
archaeology provides us
with different insights
and personal connections
with this important episode
in our country's history.
That's all from us for this year.
I hope you'll join us next time
when we continue
Digging For Britain.
The United Kingdom
has an epic history,
and a wealth of secrets
still to uncover.
Every year, hundreds of
archaeologists dig,
dive,
and sieve
to find clues
to add to the great historical
jigsaw of our ancestors' lives.
You know, when people say, "What's
the best thing you've ever found?"
This!
I'm Professor Alice Roberts.
This year, we've uncovered
some astonishing finds
and made some truly
ground-breaking discoveries.
Wow, look at that!
Each team of archaeologists has been
armed with a dig diary camera
so they can record their
discoveries as they happen.
That is brilliant.
Dave, I love you.
Our roving archaeologist,
Dr Naoise McSweeney,
is out on the digs.
Who are we looking at?
It's royal.
And I'll be inviting the teams
to bring in their finds
for closer analysis.
That is absolutely beautiful.
In this special edition of
Digging for Britain,
we're exploring the archaeology
of World War II.
We're joining digs from across
the country to give us an insight
into the lives of those who
lived and fought during the war,
from the physical evidence
they left behind.
We'll witness the raising
of a World War II bomber
from the depths
of the English Channel,
the unearthing of one of
Hitler's feared V2 rockets,
and an excavation of a hostel
where young Holocaust survivors
were brought after the war.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
I've come to the Imperial War Museum
in Duxford, Cambridgeshire.
It was from this airfield
that the first Spitfires took off
for the Battle of Britain
in July 1940.
Countless allied missions flew
from airfields right across Britain,
heading for Nazi occupied Europe.
But some planes
never made it that far.
And we head now to the Solent,
where a chance discovery
has prompted a large scale
diving operation.
They're attempting to recover
the amazingly intact remains
of a Second World War bomber.
The excavation is located
500 metres offshore,
not far from Gosport Harbour.
It was here in 2018
that the National Grid planned
to lay an electricity cable
to France,
and they first needed to conduct an
underwater survey of the sea floor.
Right, that looks like something.
It's really hard to hard to tell.
It's been down here a long time,
whatever it is.
It looks like a section
of an engine.
Got cables there, have you?
That looks like the framework
of a wing, or something.
They'd stumbled upon
a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
A World War II bomber,
known as a Fairey Barracuda
that appeared to be
completely intact.
The Barracuda was designed by
British company, Fairey Aviation.
It was built as a torpedo
dive-bomber,
the first of its kind,
made entirely from metal.
It could carry a variety
of deadly payloads,
from six 250lb bombs,
to a 450lb depth charge,
or a huge 1600lb torpedo.
The Barracuda made its maiden
flight in December 1940,
and was operated by
the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm.
At the discovery site
under the Solent,
a team from Wessex Archaeology
have been brought in
to try to raise this extraordinary
plane from the sea floor.
The aircraft is buried
in a buttery type mud,
which is not easy
when it comes to excavation.
Above the seabed,
very little remains.
But as we are excavating down,
more and more
is becoming open to us.
More than 2,600 Barracudas
were built,
but not a single complete
plane survives today.
Dave Morris from the
Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset
is heading up an ambitious project
to reconstruct an entire Barracuda
using salvaged parts.
We have crash site remains
from a number of our Barracudas,
which have been recovered
over more than 40 years
of collecting now.
But they've all been subject
to very fast collisions
to high ground mountainsides.
This is the first time
that we've come across a Barracuda
which is largely still intact,
and in most of its original shape.
It will be a dream come true
for Dave's rebuild project
if the plane can be raised
in one piece.
It's pretty amazing.
You descend down the shot line,
and you see the remains of the
Rolls-Royce Merlin engine -
that is quite prominent
on the seabed.
As you go further back, there are
the remains of the fuselage,
the cockpit, and the wings
are still in place.
Records note that a Barracuda
took off on January 6th, 1944,
from HMS Daedalus, which is now the
nearby Lee-on-Solent airfield.
It suffered engine failure
and pitched into the sea.
The pilot managed to bail out
and survived the crash.
We know that it was
a fairly smooth belly landing,
rather than a violent crash.
We know the pilot escaped OK.
So there's a lot of information
we're putting together from records
and also matching that against
the evidence that we're finding
on the seabed now.
Before the plane can be raised,
a powerful underwater siphon pump
is used to suck the mud out
from around the fuselage and wings.
But working out how to raise
the plane intact
is proving to be
a significant challenge.
The divers realised the frame
is much more fragile
than they previously thought.
The mud is tightly packed
into the individual component parts,
making the plane very heavy,
and likely to break up on lifting.
We're going to have to dismantle
the aircraft underwater
because unfortunately, it is too
fragile to bring up in one piece.
Despite the setback, the divers
have managed to isolate a large part
of one of the wings, and are
carefully preparing it for lifting.
Slowly, the unbroken wing piece
is brought up from the sea floor.
Once out of the water,
the team needs to work quickly.
It starts to decay
as soon as it comes out.
It's been in the sea
for 75 years or so.
When you're trying to conserve
archaeological material,
you want to try and keep it in the
same conditions to how it's been.
What we're going to do
is wrap it up,
and then keep it at least wet-damp
to try and stop the corrosion
continuing.
The plane hasn't come up
in one piece,
but, as more parts are slowly
brought to the surface,
Dave Morris is optimistic.
