Page 23 - Garda Journal Summer 2019

HISTORY | American WWII Warplane Excavation
American WWII Warplane Excavation
On the 17th of December 1942, Second Lieutenant Milo E. Rundall bailed out of his P-38 Lightning plane after he went off course and ran out of fuel. He had been flying from a Royal Air Force Base named Langford Lodge, near Lough Neagh, to US Army Air Station 344 Eglinton in Derry. His former homebase is now part of the City of Derry airport.
Rundall later recalled how he was separated from the rest of the crew after being delayed during take off. He was left alone and without the only pilot who had a map. He had no guide. Add in poor weather conditions that made navigating all but impossible, and Rundall was left with no other option but to eject himself from his aircraft. He experienced free fall for close to 5,000 feet before he pulled the ripcord on his parachute. Rundall landed safely in Northern Ireland and soon learned from a local that his plane had landed in a field in the Republic of Ireland. He managed to get in contact with his airbase and was back in action only days after the incident. Rundall took part in the Allied campaign against Germany in North Africa but was taken prisoner in 1943 after he was shot down. Once freed, he returned home from the war and spent the rest of his life in his hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa until he passed away in 2006.
The Irish Defence Forces recovered the entirety of the plane’s wreckage the same year it crashed. Or so they thought. Radar surveys of the land were completed by Queen’s University aviation archaeologists in early 2019, and they found that the soil concealed many
remaining pieces of the fallen aircraft. On the 29th of June, a dedicated group of excavators set out to recover what had been left behind. This effort is the first licenced excavation of a United States World War II war plane to ever take place in Ireland. An excavation team of students from Foyle College in Derry and Ballybay Community College in Monaghan, surveyors from Queen’s University Belfast and Monaghan County museum employees came together in Castleblayney for the remarkable undertaking. The Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht National Monuments Unit and the National Museum of Ireland granted the team the licences they needed to legally excavate the site and preserve their findings. A digger was used to remove an initial layer of soil so the team could utilise shovels, hoes, trowels and metal detectors to find what had been left behind more than 70 years ago. It was only a matter of minutes before its machine guns’ bullets and parts of the cockpit were discovered.
Monaghan County Museum curator Liam Bradly told the Irish Times1 that “this excavation will be the final project in our three-year examination of the impact of the Second World War on our border county.” A portion of the remains will go to the museum’s popular “The Monaghan Spitfire — Life On The Border With A World At War” exhibit that is open until the end of this year. Bradley went on to state that the “other parts of the P38 wreckage will be put on display in Derry City and Strabane District Council’s Tower Museum which already proudly hosts the 2011 recovered remains of Spitfire P8074 flown by US Eagle pilot Bud Wolfe.”
Jonny McNee, aviation historian and main organiser behind the excavation, also relayed to the Times that the team had managed to make contact with Rundall’s daughter, Meryl Rundall. She told them she was considering a visit to the exhibition before the year’s end. 76 years after Second Lieutenant Rundall’s crash landing, his heroic efforts were finally enshrined in history.
By Susie Poore
Sources: www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/ second-world-war-aircraft-excavated-in-co-monaghan- field-1.3941987 www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/ww2-plane-ireland- monaghan www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/ second-world-war-aircraft-excavated-in-co-monaghan- field-1.3941987 www.rte.ie/news/ulster/2019/0629/1059219-aircraft-dig- monaghan/ www.irishpost.com/news/american-world-war-ii-fighter- plane-excavated-168586
GARDA JOURNAL 23