Boy finds WWII plane with pilot's remains in cockpit

(CNN) - A 14-year-old Danish boy doing research for a history class found the wreckage of a German World War II plane with the remains of the pilot in the cockpit.

Daniel Kristiansen and his father, Klaus, discovered what's believed to be a Messerschmitt fighter plane buried in a field on their farm near Birkelse in northern Denmark.

"We went out to the field with a metal detector," Klaus Kristiansen told CNN. "I hoped we might find some old plates or something for Daniel to show in school."

Instead, they found bits of plane debris. So they borrowed an excavator from a neighbor and dug down seven or eight meters.

The TIME/Life account of WW2 writes that the Nazis over-ran Denmark in three hours.

I’ve read that the Nazi invasion of Denmark was a bunch of German soldiers who crossed the border in civilian clothes, spread out though the small nation, and at a certain time, took off their overcoats and conquered Denmark firing few if any shots. That said, Denmark was the only conquered nation that actively tried to protect its Jewish population and insisted on inspecting the camps where Jewish Danes were interned.

One of my earliest memories is visiting the site of a somewhat similar situation: http://www.nebraskaaircrash.com/crashsites/daykin1.html

Bruning Army Airfield was just over the horizon from the farm where I was growing up. Most every day the training P47s would fly over and do practice dog fights. Whenever my siblings and I heard airplanes, we would run out of the house or stop working and watch the action. One day a flight of B17s came over and the P47s used them as the targets. One misjudged and clipped the tail off of one of the B17s. He pretty much augured in. The action was 3-4 miles to the south. I didn’t see this happen, but my older brothers did, #2 (since deceased) claimed he saw it from the seat of the beckhaus.

A few days later we loaded into the Model A and toured the crash sites. We did not go up to the fuselage of the B17 since there were rumors that there were military guards there. I remember seeing a B17 engine sitting near the road in the middle of a burned spot in a ripe wheat field.

The P47 was in a deep round hole which contained water and oil. I don’t remember seeing much in the way of airplane parts.

We never knew if the P47 was retrieved or if it was still in the ground.

There is a maxim that you cannot find anything that is underground unless you know where it is.

In the 90s, when #1 brother and I were back on the farm I had use of the Geophex GEM-1, a hand portable mapping metal detector which can be best described as a very low frequency ground penetrating radar. This particular instrument required spot readings on grid points and for 5’ grid spacing coverage was about one hour per acre. Since the instrument was relatively sensitive, To optimize the use of our limited time, I made an engineering decision to go to a 10’ grid over the area where I remembered the hole to be. We did not find the airplane, but did find parts, one being a piece of 1/2 Plexiglas.

It seems that the NebraskaAirCrash.com people had better “luck”.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.