Absolutely amazed to see, obviously,
a piece of the Barracuda
coming up after 76 years.
Yeah, you can still tap
on the aluminium.
I expected it to be
a lot more corroded,
considering it's been down there
for so many years.
Later on, we'll be following
the recovered parts of the plane,
which will be taken
to the Fleet Air Arm Museum.
For now, Dave still has high hopes
he can use these parts
to help complete his reconstruction
of this long-forgotten plane.
Our next dig is in the Lake
District, where archaeologists
are excavating the site
of a very special hostel.
It was a temporary home for hundreds
of children who were rescued
from concentration camps
in Nazi occupied Europe,
and brought to Britain
to start a new life.
On the shore of Lake Windermere,
in the heart of the Lake District
is the village
of Troutbeck Bridge.
The archaeologists here are hoping
to shed light on an incredible
wartime story of survival
against the odds.
The Holocaust isn't just something
that happened in Eastern Europe.
We have sites relating to the
Holocaust here on British shores.
So this is one of them.
We're excavating the remains
of what we think is
a hostel, where Jewish children
were brought at the end of the war.
The dig is organised by the
Lake District Holocaust Project.
It aims to remember the special role
this area played in helping
to rehabilitate children liberated
from Nazi concentration camps
at the end of the war.
Two boys that came here in 1945
were Ike Alterman and Sam Laskier.
That's me.
A cheerful little fella.
Life in Poland for these
Jewish boys changed dramatically
the moment Germany
invaded in September 1939.
We were lined up.
The assessment came
and started counting.
Father was in front,
and I was behind him,
and he said to me,
"Stand on your tiptoe
"to make you look
a bit taller than you are."
Next to him was my mother,
my sister, my little brother.
"All those on the right,
stay where you are.
"All those on the left, march out
through the front of the square."
That's my mother,
my little brother and sister,
never to be seen again.
Both boys were sent to a succession
of concentration camps
before ending up
in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
You had a number tattooed.
See, that was tattooed in Birkenau.
But then, in May 1945,
the boys were finally liberated
from a camp in Czechoslovakia.
We were in the wagon.
We didn't know what was going on.
But suddenly, I looked around
and there were no guards.
They just disappeared.
And that is the moment that
we realised we were free.
I am the one
waving his hat.
Everybody's so happy -
"We're alive! We're alive!"
We couldn't believe it.
On August 13th,
they were flown from Prague
and brought by bus up to Windermere.
Well, I knew
wherever they were taking me,
it's going to be much better
than where I was.
The boys were housed
in one of three hostels located
on what was the Calgarth Estate -
a town that had been built
during the war to house workers
from the nearby
Sunderland Flying Boat Factory.
After the war,
the town was demolished
and a school was built here.
This is the first time
the site has been excavated.
The team are hoping to find evidence
of one of the hostel buildings,
in the hope that they can
learn something about the lives
of the children
that were brought here.
We're finding huge amounts
still exist within the ground.
So that includes the sort of types
of material that the structures
were made from.
So we're finding bricks
and concrete and mortar.
We're finding
things like window glass.
300 orphaned Jewish children
were brought to the Lake District.
They were known
as the Windermere boys.
Many of the children who came
here had been in Bergen-Belsen
some had been in Auschwitz,
or other slave labour camps,
forced labour camps,
in ghettos across Europe.
So for many, many years,
they had experienced
terrible, terrible atrocities.
They were very much alone.
They didn't know how many
of their family members survived.
But not all of the Windermere
boys were actually boys.
In fact, 28 of them were girls.
Denise's mother Minya
was one of them.
My mum was very proud
to be one of the boys,
although they were in the minority
because they made a fuss
of the girls as well.
There were plenty of boys
to choose from!
Denise has been helping out
with the dig.
We found lots of pieces of tiles
and water pipes, or sewage pipes.
We're thinking that it's probably
some kind of bathroom.
I was thinking my mum must've had
to wash in the bathroom over there!
The team are finding lots of
evidence of the hostel building,
but precious few personal items.
One of the objects that we found,
quite a poignant one, we think.
It's a little, tiny plastic unicorn,
which may or may not have been
as a pendant round somebody's neck.
So this looks to be
a really interesting find,
a small penknife.
Looks like it's made of
mother of pearl,
but it's so corroded that the blade
can't actually come out.
It's the kind of thing
that a child would have had,
and really looked after and carried
around with them everywhere.
It may have been
more than 70 years ago,
but Sam and Ike's memories
of arriving in Windermere
are still vivid.
We arrived at night,
so we didn't see much.
The following morning,
you see the hills and the lake.
We were at our place,
near the lakes as well.
And we thought, "this is paradise".
This is the main hall.
That's me.
Over here.
There was beds, clean sheets,
pillow cases
We could run outside.
You know, we didn't have
the proper things to wear -
some went out in their underpants.
We were wild. We were wild.
It was the most fantastic feeling.
Although the rescued children
only lived here for six months,
it was a life-changing experience.
They were offered
counselling and schooling,
including English lessons, before
being resettled elsewhere in the UK.
It is a very positive story of hope
in a terrible time of despair.
And I think it's really important
to humanise the stories of
refugees.
Today, Ike and Sam
have come back to the village
as they're keen
to see the excavation.
It is very important, and it's very
important that we also tell people
what it was like.
