Urges memorials for British war craft crash victims
The Rasgovindpur Airstrip in Mayurbhanj district has a short but illustrious history which has never been made public. It is the place where two British aircrafts deployed for the World War II had collided and resulted in death of 14 airmen.
On July 26, 1945, two British Royal Air Force B-24 liberator four-engine bombers, namely EW225 and EW247, collided at low altitude. The aircrafts were based at the Amarda Road Airfield at Rasgovindpur and were part of a six-plane contingent from the Air Fighting Training Unit engaged in a formation flying exercise, stated researcher Anil Dhir.
On July 26 last, a memorial service was held at the airstrip where Dhir, Aditya Patnaik of the Gandhi Eye Hospital, locals and school children paid homage to the dead airmen.
Dhir, who undertook a research on the crash along with Matthew J Poole from the United States, stated that none is reminding about the airstrip as well as its past glory.
Dhir said that the station came into existence during the war as a forward airfield against the Japanese conquest of Burma. The large strip served its purpose well as a landing ground for planes and also as a training space for special bombing missions. Built in the 1940s at a cost of Rs 3 crore, it was eventually abandoned after the war. It was probably named as the Amarda Road Airfield due to the nearby Amarda Road railway station.
Even today, seven decades after the base was made, one can still see the remains of the airfield, their 11,000 feet concrete runway still intact, though the buildings that once cluttered the edges are gone. The offices, hangars, mechanic sheds and plaster walled barracks with thatched roofs that the soldiers called bashas have been ripped down. Instead, local women dry laundry and farmers their grain on the warm tarmac. The cows and goats crop weeds along the runway edges, he informed.
Anil claimed he had located the living relatives of the dead airmen. He was able to locate nine of the relatives of the dead.
One is a 101-year-old brother of Flight Sergeant Cyril William Geeson, a Flight Engineer who died at 23 years of age and the other is daughter of Flight Officer Peter Ettlinger who too died at 30 years. Ettlinger’s daughter was just ten months old when her father was killed in the crash. The lone Indian aircraftsman PV Mathai’s relatives too were traced last year.
Meanwhile, Dhir has requested the Odisha and West Bengal Governments to erect small memorials for these airmen at Amarda Road and the crash site.