After 77 years, Richard Shrubsall may finally see laid to rest the father he never knew. Leonard Shrubsall was declared missing after his plane was shot down while returning from a bombing raid on Berlin in 1943. His wife, Beatrice, was three months pregnant with Richard when she received the telegram with the news.
Now the Dutch army and airforce have begun work to recover an RAF Short Stirling bomber from the Markermeer, a large, shallow lake near Amsterdam. The plane is believed to be aircraft BK716 from the Gold Coast Squadron, shot down during icy weather on 29 March 1943. Seven crew members were declared missing, including Leonard Shrubsall. He was 30.
“After 77 years, it is a big shock because we thought he was shot down over the North Sea but we didn’t know where,” Richard told the Guardian. “I am really pleased that [the plane] is coming up.”
His wife of 56 years, Janice, added: “It’s absolutely marvellous. It has just taken over our lives at the moment. It should have started in March, but because of Covid everything was on hold.”
The plane was found by chance in 2008, when the Royal Netherlands Sea Rescue discovered a piece of rusty landing gear while helping a boat with engine trouble. The sailors called in Johan Graas, a tireless volunteer wreck detective, who has spent 50 years investigating hundreds of crash sites in his home country. Graas, the founder of the Aircraft Recovery Group, arrived with a boat and diving crew, eventually finding an aluminium plate with a serial number that had almost disappeared after decades in the mud.
For years the plane was thought to be another missing bomber, the BK710. But in April 2019, police forensic experts carried out chemical tests, which established that the final letter on the fuselage was a six, not a zero.
“It was terrible to tell [the relatives of the BK710 crew],” said Graas, who went to the UK in person to deliver the news, but “they were also happy” that other servicemen should finally get a resting place. Meanwhile, other clues emerged from the lake. Pulled from the water was a cigarette case inscribed with the initials JMC, thought to have belonged to John Michael Campbell, 30, from Golders Green, who was serving on the BK716 on that night.
Graas and his team also recovered three parachute locks, part of a flying jacket and a tied belt. These fragments convinced him that the crew had gone down with the plane. If remains can be recovered, a specialist unit from the Royal Netherlands army will carry out painstaking work to establish the number of men who died. Finally, the men will be buried in a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the Netherlands, with individual headstones. Under British policy, servicemen from the two world wars are always buried in the country they died in.
Graas, who contacted hundreds of people in his search for relatives, has been campaigning for Dutch authorities to start a salvage operation since 2008. “A crash site is not an official grave. It’s very important to give the official burial so [relatives of the men] can go up to the ceremony and put some flowers on it and remember their loved ones.”
In 2018 the Dutch government launched a national programme to fund 100% of the cost of salvaging aircraft wrecks with crew members. Previously, the government had paid 70% of the bill, leaving local government to pick up the rest. This had meant some requests being refused for lack of funds, including the mystery plane in the Markermeer.
The salvage operation will take up to five weeks, as investigators search a 75 metres squared area of the freshwater lake. A GPS-controlled digger will bring up mud and clay from the lake floor, and all fragments larger than 8mm will be inspected. While some British plane experts have criticised the use of a digger, comparing it to an “arcade machine grabber”, Dutch authorities told the BBC last month that it would enable them to cover a much larger area than any other tools.
Shrubsall and Campbell were flying with three other British airmen and two Canadians. The youngest was 20. Like all men flying for Bomber Command, they were volunteers, and they ran extraordinary risks each time they stepped into a plane. More than 44% of Bomber Command air crew – 55,573 men – were killed in action over the skies of Europe, the highest rate of attrition for any allied unit. At least a further 2,427 men and women died in the service of the unit, both air and ground crew.
Many planes came down over the Netherlands. Capt Suzanne de Boer, of the Royal Netherlands airforce, said.“We want to bring home the people who sacrificed for our freedom, so that their families can have a decent final goodbye.”
