WHEN I FIRST moved to the North Lincolnshire village in which I now live, there was a small, discreet plaque behind the war memorial that caught my attention.

It was not an imposing monument, nor did it offer any particularly dramatic clue as to what had happened there, but there was something about it that made me stop and read it.

As so often happens when exploring the history of the places in which we live, one question led to another, and before long I found myself trying to reconstruct an event that had taken place more than eighty years earlier.

I began by researching the incident and, where possible, seeking out those who had witnessed it. Some were by then living far from Lincolnshire, but their recollections survived, and through their first-hand accounts it became possible to piece together not simply what had happened, but something of what it had been like to witness it.

The story begins in the skies above Elsham Wolds on the afternoon of Thursday, 16 December 1943.

DURING THE SECOND World War there were few things more feared by a bomber crew than the possibility of collision. Enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire were obvious and anticipated dangers, and an experienced pilot might sometimes evade a fighter or manoeuvre away from a burst of flak.

A collision with another aircraft, however, could occur in an instant, leaving virtually no opportunity for escape. With hundreds of bombers occupying the same airspace during the great raids on Germany, the danger was perhaps an inevitable consequence of the scale of the campaign.

And the inevitable happened with tragic regularity.

One such tragedy occurred near Ulceby in North Lincolnshire on that December afternoon, when two Lancaster bombers collided shortly after taking off from Elsham Wolds.

The busy A15 trunk road that now runs north towards the Humber Bridge cuts across what was once the main runway of Elsham airfield. Today, it is difficult to imagine the landscape as it appeared during the war, when the surrounding countryside was dominated by the activity of Bomber Command.

Elsham had become operational in July 1941 and was one of the Command’s busiest stations. In December 1943 it was home to two Lancaster squadrons, 103 and 576, while the airfield was also used at various times by a Heavy Conversion Unit and as a relief landing ground for the training group based at Blyton.

The skies around Elsham were therefore rarely quiet. On some nights as many as forty aircraft might be operating from the station, and with aircraft constantly taking off, landing and moving around the airfield, the margin for error was inevitably small.

There was another complication that December afternoon. The crews were preparing for a major raid on Berlin, and the weather forecast had encouraged the planners to believe that conditions over northern Europe would work in their favour.

Bad weather was expected to keep German fighters on the ground, making the raid appear, by the standards of the time, relatively straightforward. A thousand-bomber operation was planned to take advantage of the anticipated conditions.

At Elsham itself, however, the weather was far from ideal.

Low cloud blanketed the airfield. Accordingly, the crews were instructed to climb away from the station and, under no circumstances, to turn back across it. With aircraft taking off in close succession, they were vulnerable not only to poor visibility but also to the disturbed air created by those flying ahead of them.

The crews could do little more than trust that the aircraft around them were maintaining their courses and that those following would remain clear.

Among the aircraft preparing to leave were JB-670 of 103 Squadron and LM-332 of 576 Squadron. Their pilots were Flight Sergeants V. Richter and F. R. Scott. It was to be only the second operation for Richter and the first for Scott.

There was something unusual about the composition of the crews that night.

Richter and two of his crew were shown as being on the strength of 576 Squadron, yet were flying on the 103 Squadron Battle Order in a 103 aircraft. It seems likely that, in order to make the maximum use of the available aircraft and crews for such a large raid, a temporary or ‘scratch’ crew had been assembled.

Whatever the reason, the arrangement reflected the pressures under which Bomber Command was operating.

At 16:36, Flight Sergeant Scott took off into the dense, low cloud. Richter followed a minute later.

On the ground, Fitter/Armourer Geoff Howells and two colleagues had just finished bombing up their allotted Lancasters and were making their way back towards the main hangar when something caught their attention. They stopped and looked upwards, and in doing so witnessed the final moments before disaster.

One of the Lancasters suddenly emerged from the cloud directly in the path of the second aircraft as it climbed away from the runway.

At almost precisely the same time, another witness was approaching Ulceby.

Marie Harris was an Auxiliary Territorial Service driver attached to the anti-aircraft battery at Goxhill. She was on her way to Elsham with a load of supplies when she heard the familiar sound of the bombers.

Like so many people in this part of Lincolnshire, Marie was accustomed to watching the heavy aircraft taking off. Often she would stand and salute as they climbed into the sky, silently wishing the crews luck as they set out on their missions.

This time, however, she was about to witness something that would remain with her for the rest of her life.

The cloud was exceptionally low, and the Lancasters were climbing through it in formation, circling upwards and away from the airfield. Marie later described just how close they had appeared:

‘It was very low cloud – this ‘ops’ should never have taken off.’

She continued:

‘The Lancasters were taking off into the circles, up and away … they were so low and so near I felt I could nearly touch them.
One went into this low cloud and I was thinking “it’s a wonder they don’t crash, they’re so close together”, when in a split second as it came out of the cloud – God, it was a head-on crash with another Lancaster.’

