Episode 2 Dig WW2 with Dan Snow

In the telling of the story of the Second World War,

Ireland is rarely mentioned...

..but scattered across this landscape

and in the waters off these shores

are the relics and reminders of the greatest conflict in modern history.

As a military historian, World War II is a story I THOUGHT I knew

but now I've come to Northern Ireland

where I am discovering all sorts of incredible stories -

secrets, heroism, suffering and valour.

This is the untold story

of how Northern Ireland played a pivotal role in the war

and how its people helped shape the outcome.

In the waters off the north coast of Ireland...

I'm afraid there was heavy loss of life.

..we're diving on extraordinary wrecks...

-It's a Sherman tank under there.

-That's unbelievable!

..we solve the mystery of a Spitfire crash

that would claim the life of its young pilot.

We're piecing together wartime tragedies...

'Oh!'

..of those who volunteered and didn't return.

I just knew that he was in the war, and he was a soldier, and he died.

The person who shot this was aiming for the person in this bunker here.

He was trying to kill him.

From the flying boats built in Belfast factories,

we return to Fermanagh with the airmen who flew here.

What's it like flying in one of these after 65 years?

It's fabulous!

It seems like yesterday.

And how the Londonderry-based warships

took the fight to Hitler's U-boats.

Preserved for 70 years, this is the story of Northern Ireland's war

told with what's left behind.

The waters around Northern Ireland

are littered with shipwrecks from the Second World War.

-Darren!

-Hello.

-Good to see you, how are you?

-Not too bad, thank you.

Many are the victims of German U-boats -

sunk while bringing food and war materials from Canada and America

as part of the Atlantic convoys.

I'm heading out to sea on a dive vessel, The Loyal Watcher,

to some of the clearest diving waters in the world,

where I've been told of an extraordinary wartime wreck.

It will take us two hours to reach the wreck site,

17 miles off Malin Head.

In the late summer of 1944

around 100 ships that had left Halifax, in Canada, 10 days before,

arrived here, off the north coast of Ireland.

It had been an uneventful Atlantic crossing

but now they were in home waters,

just a few miles from their base at Derry

and WELL within range of the protective aircraft

of the RAF Coastal Command.

But convoy HXF-305 was about to feel the full might of Hitler's U-boats.

'For nearly four years, since late 1940'

there had been no attacks against shipping,

here, in the coastal waters off the north coast of Ireland.

Mainly because the ground-based aircraft had seen the U-boats off.

Now, in the late summer of 1944,

that was about to change dramatically.

On 30 August 1944, the Jacksonville,

an American tanker carrying 14,000 tons of petrol

from New York to London, was hit by a torpedo.

It exploded in flame.

The sea was alight

and flames from the petroleum were leaping 300 feet into the air.

Of her crew of 73, just two were picked up alive.

John Cumming remembers the after-effects of a tanker that had been torpedoed.

I remember, one occasion, an oil tanker going up,

and the sea covered in this thick black oil,

and men swimming through it.

And we couldn't stop to rescue them.

As a matter of fact...

..it's one of the worst memories I have,

of ploughing your way through men

who are already swimming in this black oil.

And the ship just, the destroyer just ploughed its way through

to get back to the convoys.

So, you're leaving folk...

..er, to drown as there was nothing could do about it, you know?

A bit harrowing.

36 hours later, very near to where the Jacksonville was sunk,

the British corvette HMS Hurst Castle was torpedoed.

She had been commissioned just two months before.

She sank in three minutes, taking 17 Royal Navy sailors with her.

Reg Mason served on corvettes, like the Hurst Castle,

on convoy escort duties.

'I will say this, that each time,'

particularly if there was any ships and that going down...

..I always remembered just to say my prayers while I was in my hammock.

And I knew, each time, that if the ship was torpedoed

it would probably blow up the magazine.

I knew that there would be no pain,

you wouldn't know anything about it, so...

Then, just two days later,

it was the turn of a Norwegian steamer, the Fjordheim.

In four years, no ships had been lost in these waters

and now three ships had been sunk in nearly as many days.

Naval escort ships operating out of Londonderry,

the largest convoy base in the UK,

had done much to keep the wolf packs away from the merchant ships crossing the Atlantic.

But, by 1944, the U-boat tactics had changed.

Lone German submarines now lurked in the coastal waters off Ireland,

where rocks, currents and wrecks hampered their detection.

It was a tactic which saw success

and it's for this reason that we are here diving off Malin Head.

Away you go, big stride out!

Let's go, big stride out!

So, there's a couple of pictures here, HMS Hurst Castle, which...

'Maritime historian Ian Wilson has brought me here,

'to the U-boat killing zone.'

Away you go, big stride out!

This was the work of one U-boat using new tactics.

And the first and most successful of the skippers employing these

was the skipper of U-482, a German count, von Matuschka.

And he was a U-boat captain of some experience?

No, this was his first patrol.

So, he managed to sink three ships...?

