Uncle Cedric story
70 years after a British Wellington bomber crashed into a field in Holland in 1942, Pilot Officer Cedric Mardon is commemorated by the people of Kilder and in 2014 a new street in the village is named after him.
I received a phone call one evening in October 2009 from a stranger, a Dutch man called Clemens Harmsen. The call concerned the wartime crash of a Vickers Wellington MK1C bomber aircraft No. DV588 which had been based with 150 RAF Squadron in Snaith, Lincolnshire. It crashed between 02.05 and 02.20 hours on the morning of 15th April 1942 in a field outside the small village of Kilder in S.E. Holland, close to the Dutch-German border. On finding a WW2 military floatation vest in the attic of his father's house after his death, Clemens wanted to find out more about the fates and lives of the crew of this aircraft and their families today. It sparked what became a 2 year research project and he eventually found me.
My uncle, Pilot Officer Cedric Mardon aged 20, was the pilot of this aircraft and the only crew member not to survive. Our family has his Log Book. The Wellington aircraft had been badly hit by German fire after flying into a searchlight belt on it's way back from Dortmund to Snaith. The remaining five crew parachuted to safety, but were all eventually caught and were held captive for the rest of the war. The life vest had been abandoned near the Harmsen family home by one of the escaping crew and had been hidden from the Germans by Clemens' grandfather. By the crew's accounts, Uncle Cedric had given orders to them to bale out before the flaming aircraft lost height, whilst he continued to try to pilot the aircraft to land safely.
Mr Berndje Bodde was 13 at the time and remembers that night vividly. He witnessed the flaming Wellington descend low overhead and land in the field. "After a little while one of the crew members came towards our house and started talking, but we did not speak any English. The next morning we went to the the crash site and saw the landing marks of the plane in the field and could clearly see that the plane had crashed into a little elevated road where it had overturned on impact, but there were German soldiers present and we weren't allowed to approach."
Following the crash, local farmers from a nearby farmhouse immediately ran to the scene, and found my Uncle's body lying close to the burning aircraft. They quickly scoured the area and recovered a compass and a flare gun from the ground nearby and fled the scene before German soldiers arrived. My Uncle's body was left in the field for many hours, but local Dutchmen quietly smuggled it away and buried him in their local church-yard with military honours two days later.
Clemens has since combed the crash site in the field and has found metal and glass fragments from the aircraft buried deep in the soil. He also managed to trace the whereabouts of a compass and flare gun to a WW2 memorabilia collector. The compass was probably my Uncle's, and the flare gun was one of two or three carried aboard the aircraft. Many materials gathered from crash sites during the war were utilised by local people, and the small brass model of a canon was made by Clemens' uncle Bernard Harmsen, now survived by his wife Gra and daughter Els, and the model's wheels were made from the aircraft's tyres.
My uncle's grave lies next to a hedge in the cemetery behind St. Jan De Doper Catholic church and on the 70th anniversary of his death in the early hours of the morning on the 15th April 2012, I photographed the crash site and the elevated road. His grave has been looked after over the years by the villagers of Kilder and is now tended by Clemens and his family. Clemens gives a biannual talk to local school children about this wartime event in the history of their village, and on one boy's suggestion there is now a new street in Kilder leading to a new sustainable housing development which opened in March 2014. It is called Cedric Mardonstraat.