Although a lot of things
have changed,
but we kept the memories.
The dig has helped
local residents reconnect
with this unique and important time
in their village's history.
Archaeology speaks to people
in a special kind of way,
and I think we owe the survivors
and the children
the chance to put
their story out there,
and I think that's
what archaeology can do.
I've invited Kevin to come
and tell me more about the project.
Kevin, you've been digging
in the Lake District,
but your usual work
focusing on the Holocaust
takes you over to Eastern Europe.
So this is a very different
kind of dig for you.
Yeah, absolutely.
We do a lot in Eastern Europe.
Looking at the archaeology of what
happened during the Holocaust
takes us to Poland and Ukraine
and those sort of areas.
But this project gave us
the opportunity to do something
a little bit closer to home.
And you did find a selection of
quite personal objects. Absolutely.
I think this one really stands out
for me, the little horse.
So, we're not sure whether
it's a horse or a unicorn.
I think it's a unicorn.
It's an important object.
It dates to around late '30s, '40s,
so it's the right sort of period,
with a unicorn
being a mythical creature
associated with hope and magic
Yeah.
To find that on the site where we
were looking for evidence of what
these boys went through, and how
they lived their life in Windermere
that was a perfect start for us.
Yes, it's lovely. Is it a little
pendant? A little pendant.
Yeah, wear around the neck. Yeah.
What I find really kind of moving
about this is that, you know,
that might be something that I dig
up in my garden at home,
and it has very little meaning
attached to it.
In this context Absolutely.
it comes with all that meaning.
And then What's that?
Interesting. A tube. Curly Top.
So, it's a hair curling gel,
but it's made
for toddlers and babies.
Yes. It says "for toddlers".
For toddlers - Curly Top.
So it's to make your
baby's hair grow curly.
The natural hair curler
for toddlers.
So it would have been a culture
shock to these children
to all of a sudden
be in an environment
where you could curl your baby's
hair using a gel. Yes!
And then what about this buckle?
Quite important.
It's a belt buckle.
It's quite common to the period.
So we're talking sort of 1930s,
1940s, right through to the '50s.
It could well be that this
belonged to one of them.
What else have you got?
There's a bottle top.
Yes, Veno's.
That is a cough medicine.
It just demonstrates
that these children
went from having no medical care
whatsoever, to all of a sudden
to find themselves in a place
where if they got a cough,
they would be given some Veno's
cough medicine
by a nurse or a doctor.
It demonstrates how dramatically
their life changed overnight.
Yeah. And the care that was
suddenly around them. Absolutely.
Do you think finding objects
like this, does it make it feel
as though that time is more distant,
or closer to the present day
when you find these objects?
The sort of argument here
is that, why do we do archaeology
on such a recent period?
Because we already know the answers,
because we've got books
and photographs,
and all sorts of things.
But I think it's important
because archaeologists
look at evidence and data in
a slightly different way. Yes.
So we are asking new questions
of these archive documents
and these data.
So actually,
we can present new evidence.
That's what this project
is all about,
bringing to the forefront
this little section of Windermere
in the 1940s, just to see what
life was like for these people.
We now turn our attention to another
group of people who came
to Britain during the war.
In the build-up to D-Day,
military camps sprung up
right across the country.
As well as housing British soldiers,
these sites were home to
thousands of Canadian
and American troops.
Our next dig comes from Salisbury,
where a team of British
ex-military personnel
are hoping to find
the remains of a barracks
used by the 2nd Battalion
of the US Army's
506 Parachute Infantry Regiment,
otherwise known as Easy Company.
The men of this elite
American parachute unit
also came to be known
as the Band of Brothers.
They came to Britain
in September 1943,
and remained here for nine months,
preparing alongside other allied
troops for the D-Day invasion.
Their training camp was located
near the village of Aldbourne
in Wiltshire.
MoD archaeologist Richard Osgood
is on site with members
of Operation Nightingale.
This is an initiative using
archaeology to support the recovery
of military personnel
injured in conflict.
On the surface, you can see nothing.
This is just a sports pitch.
What we wanted to see if
archaeology could tell us anything
about what lies below this surface,
and link us to those men
from Easy Company,
and take us back
to those days of D-Day.
We know from military photographs
that in 1943 and '44,
this field housed
a number of wooden barracks.
This was the first time
these young soldiers
had left their base in America.
Some of them described it
as the best accommodation
they had in the whole war,
and others said they felt
like they were on a Hollywood
film set
because this village
is so beautiful.
But the paratroopers would soon
leave this quaint
Wiltshire village far behind.
In the early hours
of June 6th, 1944,
the men of Easy Company were dropped
behind enemy lines in Normandy.
Their mission, to seize key bridges
and clear routes leading away
from Utah Beach to allow safe
passage of US ground troops
who would arrive by sea
just a few hours later.
The plan went awry, with many
missing their drop zone.
But they still managed to capture
and destroy four German field guns,
saving countless allied lives.
Easy Company went on to become one
of the best known
allied fighting forces in the war,
even making it all the way
to Hitler's mountaintop retreat
in the Bavarian Alps.
Back at the dig, the team are hoping
to find some personal items.
They want to gain a glimpse
into the lives of these soldiers
when they were stationed
here during the weeks
leading up to the D-Day invasion.
One of the really exciting
bits about archaeology
is when you're able to put
yourselves literally
in the footsteps of people that did
incredible deeds in the past.