And a fourth, and that's the one we're actually right above now.

A huge ship called the Empire Heritage.

Wow, she's vast, isn't she? And that's below us now?

That's below us and her huge cargo as well, on the seabed.

70 metres below us lies the wreck of the Empire Heritage.

As well as her 16,000 tons of fuel oil,

she was carrying nearly 2,000 tons of cargo,

most of which was military vehicles and you can see quite a number...

-That looks like a... Is that a tank?

-It's a Sherman tank.

That's unbelievable!

The closer you look at that, the more obvious it is.

These are scattered across the seabed.

You can see the tracks there and all the, the huge number of wheels.

Tyres, wheels, other types of military vehicles

and it's a little bit like a child's toy box...

that has been scattered across the seabed.

I didn't imagine this existed off the British and Irish coast,

I'd never imagined it.

It's the way the Sherman tanks are scattered like that

and...notice, also, you can see there that,

if you look carefully at the tyres, they seem to be in perfect condition.

They're in great condition.

This is a huge military blow.

D-Day has just happened, the battle for Normandy, the battle for France is going on.

These tanks are needed on the beaches and beyond.

Yes, the Allies were advancing through Normandy

so, obviously, the Empire Heritage's cargo of Sherman tanks

and other military vehicles was destined for there.

So, how did she sink?

Von Matuschka put his periscope up, he was in the middle of a convoy.

The first ship he saw happened to be the Empire Heritage.

A torpedo struck her after 42 seconds

and she went down in about three minutes.

She was one of the 20 biggest merchant ships sunk in the war.

The chief officer, Mr Gibson, was the senior surviving officer

and made the statement afterwards.

He said he came on deck after two minutes, after the explosion,

and by the end of the third minute, by his reckoning,

he was being swept off his feet by the water

and the funnels were disappearing.

Clearly, one of the officers survived

but how many other people managed to get off the ship?

Well, I'm afraid there was very heavy loss of life.

There was about 110 people went down with the Empire Heritage.

-And how many survived?

-About 40.

-So, a vast majority of people on board died.

-They did indeed.

And was this the first time that she had been damaged in the war?

Strangely, no. She'd been possibly weakened by the fact that,

as this picture shows very graphically,

she had been beached in South Wales after hitting a mine

and, actually, broken in two.

That's an extraordinary picture.

Amazing, you've got the bow section here and then a huge gap

and then the stern is... I've never seen anything like that.

She was repaired and it could be that the structure was weakened.

The clarity of the waters around here

means that the wrecks like the Empire Heritage,

are attracting divers from all over the world.

We saw the, er, some tanks that had fallen off the wreck as it sank.

Quite a few of those.

Sherman tanks all over the place!

Half tracks, engine showing, wrecks, mast lying to one side. Beautiful.

The remains of the ship

and a jumble of Sherman tanks piled on one another,

scattered like the hands of God just picked them up

and placed them in random order.

But the Empire Heritage wasn't the last of Matuschka's victims.

The SS Pinto, rescuing survivors from the Empire Heritage,

was sunk with a loss of 21 men.

In just nine days, Matuschka had sunk two freighters, two tankers

and one Royal Navy corvette.

In doing so, U-482 had caused the death of 250 Allied sailors.

It was on of the most successful patrols of any U-boat that year.

Matuschka arrived back at his base in Norway three weeks later a hero.

He'd heard via radio signals on the journey

that he'd been awarded the Iron Cross and the German Cross in gold.

On hardened U-boat captain described Matuschka's achievements

as "beginner's luck".

We'll never know if this was true or not

because whatever luck he did have was about to run out.

Eight days into his second patrol, Count Hartmut von Matuschka

and his crew of 47 were lost when U-482 was depth charged

and destroyed to the west of the Shetland Islands.

At the height of the Battle of The Atlantic,

up to 140 naval escort vessels

were moored along the banks of the River Foyle.

As the most westerly naval base in the UK,

it was considered so important to winning the U-boat war

that the RAF would bring squadrons of fighter aircraft

to defend the ships and the city.

The airfield they chose was RAF Eglinton -

now the City of Derry airport.

70 years later, the very same airport -

a group of scientists from Queen's University Belfast

and aviation historians are searching for an aircraft.

DETECTOR BEEPS

The team are looking for a Spitfire which crashed here in 1942

when the airport was a wartime RAF base.

The picture is dated "14/08/42",

which is approximately 10 to 12 weeks after the crash occurred.

This is runway 02, which is now abandoned

and this is the grassed area here...

The search is being led by aviation enthusiast Jonny McNee,

who has a passion for World War II aircraft, particularly Spitfires.

'I've been looking for it since 1992'

and I was granted an MoD licence in 1993 to officially go looking for it.

So it's been many years of fruitless looking!

'I think, at this time, you know, I intend to throw all the equipment

'that we have at our availability on to this search

'but I think if we don't find it now

'it'll very much go onto the back burner.'

