Archaeologists have to dig up airplane wrecks with their hands behind their backs

“I have nothing against archaeologists,” says Major Hubert Schuncken, Aircraft Recovery Staff Officer. That is why an archaeologist is also present at the recovery of the British bomber in the IJsselmeer that Schuncken and his team are currently working on.

Today the work is at a standstill because the wind is too strong for the boat to the wreck, which has been drained within a sheet pile wall. It gives Schuncken and his civilian deputy Coen Cornelissen time to talk. About the salvage of the Lancaster ED603, about the history of salvaging war planes in Dutch soil and waters and about how the aircraft wrecks have also become heritage. And so it is also about how they deal with archaeologists who have claimed their share in the salvage operations, first under the Monuments Act and, since 2016, under the Heritage Act.

Schuncken works pleasantly with the archaeologist present, he says. According to him, there is a world of difference between a salvage operation and archaeological research. “It would take them months to excavate an airplane, we now have 25 working days planned. Moreover, we do not charge the municipality that commissions us anything.”

Cleaned up by old ironmongers

Shortly after the war there was no salvage service, Cornelissen knows. “Airplane wrecks were then cleaned up by old ironmongers.” An article in Fidelity, from February 9, 1952, tells that groups of men traveled through the country to recover wrecks. Municipalities and farmers wanted the wrecks, which were in the way and posed a risk of explosion, to be cleared away as quickly as possible. To the ‘diggers’ or ‘scrap metal hunters’, the aluminum from which the aircraft was made represented ‘capital’ that the rural industry could put to good use because it saved foreign imports.

The system was simple: the diggers first asked the landowner’s permission and offered him a fixed sum or part of any proceeds. With the landowner’s permit, they then went to the Ministry of Finance’s Bureau of Reparations and Recovery. That agency had an on-site investigation into the risks. If the danger was considered small, they issued a permit and the diggers could get to work.

Unearthed ammunition and aircraft instruments had to be handed in to the local police, who supervised the operation. If remains emerged during the recovery work, the police stopped the work. After the removal of the remains by the military Graves Service, work was allowed to resume. Immediately after the salvage operation, the excavated material was valued on site. A fixed part of the proceeds went to the government.

During the same period, amateurs also started looking for aircraft wrecks, but only to find and identify missing crews. One of them was Gerrit ‘Gerrie’ Zwanenburg. His main motivation, Zwanenburg told the VPRO program in 2013 Netherlands from above, was an experience as a thirteen-year-old Harlingen teenager in 1941: a low-flying Canadian pilot had waved at him from his cockpit. After the war he had heard that the pilot had crashed shortly afterwards in the North Sea due to a lack of fuel and had not been found.

In 1967, Zwanenburg was able to make his research his job in his spare time, under the motto ‘missing is worse than dead’: as a civilian officer he became head of the Air Force Recovery Service, which was henceforth charged with aircraft recovery. At that time, research into German reports and British archives had made it clear that approximately six thousand German and Allied aircraft had crashed over the Netherlands during the war and that more than a thousand crew members were still missing.

It was also the time when large parts of the IJsselmeer were reclaimed and drained. Dozens of wrecks emerged. For twenty years, Zwanenburg has recovered war plane wrecks in the polders and identified dozens of missing people.

Private collections

From the 1970s and 1980s, more and more enthusiasts became interested in the air war over the Netherlands. They could be roughly divided into two groups: one delved into historical sources to find out what had happened to specific aircraft and their crews, the other went on to recover wrecks themselves and took war materials for private collections.

Coen Cornelissen belongs to the first group. For years he has been a member of the Air War 1940-1945 Study Group, founded in 1975, which has approximately three hundred members. “In 2008, the Study Group published ‘The Loss Register 1939-1945’, with the basic data of almost six thousand Allied and German aircraft. The register has also been online since 2014.”

The Loss Register states that the Lancaster that is now being recovered was hit by a German night fighter on the night of 12 and 13 June 1943 on its way back from a bombing raid on Bochum and crashed into the IJsselmeer five kilometers from Den Oever. Four crew members had been recovered, the remaining three remained missing.

