[Larry Hickey]

Pieter,

Thanks for your comments. Yes, the locations for B3+AS, BS and DS are confirmed by photos as stated, although all three aircraft were pretty well destroyed and burned out. A member of our WG (working group) has contacted the historical society near the 8./KG54 crash location at Sluis (NL), and they state that the background for the B3+GS photo isn't around there. Peter Taghon has interviewed people near the Ruiseledge-Wevelgem crash site, and they told him that the aircraft was set afire (by the crew?) after it landed and was pretty much burned out. That is not the condition indicated by the photos of B3+GS. Morkhoven, Belgium, however, has not been eliminated. Again, according to Peter Taghon, the plane and crew at Morkhoven fell into the hands of the Belgian Army, which was ordered to blow up the plane before they retreated from the area. He does not know if they did this or not. The tail of B3+GS, which was hit from behind by a fighter attack before it came down, was ripped from the fuselage and points in the opposite direction to the rest of the plane, which was intact, after a possible attempt to land wheels down. This could have happened during a hard landing or been done with explosives by Belgian troops before they retreated, making it impossible to confirm or eliminate B3+GS as the Mordhoven incident for now. I'm hoping that someone else will have information on this incident, or additional photos of the crash at Morkhoven (or B3+GS) that would help us research it.
Peter Taghon has commented that he thinks that the photo of B3+KS may have been taken earlier (or later) as the folliage on the bushes indicates winter or late spring. He thinks this might be from the Scandinavian Campaign
There is one other problem here. The only other loss to 8./KG54 during the Western Campaign took place on May 19th, and the location according to the NVM was Mons, Belgium, which is a change from what is in Peter Cornwell's book on the WC. We have no photos of that incident, so we don't know what the crash site looked like or the codes of the plane that crashed there. That could also have been B3+GS. So we seem to be left with either Morkhoven or Mons for the crash location for that aircraft. I'd really like to eliminate one or the other if any reader of this board can help with that.
I'd also like to turn up a photo of the apparently intact 8 Staffel crash at Sluis in the NL on May 10th, or photos of the burned out 8 Staffel He111 at Ruiseledge-Wevelgem. Slowly and patiently we're working our way through all of the WC Luftwaffe crashes.
We've recently confirmed that we now have photos of all five fighter crashes on land during the first day (10.5.40) of the campaign in the NL: 4 Bf109s and 1 Bf110. We've also, as a result of some brilliant sleuthing by a member of the EOE WG, confirmed that a plane claimed lost by 2.(J)/LG2 in Belgium on May 12th actually FL in Holland. He's located the exact spot with 100% certainty.
I now have only one series of u/i photos of a Bf109 FL in the NL during the WC for which the identity is not confirmed, and I've got a strong suspicion on that one. Another recent success was the correct ID of the He111 fuselage abandoned along a road in a suburb of Ham, France, which was much photographed by passing German soldiers. We now have the W.Nr. and full a/c code of that one, as well as a photo of it at the original crash site.
We're getting there!

Regards,