It's shiny and it has paint on it.

The Spitfire which crashed suffered mechanical failure.

Gareth!

So the pilot bailed out

and the Spitfire ploughed into the airfield.

There's paint there.

Well, Mr Carter seems to think this is aviation-related.

But try as they may, they don't seem to be able to find it.

Yes, I'm afraid Spitfires weren't marked "Coca-Cola" so...

The detectors were picking up a couple of signals

so we tried to investigate, because it could be that

fragments may lead us to pinpoint where the actual main impact is,

but unfortunately, in this case,

just a bit of modern debris, so we fill in the hole, we batter on.

Jonny's research indicates

that the Spitfire wreck should be 25 feet below the surface.

Does that look modern to you?

Well, that's a bit of...

There are planes all around, just not the one they're looking for.

Yeah, not so happy with that piece.

Right. Okey-doke.

Seven hours and several flights later,

and despite using their high-tech equipment,

still no luck.

It might be time to call it a day.

I think we have come to the end of the road today.

We've surveyed everywhere. We've found a few wartime-related objects,

one small piece of aluminium.

Unfortunately, no substantial evidence

to pinpoint the crash site of the Spitfire

so it looks like effectively game over for this site.

It might be game over for the Derry airport Spitfire search

but this is not the only aircraft Jonny has been interested in.

Over the years, I think

I've been to approximately 100 of these aircraft sites,

many of them in Northern Ireland, then many further afield in Donegal.

Like most young children, I spent my Saturdays and Sundays

gluing myself to the kitchen table making my model kits,

and then you want to know a bit more about these aircraft

so you get a few books, and then you start going to a few museums

and it just builds from there. I never lost the interest.

From small beginnings with model kits, Jonny has now become

something of an authority on World War II crash sites.

My interest isn't just limited to Northern Ireland.

I think behind many of the fields

in which these pilots and air crew operated,

there are tremendous stories to be investigated

and that's my passion, finding out what happened

and then trying to find out, is there evidence at any of these crash sites

or excavations that we can say, "Actually, the paperwork's wrong.

"This is what happened."

And it's this passion for solving mysteries

that has brought Jonny and his team to another Spitfire crash site -

this time further afield

in Normandy, northern France.

Jonny believes that like the Derry Spitfire,

this fighter plane also came down as a result of mechanical failure.

But because the Spitfire crashed in mysterious circumstances

in German-occupied France, only the dig can prove this for certain.

What do we know about the circumstances? How did it end up

-crashing in a field in Nazi-occupied Europe?

-The report that we have

is that the pilot, Fred Heninger,

was flying with a colleague from 91 Squadron

when he reported that his engine was failing

and the other pilot looked back,

saw black puffs of smoke emitting from Heninger's engine,

at which point Flying Officer Heninger radioed him back

and said, "I'm bailing out, I'm having to get out of the aircraft."

We have eyewitness reports then

which sadly indicate that as Pilot Officer Heninger bailed out,

his parachute became entangled around the tailplane of the aircraft

and from 4,000 feet, he and the aircraft crashed into this field.

After the crash, Heninger's body was found close to the aircraft

and removed by the Germans for burial nearby.

What this crash reveals

is both the extreme nature of modern warfare

but also the heroism of the pilots who flew these Spitfires.

Paddy French was born in Cork

but educated in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.

Like Fred Heninger,

he was also flying Spitfires over occupied France.

Our early duties were escorting,

escorting bombers across to France.

You may have, say, 40 or 50 bombers,

you may have hundreds. At one stage, it came to actually thousands

but Spitfires go at either side of the formations

and then another lot would be above them.

Gareth has just put a probe down there

and we actually are hitting something solid.

Jonny and the team are interested in this particular aircraft

because it's an extremely rare type of Spitfire -

the Mark 12,

of which only 100 were ever made.

This wartime photo is of the actual plane we're digging.

But what we don't know at the moment

is what caused it to crash in this French field,

killing its young pilot.

This is an interesting piece here.

A piece of the fuselage with the classic RAF roundel painted on it,

the famous bull's-eye, if you like.

There's the red in the middle and the white band

and then the blue on the outside. That's fantastic.

That is the cockpit door, isn't it?

-Oh, man.

-Look at that.

-That is magic.

-"Make sure door is locked before flight."

-Incredible.

That's quite a spectacular find.

That is just one of the best things I've found.

We lost people, of course we did.

That was the tragic side of the thing

but you never thought it was going to be you.

Fred Heninger was part of a select group of RAF pilots

who had been chosen to fly over German-occupied France

and cause havoc wherever they could.

ENGINES DRONE

There were Spitfires roaming all over northern France.

The French people were warned time and time again,

keep off the roads during daylight hours.

The Germans spent all day under cover

hiding in woods and things

and we would...

sometimes, an odd vehicle might come out

and he'd soon be pounced upon.

He'd be shot up.

The army might ask you to shoot up anything,

trains or anything like that.