At the beginning of the recovery, human remains were already recovered, Schuncken says. “They have yet to be identified.” Schuncken and Cornelissen can say that they have found numerous traces around the wreck that indicate that ‘amateur historians’ attempted to unearth the wreck, especially in the 1990s. “There are the remains of marking buoys, there are thick chains on one wing, and in other places there are thick ropes,” says Cornelissen.

They even know who did it, Schuncken adds. “In a private museum in Fort Veldhuis near Heemskerk there are two engines, on-board weapons, a pilot’s seat and a wheel from the Lancaster. The recovery of human remains was also once reported, but the Public Prosecution Service did nothing with it.”

The private museum is an initiative of the Aircraft Recovery Group 1940-1945 Foundation, founded in 1986. Their website states that they did not agree with the Dutch government who regarded plane wrecks containing missing persons as a field grave and therefore did not actively search for plane wrecks.

For example, the construction of the Afrikahaven near Ruigoord was the only reason for the Salvage Service to recover a British bomber in 2000 that had crashed on a farm in the Houtrakpolder on January 30, 1944. Archaeologist Simon Wynia (1935-2005), specialized in the Roman period, was there, because since the war he had also been interested in war planes. Although the salvage yard was closed off to the public with screens, he had a strong opinion about the salvage work: “We archaeologists would get a lot more information out of it.”

What we are allowed to do depends on who is leading the Recovery Service at that time

Unexploded ordnance and bombs

It was the time when Dutch archaeologists, who traditionally saw the Middle Ages as their most ‘modern’ field of work, also shifted their attention to later periods and therefore also to the traces and remains of the Second World War. However, the Ministry of Defense kept archaeologists away from the aircraft salvage sites for a long time, with the main arguments being the danger of unexploded ammunition and bombs, and respect for any human remains. According to Defense, recovery and clearance were the task of the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service Defense) and the BIDKL (Salvage and Identification Service Royal Army).

It was only in 2010, after much discussion and insistence, that archaeologists were given permission for the first time to be present at three salvage operations (a Messerschmitt and a B17 bomber near Apeldoorn and a Juncker near Utrecht). In practice, this meant that the archaeologists were only allowed to take a look at the protected disposal site during breaks. They were also allowed to study recovered debris.

Since 2019, aircraft wrecks have been recovered in a targeted manner as part of the National Salvage Program: the Salvage Service will recover a total of thirty to fifty of the estimated four hundred wrecks with human remains on behalf of municipalities. For the archaeologists, little has changed, says Martijn Reinders, who was present as an archaeologist at three salvage operations. “What we are allowed to do depends on who is leading the Recovery Service at that time. They change jobs every four or five years. I was able to measure tracks with GPS at two salvage operations.”

Without interference

Yet, because of all the restrictions, Reinders has had enough of aircraft salvage for the time being. The safety argument in particular bothers him. “In France, Germany, Belgium and Great Britain, they allow archaeologists and even amateurs to excavate aircraft wrecks from the Second World War without interference from the military. Dutch students are also allowed to participate in such excavations in Germany. I and many other archaeologists have had the certificate for Detecting Explosive Remnants of War for years. But during the recovery operations I have experienced that when I arrived, the safety rules suddenly applied and everyone had to leave, while all kinds of others, including civilian employees, were at the recovery site.”

The frustration among archaeologists like Reinders is particularly great because, according to the Heritage Act, only certified archaeologists are allowed to excavate. This also applies to the aircraft wrecks that are now considered heritage. Strictly speaking, the Recovery Service is operating illegally. An Order in Council, agreed by the Ministries of Defense and OCW, must give the Recovery Service an exceptional position as of January 1 or April 1, 2024. On the other hand, a municipality can determine before a salvage operation that a wreck has heritage values ​​and archaeological interests for its citizens. In that case, an archaeologist will supervise the recovery at the expense of the municipality based on various research questions.

“The Recovery Service does not have to fear that we will take over their task,” says Reinders. “They perform their task of salvaging very well: they plan the soil with an excavator and sort everything on a fine sieve. But we also have our expertise. We won’t get any more, but Others information out. This gives the remains an extra meaning.”

For example, Reinders was able to determine the entire production process of a Messerschmitt that crashed near Dalfsen, including forced laborers from concentration camps involved, based on archaeological data.

And on the Lancaster ED306, an empty parachute hook tells us that one of the crew members was probably unable to hook a parachute. In this case it was a discovery by Coen Cornelissen.