50 years after the Schoeneck Crash
    

Remembering the uncle who disappeared

August 26, 1944, an American Liberator crashed at Schoeneck. The pilot disappeared. Tim Shaffer has returned to Schoeneck 48 years after the dramatic event to discover what happened to his uncle.

Raymond Engelbriet, local history buff, guided him in his search. He relates......
August 1944. The acrid odor of fire and gunpowder, smoking ruins...murderous bombardments following explosions of flak. Saarebruck is on fire. An absurd violence destroys the heart of our neighboring and surrounding villages.
Schoeneck, 26 August 1944....at the stroke of noon, an infernal explosion arouses the inhabitants from their torpor. An American bomber of the B24 Liberator type crashes in the village at the edge of the Stiring-Wendel forest. Eyewitness Gaston Siebenschuh, then 15 years old, remembers: " Our young men, we did not usually go into the bomb shelters. Our carelessness sometimes exposed us to the worst risks. I was in the backyard of my parents' home, when this enormous machine suddenly appeared above the nearby forest of Saarebrick. It rapidly lost altitude at the same time that the last people on board dropped out one by one. The airplane flew around the clock of the church before breaking up in the woods at Stiring."


The last mission of "Ginger"

The crash was the major event of the late summer of 1944 in Schoeneck. Everyone hurried out to recover a few liters of precious motor oil which was leaking out of the plane's engines. The bombardier lay there, on the side of the road, the cockpit pointed towards the first row of houses, the wings and the propellers had dug deep ditches in the earth. It was 99% destroyed. On the fuselage, a surname, "Ginger" and the number "ET-129177." Swastikas also and bomb designs, which related the trophies and the exploits of the crew. Research in the "Department of the Air Force" reveals that this B24 H was part of the 446th bombardment group based at Bungay in England. It had taken part in a number of missions in France and Germany in the course of the month of August. On the fatal day of August 26, 1944, it bombed Ludwigshafen and its chemical complex. Damaged by the enemy anti- aircraft defenses in its return toward Mannheim, the four-motor appeared over Saarebruck a little before noon. Flak (Flugabwehrkanone anti-aircraft cannons) was immediately put into action. "Today, we are able to shoot at will without being silenced and without ever leaving the target" relates a young German artillary-man, Sepp Nuschler, 15 years old, in the border of his journal. The airplane "ein krank geschossenger (badly damaged) Liberator" flew at reduced speed (60m/s) and at low altitude (700m). Sustained salvos, a deluge of firing...deafening noise. The airplane plunged beyond the forest of Saarebruck in the direction of Schoeneck. Volunteers and members of the Hitler Youth raked the terrain to flush out the fliers who could try to reach the Free French underground. Otwin Bredel, then 15 years old, today reports to the Saarebrucker newspaper, remembering that one of the parachutists hung between the earth and sky, the cloth caught in the branches of an immense beech tree.

Continued