Sometimes we were dive-bombing these railway marshalling yards

and things like that to upset their communications.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

Their exploits were recorded by small film cameras

mounted in the aircraft wings.

It's amazing. This was a camera carried by every Spitfire.

-That's amazing.

-Indeed, yeah.

-Wonderful.

This plate on the back - camera type G45,

serial number, make,

London and Reading. Amazing.

And the lens is almost intact, isn't it?

The rest of it's obviously in a pretty sad state

but that's the actual film cassette.

Send it off to Kodak and see what they can do.

It's like finding the black box. Amazing.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

Much of the Spitfires' success

on these low-level attacks over occupied France

was down to the planes' 20mm cannons,

one of which has now been uncovered

by Jonny and the team here in Normandy.

It's amazing to be up close to this weapon. It's seven foot tall.

It's pretty heavy, so the mayor here is helping me hold it.

It makes me think that the Spitfire itself was a wonderful design,

a fast, versatile, manoeuvrable aircraft

but it wasn't until it became armed with these 20-mil cannons

that it really started packing a punch, and made its claim

to be one of the greatest aircraft of the Second World War.

What's intriguing me is,

what went wrong that day to bring the plane crashing down

and burying it 20 feet beneath the surface?

Is there any evidence of German involvement?

Might it have been shot down?

The reports from the squadrons say mechanical,

but there are reports from a German pilot

flying a Messerschmitt 109, who claims to have shot down a Spitfire

in the same area at the same time.

We won't know until we get down on to the wreckage.

Possibly, we may see signs of battle damage,

bullet holes in propeller blades, something like that.

I've never really fully understood

the raw ferocity of an impact like this before

but coming up close to this twisted pile of mangled, smashed metal,

you get such a powerful sense of it.

The aircraft would have hit the ground at terminal velocity,

so would have buried itself 20 feet under the surface of the ground

in less than a quarter of a second and in doing so,

it concertinaed in on itself, like crushing an aluminium drinks can.

Here's the engine. The propeller would have been up at the front

and the whole plane followed it in.

The cockpit is this smashed bit in here

and there is the tail wheel.

So the whole thing is hardly more than a metre cubed.

Such an impenetrable, twisted mess of wires and metal

and oxygen bottles, seat fittings,

it's taking a while to break bits off and work out what's what.

'At the bottom of the hole is the Spitfire's Griffon engine

'and as it's turned over,

'it reveals the cause of Heninger's crash to team member Jeff Carless.'

Was it enemy fire or engine failure?

Engine failure. We know that for certain now.

Now we've lifted the engine up, we can see

it's thrown a con-rod off the crank.

So that smashed out through the...?

It burst through the side of the crankcase.

It shouldn't be on the outside, so it's come through the housing.

Yep, it's thrown off the crank.

Why couldn't that have happened when it hit the ground?

It's a classical sign of losing a big end bearing, oil failure

and it's thrown through the crankcase.

That happened when the engine was running.

That wasn't a result of hitting the ground.

'The harsh reality was

'that not only was this mark of Spitfire a prototype

'but the aircraft's Rolls-Royce Griffon engine

'was also not long off the drawing board.'

This is when they were still in their development stages

and things were going wrong

as I think we've found evidence here to prove, with the crank failure.

It's amazing that during the war,

they had no time for R&D and testing.

These guys were sent up in the air with developmental engines.

They were tested in battle.

30 miles from the crash site

is Grandcourt War Cemetery

and it's here that Fred Heninger is buried.

As you can see, crew together in life and buried together in death.

You can see them paired up, navigator and pilots in several locations.

The amazing thing about that dig for me

was that when you come here and look at a headstone,

you don't really think about the circumstances under which they died

but seeing that twisted metal, that compacted, shattered wreck,

I'll never quite look at a fighter pilot's tomb in the same way again.

-Here's our man, Heninger.

-Yeah.

22 years of age.

The one thing I'll take away from this is

the unconditional willingness of these guys

to put themselves on the line time and time again.

Back in Northern Ireland, the young pilots of the RAF

were in engaged in a very different type of warfare

against the U-boats operating deep into the Atlantic.

This is Lough Erne in Fermanagh.

This is about as far west as you can get in the United Kingdom.

The Atlantic is just a few miles that way beyond the end of the lough

so with the battle of the Atlantic raging out there,

it was clearly vitally important to use this area as a base.

Trouble is, on the outbreak of war, there were no airfields around here.

What there was, though, was water.

Lots of water.

In 1941, it was a very different kind of boat which was moored here.

-NEWSREEL:

-Northern Ireland factories are making Sunderland flying boats -

those magnificent aircraft

which have done so much to prevent the U-boats being victorious.

It's not permissible to say how many flying boats have been manufactured

in Ulster, but the output has been highly creditable.

Lough Erne was the home to the Sunderlands and Catalinas

operated here by airmen from RAF Coastal Command.