Already they're finding telltale
structures just beneath the surface.
Not many people get excited
by concrete, necessarily,
especially 20th century concrete,
but we've got one, two, three,
four pads of a building
that were put it into this field
in the 1940s.
And this is the remnants
of the platoon sergeant's building.
What have you got there?
It looks like some sort of iron
cooking pot?
Possibly?
It's a coin.
It's a 1944 half penny.
They're also finding artefacts
that directly link
to Easy Company's pivotal
role on D-Day.
Just pulled this out the ground
and didn't have a clue what it was,
but we borrowed Paul's book
and we found exactly what it was.
You see, the handle
for the emergency parachutes.
Yeah, fantastic. Oh, my God.
There are even finds that don't
often survive being buried.
Our military expert
has now identified this
as being parachute silk.
You're standing in a hut
used by Easy Company
and you're touching
a piece of parachute silk
used by those paratroopers,
and that That is amazing.
That is as good as a link to D-Day
as you're ever going to get.
Eagerly sought personal items
are also surfacing.
They're helping to paint a picture
of life outside of combat training.
This is a fairly fun piece
of evidence.
It's a bottle of Brylcreem
that they'd have put in their hair
to make themselves look presentable,
having had their training and got
themselves ready for an evening out.
One of the local buildings
was a place where the Americans
did a lot of their dancing
with the local girls.
The story goes that they made
such good use of that venue
that, at the end of the war,
they had to pay for the floor
to be re-laid.
The hall still exists today.
The floor's in really
good condition.
The dig is giving a unique insight
into the reality
of daily life for these brave men,
just at that moment before they left
Britain for D-Day in June 1944.
This particular room, and I'm just
standing by the entrance, looking
into the hut, is their last moment
of quiet, peace, tranquillity,
and probably
a great deal of reflection
before they dropped in on Normandy.
And that adds a real element
of pathos, I think,
to this particular site.
I've asked Richard to bring in some
of those personal items
for a closer look.
And you've got some of the finds
here from inside the hut,
including that,
which is extraordinary.
You know, the hairs
on the back of my neck,
when you find something like this,
and we're talking paratroopers,
this is the handle
of a reserve parachute
used by somebody in Easy Company.
So that's for your backup parachute.
That's right.
Your first parachute
is what's called a static line,
it's pulled by the aircraft
itself and it opens up,
and you parachute down, hopefully,
and if that doesn't work,
you've got that to keep you alive.
And you've got some smaller objects.
Talk me through these.
What have we got here? A badge?
Well, that's a little touch of them
being very human, in fact.
It's a basketball supporter's badge.
Let's get it under there. So there's
a little basketball on there
That's right. It says, "I support",
but tantalisingly,
we don't know who this individual
soldier supported.
So you've got you've got
a little trace
of them being keen
on life back home,
but just whom, we don't know.
And this looks like something which
you'd find on the head of a guitar.
I think it's a mandolin. Oh, right.
They're passing time
playing musical instruments,
one of the ways that they kept
themselves occupied in the evenings.
And what's this?
That is a nylon stocking.
Found in the hut.
I don't know
how far we go into that!
Maybe some chap had used
a lot of Brylcreem
and had done pretty well,
and his dancing skills
Had a small gift with him.
There are numerous histories
and anecdotes of the guys
giving kids sweets and chewing gum,
things like that,
and luxuries, like these stockings.
So it's all part of that
liaising with the locals
and getting them onside.
It's a nice,
tantalising touch again,
that this soldier might have had
maybe happier things happening
before they went to D-Day. Yeah.
And it is It is like we're
looking at a little
American colony in 1940s Britain.
That's right.
We've got one small trench,
but it's given us loads of finds
relating to a pivotal
moment in history,
and a really famous group
of young men.
And it is about Americana.
It's about what they're doing
to fight,
what they're doing to try
and stay human,
and it's just a small keyhole
into those days of 1943, 1944.
And, as such, I think it's actually
quite a fascinating
little collection of finds.
And I think what's interesting too
is that you're digging with veterans
who are bringing
their own experiences to bear
on the archaeology
they're uncovering. Completely.
We had several British military guys
with us who have faced combat.
So they know the sorts
of experiences and traumas
that these men have faced.
And for them, that was a really
important and powerful thing
because they could directly connect
to the men of Easy Company,
albeit from
a 21st century perspective.
And therefore, finding
this sort of thing, for them,
was quite an emotional experience,
I think.
We now return to the raising
of the Fairey Barracuda bomber
from the murky waters just off
the South coast.
All of the parts that were recovered
have now been transferred to the
Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset.
Our roving archaeologist
Naoise McSweeney is there
to see how the team
is attempting to reconstruct
this long forgotten bomber.
The discovery of an intact Barracuda
bomber was a world first,
but sadly, the salvage team
could not raise it in one piece
and had to bring it up in parts.
At the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Dave
Morris is head of an ambitious
project, to rebuild a whole
Barracuda using only original parts.
For the last 40 years,
they've been collecting fragments
salvaged from various crash sites.
But these are very difficult
to use in the rebuild
because they're so battered
and mangled.
This could all be about to change
with the treasure trove of parts
raised over several days
from the Solent.
So, Dave, where are we
so far with the project,
putting these giant multiple
jigsaw pieces back together?
If you were to look at, basically,
the plan form of a Barracuda
and think,
"OK, let's build one of those",
I think you would stop on day one.
