On the night of 17th / 18th December 1942 some fifteen Dornier Do217 aircraft set out from their bases to bomb York, while en-route to York this aircraft is believed to have been damaged by anti-aircraft fire while over the Yorkshire coast and thought to have been in the Scarborough / Whitby area, as a result it failed to gain enough height to clear the North Yorkshire Moors. The aircraft struck Wheeldale Moor above Goathland at 22.15hrs at speed and at a fairly shallow angle and disintergrated. The wreckage was spread over a large area and the German crew didn't stand a chance and all four died instantly. The wreckage was not found until 12.00hrs on the 20th December 1942 by a young shepherd Norman Winspear and a wide search was initially made for the missing crew but their bodies were later found in the wreckage. Another Dornier aircraft crashed near Hawnby on the same night and is documented on this website.
Pilot - Fw Wilhelm Stoll (Luftwaffe), aged 25. Buried Acklam Road Cemetery, Thornaby on Tees, Yorkshire.
Observer - Obgfr Hans Roeschner (Luftwaffe), aged 20. Buried Acklam Road Cemetery, Thornaby on Tees, Yorkshire.
Wireless Operator - Obgfr Gerhard Wicht (Luftwaffe), aged 22. Buried Acklam Road Cemetery, Thornaby on Tees, Yorkshire.
Mechanic - Obgfr Franz Armann (Luftwaffe), aged 19. Buried Acklam Road Cemetery, Thornaby on Tees, Yorkshire.
The graves of the four crew at Thornaby on Tees Cemetery.
The main collection of wreckage at the site as it was in May 1975 (photo Mr Graham Sharpe).
The same area as it was in December 2006.
I first visited the site early in 2002, little appeared to remain there then. I believe that a lot of the larger parts that remained at the site until the mid-1970s were removed from the site after the area suffered the effects of massive uncontrolled moorland fire the hot summer of 1976. Since my first visit I have returned a number of times, no real change to the site has been observed other than much of the scattering of wreckage has now been collected up and is now together in very deep heather. By following the wreckage trail as it is today it would appear that the aircraft did not simply fly in over Whitby, as was the general assumption, and then crashed straight into the first lump of high ground it got to. The scatter of wreckage is over a good half to three quarters of a mile in an almost west to east direction. Whitby is at 90 degrees to this line.
Part of the aircraft's bomb bay which was at the site in 1975 but disappeared from this crash site many years ago (photo Mr Graham Sharpe). The bomb bay was found in Ken Ward's collection when I visited in 2010.
John Skinn and myself paid the site another visit in October 2007 and by chance found a cast cylindrical object some distance from the main collection of wreckage. Upon closer inspection and cleaning up in a stream this part was seen to have a manufacturers plate on it in German writing. Given the engines are known to have rolled some distance after the aircraft crashed we presume that this part broke off during this roll. A small amount of research on the internet has being worthwhile; the wording at the base of the plate reads "Hersteller Deutsche Benzinuhren GMBH Berlin" this appears to then roughly translate to being part of the fuel pumping system from one of the BMW 801 engines.
Also of note is that during the search for missing Meteor WD778 in March 1954 (which was later found crashed near Appleby in Westmorland), a search helicopter pilot F/Lt J Hamilton landed his machine near aircraft wreckage on the North Yorkshire Moors and removed some pieces back to Linton on Ouse for identification, these later turned out to be from a German aircraft and this is almost certainly from this Dornier. This bits were probably scrapped.
A huge moorland fire in 1976 destroyed a massive part of Wheeldale Moor and in an attempt to contain the fire some reasonably deep ploughed trenched were created very close to the crash site of this aircraft. Given that a lot of the smaller fragments that remain at the site show sign of fire damage I would suggest that they were damaged in 1976. What appears to have been a Green Goddess fire engine became cut off in the fire and had to be left to its fate. Small fragments of what are probably this vehicle remain near Blue Man while the chassis appears to have been dragged a few hundred metres at a later date and then left (and shows signs of bending during this drag). A post on the internet suggests this was not a Green Goddess but was a fire tender based at the Dalby Forest workshops. An attempt to drag the vehicle by their bulldozer failed when the chain snapped and by the time another was found it was too late.