Because of a secret deal with the Irish Republic,

the flying boats based at Castle Archdale and Killadeas on Lough Erne

could fly a route which became known as the Donegal corridor,

a short cut to the Atlantic over neutral Ireland.

This extended their range,

enabling the aircraft to get further into the Atlantic

to protect the convoys from marauding U-boats.

This is a genuine Second World War Catalina flying boat,

an aircraft perfectly designed to take off and land on the water.

And just look at the fuselage here -

it's shaped exactly like the hull of a ship

and these wheels wouldn't have been there during the Second World War

so it could only operate from the water. For me,

it's one of the most distinctive aircraft of World War II.

There's a huge bubble-shaped canopy known as a blister at the back there

and that allowed an observer to have an unimpeded view

and that's the job of these aircraft,

to go out and act as observers,

scouring the Atlantic for enemy ships and U-boats.

If it did spot a U-boat,

there were depth charges arrayed along the wings

so it could swoop down and drop depth charges on the U-boat

and try and sink it.

MUFFLED BOOM

Seven decades later,

this wartime Catalina, one of only a few left flying in Europe,

has returned to Fermanagh and Lough Erne.

'It was about 66, 67 years ago'

when I last flew in a Catalina.

On board are two veterans,

Ted Jones and Chuck Singer.

Both flew with Coastal Command from Lough Erne during the war.

-So is it all coming back? Do you recognise it all?

-Oh yeah, yeah.

What's it like flying in one of these after 65 years?

It's fabulous.

It seems like yesterday.

I was made a captain of a Catalina two days after my 20th birthday

so I was young.

Ted Jones joined RAF Coastal Command in 1942

and flew 55 anti-U-boat patrols.

Well, they flew like an old cow

but they were a lovely aircraft.

They were built like a tank, solid, you know,

but a bit heavy on the controls.

I mean, we had a marvellous automatic pilot

because we went out for 18-hour patrols

and it wouldn't have been possible to fly one for that time.

Chuck Singer was a crew member

of the much larger Sunderland flying boats,

which operated out of RAF Castle Archdale.

-I was the gunner.

-The gunner?

-Yeah,

in the mid-aperture. That was my position.

Flying boats, an extraordinary job during the war because it was just

endless patrolling and looking out. It must have been exhausting.

It was. You were awful tired when you got back,

after you had to be on the alert all that time.

How long were you up in the air for?

10 to 12 hours.

It was quite a while.

You must have been exhausted

because you're constantly looking at everything in the sky.

Yes, for the first five or six hours it's very interesting

and after that, your eyes start getting sore

and it's drawing, you imagine things.

You say, "That's an aircraft,"

and later you find out it was just a flock of gulls or something,

but you had to be on the ball every second.

We were really shattered, you know,

and it was basically the noise

because we had no ear protectors.

We just had the ordinary earphones and a helmet on.

But it didn't bother us. We were too young.

Nothing can happen when you're 19,

can it? You know.

In the Second World War,

all able-bodied young men across the UK were liable for conscription.

All, that is, except in Northern Ireland

where political sensitivities

dictated that there was no conscription.

In spite of the fact conscription was never introduced in Northern Ireland,

there was a very high level of volunteering for all three services

and for the women's auxiliary services.

From both sides of the community in Northern Ireland,

there was a tremendous outpouring of the volunteering spirit

so that you get people from Northern Ireland in all three services

and in every theatre of war and in significant numbers.

MARCHING MUSIC

In all, nearly 40,000 men and women from Northern Ireland

volunteered for the Armed Forces.

-NEWSREEL:

-Ulster puts all her resources

at the disposal of the United Nations.

Many of those who didn't volunteer

were able to give their support to the war effort in other ways.

The ships that Northern Ireland has sent to sea

carried war goods to every front in the world.

Her troop ships conveyed...

Northern Ireland industry played a fairly significant part in the Second World War.

Harland and Wolff, the shipyard, built ships for the Royal Navy,

repaired ships for the Royal Navy.

Short Brothers, the UK's oldest aircraft manufacturer,

in fact the world's oldest aircraft manufacturer.

They created Short Brothers of Harland who were based in Belfast, as well, and built aircraft.

Peacetime factories were turned over to the war effort,

producing huge numbers of parachutes, as well as uniforms.

They also produced massive quantities of armaments.

14,000 gun barrels.

75 million shells

and 180 million incendiary bullets.

NEWS REEL: Incendiary bullets that have shot down

many a Nazi plane have come from this place.

Like the rest of the United Kingdom, with many men away fighting,

it was women who stepped in to make a vital contribution to the war effort.

So you would have had women working in the aircraft factory,

you would have had women working in various other industries

where they hadn't normally been employed.

The wartime years brought an awful lot of additional work for women,

including working on farms, which they did

to a much greater extent than they had done in peace time.

And it was women who helped to make agriculture

one of the great success stories of Northern Ireland's war effort.

Agriculture was an industry which had been transformed

under the watchful eye of the energetic cabinet minister, Sir Basil Brooke.