The two aircraft collided almost directly above Marie’s wagon.

For a moment the sky itself seemed to break apart. Both Lancasters were fully laden with bombs and fuel for the journey to Berlin, and burning fragments of aircraft began falling onto the road and surrounding fields.

Marie brought her vehicle to a halt and leapt into a roadside ditch for safety as pieces of the shattered aircraft came down around her.

It was, as the original account records, a remarkable piece of fortune that the collision took place over open fields rather than directly above Ulceby itself. The consequences for the village could have been catastrophic.

Yet Marie’s thoughts were not immediately concerned with what might have happened to her. Her attention turned instead to the crews. If anyone had survived, perhaps something could still be done.

She ran towards the wreckage, passing the farmer’s house as pieces of the aircraft fell around her. She was approaching a barn when somebody caught hold of her from behind and refused to let her continue.

‘No lass, no lass – there’ll be nothing.’

Indeed, there was nothing she could do.

Within moments the fire engines were arriving, and the full horror of what had happened was becoming apparent. Yet, remarkably, Marie still had a delivery to make. The supplies in her vehicle were destined for the airfield, and so, after witnessing the destruction of two aircraft and the deaths of their crews, she dutifully climbed back into her truck and continued towards Elsham.

When she reached the guard-room, the shock finally overwhelmed her.

‘When I pulled up to the guard-room I was rooted to my seat and couldn’t stop crying – thinking of the Bobs, Alecs and Bills, just blown to bits. It was awful – and still is.’

The duty guard and his sergeant needed little explanation. The condition of her vehicle made it obvious that she had been beneath the aircraft when they collided. They took her to the mess, where she was given a mug of hot, strong tea.

It was a small act of kindness, but in the midst of such an extraordinary event it is perhaps these small human details that stay with us longest.

THE COLLISION AT Ulceby was only the first of a series of disasters that would make 16 December 1943 one of Bomber Command’s blackest nights.

The planners’ expectation that bad weather would keep the German fighters grounded proved disastrously wrong. The fighters were airborne and waiting, and they succeeded in shooting down twenty-one aircraft. A further four were lost in collisions over Berlin.

For those crews who managed to survive the outward journey and return to Britain, the dangers were not yet over.

During the evening, mist developed around the airfields, shrouding the runways and making the final stages of the journey particularly hazardous. A further eleven aircraft were lost in crashes and collisions on or around their bases.

Including the tragedy at Ulceby, these crashes and collisions alone claimed the lives of fifty-six men.

The numbers are stark, but numbers can also conceal as much as they reveal. Fifty-six men is a statistic; fifty-six individual lives is something very different. Each man had a name, a family and a history that existed beyond the brief record of the operation in which he died. For those who knew them, the loss could never be reduced to the words ‘aircraft lost’.

Yet that was precisely how the machinery of war was obliged to record such events.

In the official report of the night’s operation, the conclusion was brief and dispassionate:

‘Conditions were vile and unexpected yet 136 aircraft landed safely. We must continue to strive for better airmanship and more effective ground control.’

There is something deeply revealing about that sentence. It was, of course, the language of an organisation at war. Aircraft had to be counted, causes identified and lessons learned. The emphasis was necessarily upon operational performance: better airmanship, more effective ground control, and the continuation of the campaign.

But behind those words were the men who had disappeared into the darkness.

The official report could record the number of aircraft that had landed safely and the need for improvements in procedure. It could not record the shock of a woman sitting behind the wheel of her truck, unable to stop crying as she thought of the men she had watched falling from the sky.

Nor could it convey the sight that Geoff Howells and his companions had witnessed from the ground at Elsham, or the memories that would remain.

For the men of Bomber Command, such losses were an accepted and terrible part of the war. The next crews would be briefed. The next aircraft would be bombed up. The next raid would be prepared. The work of the airfield would continue.

Today, the landscape around Elsham is peaceful. The great bombers have long since disappeared, the airfield has changed beyond recognition and the roads that cross the old wartime landscape carry traffic rather than aircraft.

The countryside gives little indication of the drama that unfolded here in December 1943.

But history has a way of surviving in unexpected places.

Sometimes it survives in an official archive or a squadron record. Sometimes in the recollection of an eyewitness and held in remembrance for the remainder of their life.

And sometimes it survives on a small, wall-mounted plaque behind a village war memorial.

Author’s Notes

This post is a reworking of an article I wrote in 2003. Originally titled ‘Black Thursday,’ it was published in the Winter 2003 edition of ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher,’ sister magazine to ‘Lincolnshire Life.’

The images accompanying these articles have been created or tailored using AI. While I have taken care to achieve a generally authentic impression of the period, they should not be regarded as historically accurate representations. These images are intended simply to illustrate and complement the narrative—to help bring people, places and circumstances of the past to life—and should be understood in that spirit.