It would just be too mind-boggling.
Chief engineer William Gibbs
has been working on the project
for five years.
He has to identify each specific
part, then work out where they go.
It's a complex process.
So we might put something together
and then it has to come apart again.
OK. Which is annoying,
but it's just part of the process.
So far, he's rebuilt the cockpit.
So just help me visualise
this a bit more.
You've got the pilot sitting here,
you've got the wings over here.
This is the nose of the airplane
going behind us The engine, yeah.
The engine would fit in front,
there in front of the pilot,
so the engine and propeller there,
and then the remainder
of the aircraft,
and the tail would be 30 or so feet
down in that direction.
So she's a big airplane.
It's This is a huge plane.
The project is already providing
a glimpse into the working lives
of the people who built these planes
more than 70 years ago.
On here, we've got drawings -
pencil drawings -
done in the factory.
We were the first people
to see those drawings
since they were doodled on
in the factory
In the factory! Pretty poor factory
behaviour. Well
You shouldn't go scribbling
and doodling on airplanes,
but this was wartime Great Britain,
and there was a little bit
of camaraderie and morale going on.
Dave is now pinning his hopes
on sections of the Barracuda raised
from the Solent, providing
a mountain of usable parts
to help complete the build.
We started finding there
were hundreds of really valuable
fittings, tube ends,
constructional details,
components for the Barracuda
that we could harvest.
You can't even begin to measure
how useful this is for the project.
As well as large sections, such
as the fuselage and the wing piece,
outside the hangar individual parts
harvested from the Solent wreck
are undergoing
chemical preservation.
So what have you got in these tanks?
What's the magic solution
to get rid of all this gunk?
This is just ordinary fresh water.
Tap water mixed with citric acid.
The citric acid helps reduce
the alkalinity of the sea water,
producing a more neutral
PH solution.
This helps to stabilise the parts
and reduce any further degradation.
Let's see what we've got. Yeah.
Oh!
It's a pipe, bit of connecting pipe.
Then we've got Ooh! Yuck.
And the rubber's incredibly
supple. Rubber? Yeah. Oh, yeah!
Oh, this one does not smell good.
There's a long way to go
before all the components salvaged
from the Solent wreck
will be ready for use
in the reconstruction of the plane.
But Dave has already made
some astonishing discoveries.
These are a pair of batteries
from the Solent wreck,
two 12 volt batteries,
dated June '43.
We couldn't resist putting a tester
on the batteries, and one of them
still has not a 0.86
residual volts of current in it!
It's absolutely remarkable,
after 76 years on the seabed.
Underwater. Absolutely.
So there are some remarkable,
quirky little finds
coming up from the Solent wreck.
I don't think I've ever seen
a conservation challenge
quite like this one.
I'm used to working out on site
with conservators to put together
ancient pottery,
or other kinds of artefact,
and that's extremely
difficult to do,
but this is something
on a different scale.
The complexity of it
is just ramped up hugely.
The rebuild project has many years
of work ahead, but Dave is now
confident that,
with the Solent wreck,
one day he will be able to wheel out
a complete Barracuda,
the very last of its kind.
We now move from British planes
to German military hardware.
One of the most destructive weapons
developed by Nazi Germany
was the V-2 rocket, the forerunner
to later ballistic missiles.
Each rocket bore a warhead
containing 900kgs of explosives.
It's thought that around 3,000
rockets were launched at allied
targets during the Second World War.
We now join two brothers
who are on the search for
a V-2 rocket, which fortunately
never hit its target
and ended up in a farmer's field.
The hunt is focused near
the village of Mardan in Kent.
Amateur military archaeologists
Colin and Sean Welch
are on the trail of a V-2
that struck here at 2:15 am
on March 9th, 1945.
Aerial imagery taken after the war
shows it came down in this field.
We've excavated several V-2 rockets
and V-1 flying bombs,
so I'm afraid to say
we've become experts.
The V-2 was the fore-runner
to rockets that would eventually
put a man on the moon.
It was invented
in Germany in the 1930s,
and later developed as an explosive
missile by the Nazis.
The key to its long range
was the innovation
of using liquid oxygen and alcohol
to propel the rocket.
At the dig in Kent, the brothers
hope that the remains of the rocket
could reveal clues to its trajectory
and how it detonated.
To help locate the impact site,
they use a portable magnetometer.
If there are large steel parts
in the ground,
that will then cause a disturbance
to the magnetic orientation
in the ground.
The magnetometer will detect
that and give us a signal.
Using the survey results,
they map out what they believe
is the extent of the impact crater,
now buried underground.
And they start to dig.
Just a metre down, and they're
already finding indirect evidence
of the detonation.
There was an orchard here
and obviously the trees
were destroyed, and the damaged
trees were pushed back into the hole
and buried with the infill,
and the one that you can see
standing up just there,
that's got a broken off top,
which would have been caused
by the blast of the device.
Strong magnetometer readings
down in the hole
indicate they're still on target.
The heavy clay soil makes
it difficult to locate small finds,
but it does have its benefits.
This is the tiniest little bit here,
and the aluminium looks almost fresh
in the find.
And that's because of the absence
of oxygen in the hole.
That's a good sign.
It means that any future
finds are going to be
hopefully in a good state
of preservation.
The V-2 had a maximum range
of 320km,
and travelled at over 1000 metres
per second.