NEWS REEL: Today the Minister Of Agriculture, Sir Basil Brooke,

watches a demonstration of the new tractor that has been imported

and, on such an important occasion, why shouldn't Sir Basil have a go?

Sir Basil Brooke eventually became the wartime Prime Minister of Northern Ireland

but he wasn't the only member of his family to make an extraordinary contribution

to the British war effort.

The Brooke family have a long history of military service

going back over 200 years.

The walls of the parish church at Colebrook in Fermanagh

are covered with the names of the family who have served their country.

This is a memorial to Sir Basil Brooke and his wife, Cynthia.

He became the wartime Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1943.

He came from a powerful family.

Just over here is a memorial to his uncle,

although they grew up like brothers - they were very close in age.

Lord Alanbrooke...

This man became the senior British general during World War II.

He was the military mastermind of Britain's war effort

and it was said he was the only general that could stand up to,

and control, Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister.

Over here, two more Brookes.

Probably poignant this time because two of Sir Basil's sons

are remembered upon this plaque here, Julian and Henry.

Both young men who gave their lives during the fighting in the Second World War.

This is Colebrooke Park, not far from the church.

It's the seat of the Brooke family.

Lord Brookeborough, nice to meet you. Dan.

I've come to meet the present Lord Brookeborough.

Thank you for coming.

He is the grandson of Sir Basil Brooke.

A lot of history.

How long have you been living here?

We moved in in 1980.

'Colebrooke Park is significant because not only

'did Sir Basil Brooke and his three sons grow up here

'but Field Marshal Alanbrooke spent much of his childhood here, too.'

Churchill had a sometimes stormy

but nevertheless successful relationship with Alanbrooke.

It was a partnership which would ultimately lead

to victory for Britain in World War II.

Sir Basil remained close to his uncle, Alanbrooke, throughout the war.

Whenever my grandfather went on trips to England,

he always noted down,

"I had dinner with Alan."

They saw a lot of each other and they talked to each other a lot.

And they, both Alanbrooke and your grandfather had sons who served?

Yes, Alanbrooke had Tom and then my father, and his two brothers, four.

What became of them?

The eldest, Julian, was killed in 1943 in Tunisia

at something called the Mareth Line, he was in the 6th Grenadiers.

Henry died in the last few days of the war in Italy

when... the break at Ravenna

and he was in the 10th Hussars and he was in a Sherman.

They were in a village and, in fact, the lead tank had been knocked out

and he took over and he was killed by a sniper.

So your grandfather lost two of his sons. What became of your father?

My father was wounded and he was in Italy at that time.

That must have been devastating for your grandfather?

Yes, I think it was, and for my grandmother who had also had a very difficult time

because she had had TB and had been incapacitated for quite a long time. I mean, months.

We have obviously private letters,

some of them are to my father saying how they heard and how devastating it was

but they also show how devastating it was my father

because he and Henry, especially - and Julian was older

and had gone off earlier - were so very close at the time.

And then we've got the official diary.

There's one here which says, "Wednesday the 18 April 1945..."

So very near the end of the war?

Yes, within a few days of the end of the war in Italy.

"Another terrible blow has struck us.

"Alex wired to say that Henry had been killed in Italy.

"Cynthia has been just marvellous but it was a horrible task telling her.

"Henry was so grand and big hearted and such a friend.

"It's a bit difficult to bear

"but one just has to carry on with a heavy heart."

Of course, it's the second one that's been killed.

"Spoke at Larne, Carrickfergus that night." He went straight on.

"They were good meetings but it was not very pleasant going to them."

-Not very pleasant? That's a classic British understatement.

-Exactly.

Then, "Friday the 20th, hundreds of messages of sympathy are coming in about Henry.

"It's a severe strain, especially on Cynthia.

"The trouble is there were so many memories of the boys

"that when one goes around Colebrooke, it's hard to stop thinking.

"A very kind wire from Their Majesties,

"expressing sympathy about Henry."

Then Winston Churchill sent a wire.

And, of course, it must have been devastating.

It's really impossible for me

to imagine the grief that Sir Basil and Lady Brooke must've felt

at the loss of their two sons during the war,

particularly their son Henry who was killed just days before the end of the war in Europe.

For one Belfast family, their grief at the loss of a loved one

has been compounded by a mystery,

a mystery that's taken nearly 70 years to solve.

The story begins on September 17, 1944, when the first

of nearly 12,000 troops were dropped by parachute and gliders

on fields eight miles to the west of Arnhem in the Netherlands.

Their objective was to capture the bridge over the Lower Rhine

in a bold bid to end the war early.

In nine days of bitter fighting, Arnhem would be remembered

as a heroic failure and their objective, a bridge too far.

This wide-open and fairly flat terrain made a perfect candidate to be a glider landing zone.

On Sunday 17 September, this whole area would have been

chock full of over 130 gliders that landed that day.

