It was Sunday tea-time on August 18, 1940, when Spitfire pilot Colin Gray suddenly found a German Messerschmitt 110 in his sights.
Pilots from 54 Squadron had been scrambled after more than 100 enemy aircraft were spotted heading towards the East Coast.
Colin – a group captain with the New Zealand Air Force – was among the defenders.
“Out of nowhere, the sleek outline of a Messerschmitt 110 reared up right before my spinning propeller and into my gunsight,” he remembered years later.
He pumped two bursts of machine-gun fire into the enemy aircraft.
It stalled at 15,000ft before plunging earthwards with thick black smoke pouring from one of its damaged twin engines.
The stricken aircraft’s death dive screamed over Butlin’s in Clacton before slamming into Smiths Sandpit, off Alton Park Road.
Burning oil set fire to hedges at the nearby allotments.
The plane vanished without trace into the deep sand, entombing pilot Hauptmann Hubert Leuttke and rear-gunner Unteroffizier Herbert Brillo in the wreckage deep underground.
Their bodies were never recovered.
Military antiques dealer, author and local historian Derek Johnson was on his deathbed when told son Karl the story.
Derek had met Gp Capt Gray when the New Zealander returned to the scene of the crash during the early 1970s.
Karl was gripped and started doing his own research into the Luftwaffe’s advances over Tendring during the war.
His father also passed down a radio headset earphone that came from the Messerschmitt wreckage.
“It was made from Bakelite and would have gone in his flying helmet,” said Karl, 52, of Old Road, Clacton.
“A Luftwaffe tunic was found hanging in a tree covered in blood. A bloke took it home and put it in his coal bunker.
“The plane is still buried there with the crew in it. They reckon the fuel tank must have exploded because there was no bomb on board.”
Other relics recovered from near the crash site included part of a bullet-riddled tail-fin, a pair of binoculars and the smouldering leather sole from one of the German crew’s flying boots.
The earphone is all that is known to have survived.
Decades later, an allotment holder found a piece of Perspex believed to be from the cockpit canopy, but his wife thought it was rubbish and threw it away before Karl could track it down.
“I was disappointed about that because I wanted it for my collection,” admitted Karl.
There was no shortage of memorabilia for wartime souvenir hunters in Clacton.
Karl has the landing light from the Heinkel that crashed in Victoria Road, Clacton, in April 1940, claiming the mainland’s first civilian victims.
The bomber landed on to the home of Frederick and Dorothy Gill, killing the couple.
His collection also contains part of the Heinkel’s canopy, a bloodstained parachute and part of one of the mines it was carrying.
“It’s just a hobby, but it is very interesting,” said Karl, who spent years working as a musician.
“It’s better than slogging your guts out around the pubs and clubs as a singer.”
- Source: http://www.clactonandfrintongazette.co.uk
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