On 10th November 1941 this Bernberg built Junkers Ju88 about to attack a shipping convoy off Whitby in heavy seas, strong wind, low cloud and drizzle but as the crew were about to attack the merchant ship, HMS Kittiwake, it's destroyer escort, HMS Quantock, opened fire with all it's guns onto the aircraft. The aircraft sustained damage causing the pilot to abort the attack, it climbed away and flew towards land to the west. Shortly afterwards it was seen to crash at the foot of Blea Wyke below Ravenscar at 17.26hrs. Whether the pilot was attemping a landing on the rough rocky beach is open to conjecture. The ships did not try a rescue attempt because of the heavy seas. The crash claimed the lives of the four airmen on the aircraft.
Pilot - Oblt Heinz Wilhelm Moritz Weber (Luftwaffe), aged 29. Missing.
Observer - Obfhr Karl Schutz (Luftwaffe), aged 21. Buried Thornaby on Tees Cemetery, Yorkshire. Listed in the Register of Deaths as "Schuetz".
Wireless Operator - Obfw Werner Hanel (Luftwaffe), aged 22. Buried Thornaby on Tees Cemetery, Yorkshire.
Air Gunner - Uttz Artur Graber (Luftwaffe). Missing.
Only the bodies of Schutz and Hanel appear to have been found and identified. The bodies of Weber and Graber were never identified and infact only one of their bodies may have been recovered. There is a grave at Thornaby Cemetery marked "Ein Deutsche Soldat" and this I believe is the grave of one of these two (possibly Oblt Weber). The remains of the other airman may well have been washed out to sea and his body never found.
Heinz Weber was born on 22nd April 1912 in Berlin.
Karl Schutz was born on 9th May 1920 in Hamburg.
Werner Hanel was born on 25th December 1913 in Berlin-Friedenau.
The aircraft crashed on the beach below the cliffs in this photograph.
The rocky beach near to where the aircraft came down. I visited the site of the crash in June 2002 and found a crankshaft from a Jumo engine and some other pieces of metal jammed in the rocks. The site is in a very inaccessable place and care should be taken if anyone else is planning to visit the site. I planned my trip well before I went and found out when low and high tides were, I still did not have long to walk to the site along the rocky beach before the water began to come in again.
The crankshaft of one of the Jumo engines still wedged in the rocks in 2002.
Adrian Morris visited the site in 1978 and there was a complete undercarriage leg on the beach then, I thank him for kindly supplying these two photographs. This was recovered from the site by Jason Brand in the early 1980s and was donated to the Yorkshire Air Museum when it opened. I thank Mr Brand for contacting me in 2016.
More wreckage at the foot of the cliffs in 2002.
One of the aircraft's Jumo engines as it was at the crash site in 1977.
Part of a Jumo engine was recovered from the site by Jason Brand in the 1980s and donated to the Yorkshire Air Museum at Elvington, York. This engine could well be the same as the one in the photograph taken in 1977.
I revisited the crash site in June 2015 and re-photographed and recorded everything I could find at low tide. The photograph above is a general area of the crash.
The Jumo engine crankshaft and engine casing.
Part of what appears to be an undercarriage section.
A couple of smaller bits of the aircraft found wedged in rocks.