Among the troops aboard them was Sammie Cassidy,

a 24-year-old private from Belfast.

Cassidy had volunteered in 1942 and this was his first time in action.

He was leaving behind his wife and their 23-month-old daughter, Betty.

I was born in '42 and he was killed in '44.

For almost her entire life Betty Ross has lived with a mystery -

how was her father killed and where is he buried?

Mother never talked about it.

Her family and her sisters never talked about it either.

So, it just wasn't talked about.

Did you know anything?

I just knew that he was in the war

and he was a soldier and he died.

-He was killed here.

-And, he was killed here.

Arrived on time, the gliders were soon

discharging their cargos of fighting men, tanks, guns and supplies.

An entire Allied army had swept down from the skies

behind the enemy fighting line.

There were reports that Sammie Cassidy was injured

during the landing in the glider.

In fact, some reports said that he had been killed.

But in fact, he was fit and well, and two days after landing,

he arrived here with 250 men of his unit at the Hotel Dreyeroord,

about halfway between the landing zones and Arnhem bridge.

The Hotel Dreyeroord, which the troops would call

the White House, is located in the leafy Arnhem suburb of Oosterbeek.

It's here, 67 years later, that Betty and her daughter Lynda have come.

And the journey has not been easy.

Very emotional.

I just couldn't believe I was here.

I'd talked about it to Lynda for so long.

I just couldn't believe I was here, and seeing it,

walking down the street, walking round here.

It was so... It was unreal, actually.

It was as if... It's like, "This is happening to somebody else,

"somebody's else's story."

This hotel became the front line.

Cassidy and his comrades found themselves fighting

the Germans at very close quarters.

As this photograph shows, the hotel itself was very badly damaged.

These window frames here

and the windowpanes had been blown out by incoming and outgoing fire.

And if we look at this next photograph here,

it shows the front foyer here, there are the pillars

and the banisters, and the damage is extraordinary.

There's burn marks, scorch marks on the walls, masonry has collapsed.

This was at the centre of some very bitter fighting.

It was a target for the Germans all the time.

Once they could get through there,

they could get into the streets of Oosterbeek.

John Crosson served as a sniper alongside Sammie Cassidy

in the King's Own Scottish Borderers.

There was a lot of bombardment.

They were using bombs, obviously, mortars,

and machine guns, mostly. And snipers.

It was not a good place to be.

There was absolutely no security there.

At any moment, something could happen,

and you had to do your best to fight against it.

The day after Sammie Cassidy arrived here,

this was the site of a vicious skirmish.

The Germans had managed to drive out the British from the White House,

and so the British counter-attacked with everything they had.

Sten guns, heavy machine guns, and in the end,

they drove the Germans out using an age-old tactic - the bayonet charge.

In this brief, 45-minute fight,

15 British soldiers had been killed and many, many more wounded.

-Are they good readings today?

-Well, a few bits.

'Hans van der Velden is a metal detectorist.'

A-ha. There's something. 'For some years,

'he has had permission to detect in the hotel grounds.

'And considering Sammie Cassidy's battalion was here

'for just 36 hours, it's remarkable what still remains.'

There's one there, I think, isn't there?

-Yeah.

-What is this?

The caps of a three-inch mortar.

-Three-inch mortar.

-Yeah.

So, there might have been a position here.

Where we are now, on the north side of the hotel,

the British would have been able to see

the whites of their enemies' eyes.

The Germans were just metres away, in that direction.

Oh, my goodness.

Lots of live ammunition coming out of the ground now.

Which was held together in these bandoliers.

Wow! There's mounds of ammunition coming out of the soil here.

And there's more to come.

Sten gun magazine!

Oh, my goodness!

That's the classic.

There would have been bullets in there, it's a magazine.

Magazine, yeah.

-Clips into the side.

-Yeah.

It's amazing.

This is a poignant reminder that what is now a quiet hotel garden

in a suburb of Arnhem was once a military stronghold,

a unit of men here, armed to the teeth,

preparing to fight to the last round.

Sammie Cassidy and his platoon were in a street close to the White House.

In an upstairs window, John Crosson was posted as a sniper.

There was a German tank that was causing a problem.

And so, it was decided to hunt this down

and try and put it out of action.

In the street below, as they waited for the tank to appear,

Cassidy spotted some German soldiers and called for a Bren gun.

Somebody gave him the Bren gun. He tried to fire it from the hip.

But it jammed.

As they sometimes do.

Well, there is a procedure for unjamming a Bren,

because it takes time.

But he banged the butt of the gun on the ground, tried again

and it was still jammed.

And, getting a bit agitated now, he banged it again -

this time, it went off.

But the gun was facing upwards, and shot him up through the head.

He fell instantly dead.

With a great clatter.

Everybody thought these Germans had shot him,

but they got up and ran away.

I realised what had happened, because I was just behind him.

Sammie Cassidy's death came in the middle of nine days of fighting.