It was travelling so fast
that you could be stood on the spot
and not know that a V-2
was approaching.
You wouldn't see it coming.
You wouldn't hear it coming.
Launched at Britain from sites
in the Nazi-controlled Netherlands,
the V-2s caused an estimated
9,000 British civilian
and military deaths.
As the brothers dig deeper,
recognisable pieces of the rocket
are now starting to emerge.
This is one of the support brackets
for either the oxygen tank,
or the alcohol tank.
That's quite a nice find.
Let's just see what my brother
concurs.
Right, well I know what it is.
That's one of the clamps
for the fuel tanks.
I just said that I'd get
you to confirm it with me.
OK. So you haven't?
I've told them. OK, well
that shows what
a pair of nerds we are,
that we know every bit
of a V-2 rocket!
Deeper still, and key parts of the
supersonic engine
are coming to light.
Doesn't look like much at the
moment, but this is a burner cup
from the combustion chamber
of the V-2 rocket.
I can tell that it's a burner cup
because of that little
bit of brass there, which was
an injector nozzle.
So alcohol was pushed through that
to squirt a feed
into the combustion chamber.
There were 18 of these, and this is
the first one out of our excavation.
3.1.
As the excavation continues,
the brothers make an intriguing
discovery, linked to the
precise moment of impact.
When we look down in there,
we can see the clay itself
has changed colour - rather than
the nice bright yellow, orange
of the surrounds,
it's a horrible grey colour,
which I think is due to the
carbonisation of the materials.
The V-2 was exploding
as it travelled into the ground
at three times the speed of sound.
The detonation couldn't keep
up with how fast it was travelling,
so it got in at least
five feet into the ground
before it actually detonated.
This is a fascinating revelation.
The original intention was to try
and create something like
a blast weapon on the surface.
What they didn't bargain for,
the supersonic speed took the rocket
further into soft ground
than they might have expected.
This V-2 rocket had clearly gone
off target when it hit the field,
and it only detonated
once it had penetrated the ground.
The blast from its warhead would
have been absorbed by the clay.
Six metres down,
the brothers finally reach
the bottom of the impact crater.
The plan now is to clean
and preserve the finds,
and scan them
to create a digital archive.
I quite enjoy the physics
of the excavation.
I particularly enjoy
building a representation
of what it was
that happened at the site.
We've found a lot about the geology
and what it does to the finds.
I think we've done pretty well.
Colin and Shaun's excavation
is part of an ongoing investigation
into the role this terrifying weapon
had on Britain during the war.
Prior to D-Day in June 1944,
the allied forces staged a number
of rehearsals of the landings,
all in top secret.
One of these was called
Operation Tiger,
and it would end in
absolute tragedy.
But, because of the secrecy,
very few people knew about it.
Then in the 1970s, one man
uncovered evidence of the event
and fought to bring
the story to light.
Naoise McSweeney met his son.
The incident took place
off the Devon coast,
near Slapton Sands.
Operation Tiger may have remained
a forgotten moment in history
if it wasn't for the amateur
archaeological sleuthing
of a local man named Ken Small.
I'm meeting his son Dean
to find out more.
When did your father
first begin to suspect
that there was something out there?
He was beachcombing and
he came across things like
tunic buttons, empty shell cases,
identity bracelets Oh, right!
Various parts - all these bits -
knives and forks, spoons,
parts of them, and he thought,
"This is weird.
Why would this be on a beach?"
A local fisherman
added to the mystery.
He told Ken about a spot
just out from the beach
where their nets would snag
on something large underwater.
In the summer of 1974,
Ken persuaded a diver friend
to go down and take a look.
My dad took him out in a boat.
He dived down.
He came up and he said to my dad,
"It's a tank."
My dad said, "What, an oil tank?
A water tank?"
He said, "No, it's like
an Army tank."
My dad just thought,
"This is crazy. How can this be?"
Ken started to search local records
and military archives for answers.
It was then that he stumbled
across a wartime exercise
codenamed Operation Tiger.
Operation Tiger
was carried out in April 1944.
It was one of a number
of practice exercises
involving troops from Britain,
the US and Canada
that all took place in preparation
for the Normandy landings.
30,000 US troops were sent
to Slapton Sands
to rehearse their part in D-Day.
All of this stuff
was completely covered up,
so there was very little evidence
as to what went on,
the actual exercises themselves.
Determined to find out
more about the tank,
in May 1984, Ken took amateur
maritime archaeology to a new level.
With the help of friends
and local divers,
he raised the tank
off the sea floor.
They got a big bulldozer,
they strapped a cable to it
and they started to pull it
along the concrete slipway.
And amazingly,
the tracks started to turn.
It's incredible. Yeah.
And then all the crustaceans, and
stuff that had grown on the tank
over years of being under the water
all started to break away
and crumble, and you could actually
see grease still on the thing.
It's just amazing.
The tank was immediately jet cleaned
and sprayed with rust preventer
to protect it from decay.
So, this is it!
This is the tank. It's enormous!
It's amazing to think
about this under the water.
And of course they were snagging
their nets on it! Yeah.
Dean, this is crazy for me.
I'm used to, when I dig up,
you know,
iron objects from the Iron Age,
they come up as
really crusty, corroded
It's hard to tell what they are, but
this, it's in fabulous condition.
Ken had recovered an American
amphibious Sherman DD tank.
So what happens
is, all around the tank,
there's this flotation collar,
and it's raised
with compressed air upwards,
and it forms a complete skirt
around the tank.
Fantastic, so it's
a fully amphibious tank.
Tank, boat, tank.
While the DD tank
was ahead of its time,
it could be quite unreliable.
Several of them, including the one
Ken raised off the sea floor,
were known to have sunk
during the D-Day rehearsals
due to mechanical faults.
But, as Ken investigated further,
he discovered that Operation Tiger
wasn't just blighted
by technical problems.
Something far more deadly
had occurred.
By early 1944, the Germans
knew allied forces
were planning to invade
Nazi-controlled France.
They just weren't sure
where or when.
By listening in to the
allied radio chatter,
they got wind of Operation Tiger.
On April 28th 1944, nine German
E-boats were sent out on patrol
and headed for the coast of Devon.
Armed with torpedoes,
these were highly manoeuvrable,
deadly attack craft.
That night, allied ships taking
part in Operation Tiger
came under attack.
Two US tank landing ships were sunk
and three more badly damaged.
More than 700 US servicemen
drowned, or died of hypothermia
as they waited to be rescued.
In 2012, two wartime shipwrecks
known to lie off the Devon coast
were formally identified as the
two tank landing ships, or LSTs,
that were sunk
during Operation Tiger.
As part of a project to grant
the wrecks special status,
maritime archaeologist Graham Scott
is heading out to survey them.
What's really important
about these wrecks
is that they're associated
with D-Day,
and they're associated with
practices for D-Day.
Historic England have asked us
to investigate these wrecks for them
and to advise them
what's left of them,
and how important they are.
Now anchored over the wrecks,
they prepare to send down a remotely
operated vehicle, or ROV.
Equipped with sonar
and specialist low light cameras,
the team can stream a live feed
from 50 metres down
direct to the control room.
OK, mate. That's us.
We've got a visual.
We'll just work out
what we're doing.
Let's orientate ourselves.
Let's move along to the west.
Today, Graham is concentrating
on one of the ships.
He wants to assess
what state it's in,
what equipment it was carrying,
and any potentially live munitions
still on board.
We are wondering
whether we have found a gun here.
We are rather hoping that this is
evidence of the ship's armaments.
We could be wrong.
Start tethering easy.
Tethering easy.
One thing we have to be careful
with on a wreck like this
is the presence of ammunition.
We don't touch any of that.
We back the ROV away
to a safe distance.
We've no real idea whether
these things are still viable.
We've got to treat them as though
they could still potentially explode
if we blunder into them.
Moving along the boat, the ROV
camera captures a lifeboat crane
a cargo net
and the engine.
The hull is upside down.
These were very
shallow drafted vessels,
and they tended to capsize
when they sank.
We now know that on the night
of the attack, chaos ensued.
The men on board the landing ships
thought that the firing
initially was part of the exercise.
And it was only when
one of the ships was torpedoed
and they saw this massive
explosion that they realised
they were actually under attack.
And then all hell breaks loose.
Everybody starts firing everywhere.
Very confusing.
Following the deadly Nazi attack,
the Operation Tiger disaster
was quickly covered up.
It remained largely unknown
for decades,
until Ken Small found,
and raised, his tank.
While the tank was not sunk
in the enemy attack,
it now stands as a permanent
memorial to all the US servicemen
who lost their lives
during the D-Day rehearsal.
Ken's son Dean still has his
father's collection of artefacts.
These didn't come out of the tank?
Yeah, they did.
Yeah, they Seriously?
Yeah, they did.
This one here is a range finder.
And this, I believe,
is used to work out
the elevation for the main gun.
The main gun in the turret
of the tank. Yes.
Line of fire. Line of fire, yeah.
In recognition of Ken's
determination to bring the story
of Operation Tiger to light,
and remember the American soldiers
who lost their lives, he received
a letter of gratitude
from the President.
"Dear Mr Small" Yeah!
"..On behalf of all Americans,
"thank you for your kind
and generous efforts.
"Sincerely, Ronald Reagan".
Yeah, yeah!
I think it's
a really important story
that deserves to be
much more widely told.
I mean, it's a big kind of part
of the preparations for D-Day,
which we just haven't heard about.
It took someone like Ken
to get that story out there,
and to give those people who died,
and their families,
and the survivors, a voice and
something to kind of remember it by.
During the war,
Northern Ireland had 28 airfields,
home to both RAF and
US Army Air Force crews.
Whether through combat damage,
mechanical failure or pilot error,
not every plane returned home.
For our final dig, a team of
archaeologists has been joined
by an army of volunteer
schoolchildren
from both sides of the Irish border,
and they are excavating the site
of a crashed American fighter plane.
On December 17th, 1942,
22-year-old American pilot,
Second Lieutenant Milo Randall
was returning to the Royal Naval
Air Station at Eglinton
when he went off course.
As part of an ongoing project
to highlight the role played
by Northern Ireland during the war,
aviation historian Johnny McNee
has been trying
to find Randall's plane.
Eyewitnesses said a plane
crashed in this direction.
What we're trying to work out
from the archaeology,
is that correct?
And the orientation of the
aircraft - did it go in vertically?
Did it bounce across the field and
then sadly bury itself in a corner?
Randall parachuted
safely down into Northern Ireland
and returned to base,
but his plane hit the ground
somewhere near the town of
Castleblayney in County Monaghan,
just south of the border in Ireland.
While parts of the plane were
recovered at the time of the crash,
it hit the ground so hard
that much of it still lies buried.
We're fairly sure these are engine
parts - lots of cables,
clamps, ducts, bits of very
contorted and smashed up metalwork,
with a distinct aroma of fuel
off it.
It looks to be part of the outside,
we're thinking,
because it has
that greenish paint on it.
I'm 100% sure.
We have a long, hinged object here.
Could be a door. Could be
It's very light material.
Records reveal that Lieutenant
Randall was flying
a US fighter plane known
as a Lockheed P-38 Lightning.
The P-38 was the first fighter
aircraft to fly faster than 400mph.
With its four nose-mounted
machine guns,
and 20mm cannon,
it was feared by allied enemies.
The Japanese called it
"two planes, one pilot"
because of its unusual design.
The Germans knew it
as "the fork-tailed devil".
Back at the dig, Johnny is now
finding clues that can be
traced back to where the plane
was manufactured.
We're finding lots of these
little fuel clamps.
These clamps hold the insulation
and rubber tubing
around various parts.
You can see the manufacturer,
a patent number
so it's Witex Manufacturing Company,
Chicago, USA.
And look at that.
Still threaded, still working.
We know that Witex made
fuel clamps for the P-38,
so the team are definitely
digging in the right place.
Johnny is now recognising other
specific parts of the plane.
That's a serious bit of sheet steel.
That must be five, six,
seven mils thick
You know, so it's not like
aluminium. It's there for a purpose,
and that purpose would be to stop
bullets hitting the pilot
or the engine components.
Confident they have found
Rundall's P-38 Lightning,
the layout and condition
of the wreckage
is also providing clues
as to how it crashed.
The debris that we're getting
here suggests that the aircraft
did enter the ground, but almost,
I would say, at about
a 70, 80 degree angle
into the ground.
You've got to imagine this
iconic design, twin engines,
without a pilot,
roaring from across the sky,
running low on fuel, from the West.
It's come in almost vertical
into a stony field,
and this iconic design has been
turned in a matter of seconds
into this crumpled pile
of metal that you can see.
For the schoolchildren volunteers,
the dig is giving them a tangible
connection to the brave young pilots
that were based near here
almost 80 years ago.
So it is bringing history to life.
So it's like relating the artefacts
to what we're learning,
and we can see really what happened,
and how it would have looked from
an outside perspective.
I've asked Johnny to bring in some
of the finds to see what else
we can learn about this plane
and its pilot.
So, what have we got here?
Where do these parts belong
on the Lightning?
You've got little inlet
exhaust valves from the engine,
broken bits of the cockpit - that
locks the cockpit latches down
when you shut it and go flying.
You can see the little
serrated buttons here,
just for locking your cockpit
closed. Yeah.
We've some of the Perspex,
still with the distinct wartime
olive drab paint on it. Yeah!
And some of the very fearsome
nose armament
was also recovered.
We have two 50-calibre bullets.
There are four 50-calibre Browning
machine guns on the front,
plus a 20mm cannon.
And then there's a plate here. Yes.
That was one of the star finds
by the pupils.
I mean, they really were
forensically going through the soil.
And one of them said, "Oh, I've got
a little plate with writing on it."
And you can see there all
the drawing information -
the contract, the date,
it tells you the oil capacity.
And then right at the bottom,
"Lockheed Aviation Corps".
So that 100% proves that
we were dealing with the crash
of a Lockheed P-38.
That was a good find.
What on earth are those?
They came out, if you can imagine,
in our profile with engine wreckage,
cockpit wreckage
and engine wreckage,
these were in the cockpit.
There was a lot of head scratching
amongst the team.
People were suggesting
they were like butter paddles,
or they were something agricultural.
Yeah.
And we put some articles into
the P-38 Association magazine
in America and said, "Does
anybody know what these are,
"before we make some grand
announcement and look stupid?!"
And a guy came back and said
the plane was going to fly
in the Mediterranean theatre
of operations.
Those go into the air intakes
to stop that sandy wind
from blowing in and
clogging up your engines.
You can see traces of yellow paint
on the handle.
They would flag up as you're doing
your walk around in the morning -
"Right, I'd better take these out."
You don't want to fly with
them still in, do you?
No. That would be a bad thing.
And what happened to
the pilot himself? Yes, so
Second Lieutenant
Milo Randall from Iowa,
he then goes to Tunisia,
and less than a month later,
he was shot down and he ends
up being captured,
and then taken to Stalag Luft III,
and he was there for the rest
of the war, and he was there
during the time when the
great escape was taking place.
Is he still with us? No.
Sadly, he passed away in 2006.
But, as his daughter tells us,
he was a great patriot,
loved the P-38, and he did a lot
of flying after the war as well.
But a lot of time for the P-38.
When I said, "What do you think
he would think of what we
"and the pupils are doing here?"
They said, that generation,
he would have laughed and said,
"What are you doing, you know, looking after
my old P-38? What's all the fuss about?" Yeah.
He was just that generation,
that type of a character.
Although the Second World War
happened just 80 years ago
and we have plenty of
historical records of the time,
archaeology provides us
with different insights
and personal connections
with this important episode
in our country's history.
That's all from us for this year.
I hope you'll join us next time
when we continue
Digging For Britain.