The vegetation is different: it’s discoloured and there are a lot more weeds.’ At a crash site you get lots of oil and fuel seeping into the ground. As a 16-year-old boy I found it fascinating, so I went out to the site, just outside Purmerend, and asked the landowner if he knew about the crash. ‘An American life jacket with a name on it. ‘I was at a birthday party where an uncle of mine was telling me how he had found a lifejacket at a crash site,’ he recalls. Thirty years after the war, a teenage boy named Johan Graas began poking around crash sites with his metal detector. They came to rest in fields, skewered through farm buildings, in the North Sea or in the country’s network of waterways. More than 3,000 Allied planes were shot down over the Netherlands during World War II. It was the first piece of a wartime puzzle that would take 12 years to piece together. The crew dropped anchor while they waited to be rescued, and when they pulled the weight back up again they found a piece of aircraft machinery attached.
On a winter’s day just before Christmas in 2008, the Royal Dutch Rescue Society received a call-out to a boat that had broken down on the Markermeer lake, around six miles north-east of Amsterdam.
The crew from 218 Squadron with the Short Stirling bomber
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