In the fog of war, it was no less heroic for being an accident.

And it would be nearly 70 years

before the family would learn the truth.

Because Mum never knew what happened, you kind of think,

"Well, maybe we should find out what happened."

So I started to look into it.

I would be curious, and I would ask a lot of questions about things.

And I think one day I just decided,

"I'm going to find out what happened to him."

A letter was sent to the Army Veterans Club magazine,

appealing for anybody who knew something about this incident.

Because this was his daughter appealing for this.

And I thought, "I know what happened, because I was there,

"but I can't tell her that he shot himself."

But there was another appeal in the next issue, so I thought,

"Well, maybe I should."

We didn't know any of this.

When we started looking into it, we didn't know what happened to him.

We know now where he died, the exact spot where he died.

We didn't know that.

-Is this the house?

-This is the house here.

-Just here.

This house.

Betty, it's pretty amazing, you started out on this journey,

you didn't know anything about your dad, and here we are,

the place he died, knowing the details of that last moment.

It's weird, isn't it?

It is weird. Very emotional.

The veterans that were with him were very reluctant to tell us

what had happened.

And it was only that we kept pushing

and asking did they eventually tell us what happened.

We sort of... He died in battle, and that's the way it happened.

You can't hide the facts, you know?

I'll move the leaves.

However difficult the discovery of the facts has been, it has brought

Betty and Lynda closer to the father and grandfather they never knew.

Sammie Cassidy was buried in the grounds of the White House.

Like thousands of others who fell in the Netherlands,

his was an unmarked grave.

And how many bodies do you get handed over a year?

It's very difficult to say, because...

'In 1945, the Dutch Army set up a special unit to recover

'and try to identify the bodies of soldiers like Sammie Cassidy

'who had fallen in their country.

'It's a unit which is, remarkably, still active today.'

This is the laboratory where we do all our anthropological research

and orthodontic research - you know, the teeth.

'Nearly 70 years after the end of the war,

'bodies are still being unearthed from that conflict.'

This is a Dutchman, probably a Dutchman who served with the Germans.

Oh, really? So this was not killed by the Germans?

No, this is someone who most probably...

We have reasons to believe he was executed by the Dutch resistance

because of being a collaborator.

How do you know that?

This individual comes from a group of three men, three individuals

that were shot by the Resistance, and were buried together.

They were all shot in the back of the head, so most probably, they were...

They had to kneel, and then they were shot in the head.

Wow, execution...

This is true execution-style.

The skull is completely fractured.

This is what we call primary fractures.

So, all the energy from the impact released in the skull,

and it just explodes.

And what else can we tell from looking at the corpse?

The four individuals we've exhumed in this particular cemetery,

they were all found with pieces of string that you can see

over here between the leg bones.

These are pieces of string that were cut from parachutes.

And these pieces of string were used

to tie the hands of these collaborators.

So, these loops here are exactly as they were in 1944, '45?

-They would have bound the hands as this man was executed?

-Absolutely.

Irrespective of which side the combatants fought on,

the sole purpose of the Dutch Army's work is to try

and give an individual their identity back.

Using tried-and-tested anthropological techniques,

as well as modern forensic methods,

the team work on around 35 bodies a year.

It just goes to show that there is really no difference

between someone going missing in 1944

or someone going missing in 2004.

For the next of kin, the feeling of uncertainty just stays the same,

it doesn't wear off.

And as long as the people are still alive,

that have known those who went missing during the war,

I am positive that the Dutch government in the Netherlands will

keep on doing this very important task.

'The work carried out by the Dutch Army makes me feel that,

'in some ways, the Second World War has still not come to an end.

'It's a feeling echoed by the family of Private Sammie Cassidy.

'Their journey is not yet over.'

So, here's... Is this possibly Sammie Cassidy here?

-Possibly.

-Possibly.

What happened to his body?

He was buried in a mass grave at the White House.

We know that cos we've German records

to show that he was buried there.

But after the war, whenever they were digging up the mass graves

and reburying people, he seems to have got lost.

'At the Oosterbeek Cemetery in Arnhem, there are eight graves

'to unknown privates from Sammie Cassidy's regiment.

'So the family can only assume that his is one of them.'

When you come here, do you spend a bit of time at each one?

Yeah, we did last time, we went round every one of them.

We laid a cross on every one of them, just in case.

We find each, we put a cross on each of them,

because we have to assume that he is one of them.

We can't just pick one.

We have to assume that he's one of them.

But it's nice to have a grave to go to.

Yeah, it is, but we'd still like to know.

At least we know he's somewhere.

Betty and Lynda may not have found the final resting place of Sammie,

but they have come a long way in understanding the part

that one Northern Ireland soldier played to help make peace possible.

Next time on Dig World War II,

the American bomber which crashed in Lough Foyle,

an island on Lough Neagh

where troops bound for D-Day left their mark...

..and the sand-filled tunnels on Normandy beaches

where our soldiers fought ashore.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd