During the morning of either the 14th or 15th February 1945 the pilot of this 61 OTU aircraft was undertaking a high altitude cross-country training flight, during the flight the pilot is thought to have lost control whiel flying in cloud. The aircraft entered an uncontrolled dive which reached high speed, the speed resulted in the failure of the starboard wing attachments which saw the wing break away just before it crashed into a field near Thornber Farm, High Bentham at 10.20hrs. The pilot was killed instantly.
The date of this incident is confusing, the 14th February 1945 is quoted in numerous locations while the pilot's grave states he did on 15th February 1945 and is highly unlikely to have survived for a day because of the nature of this crash. The crash site was excavated by the Pennine Aviation Museum in 1988 and then by Lancashire Aviation Investigation Team (LAIT) in 2012. I credit LAIT's Nick Wotherspoon with the information shown on this webpage.
Pilot - Sgt Pawel Struniewski PAF (P/784960) , aged 20. Buried Barrow in Furness Cemetery, Lancashire (7/2619).