Lancaster R5679 shot down 25th September 1942

[beachcomber]

I have an account of the air battle here:

By Georg Ask Lunden Jensen
GRØNHØJ: At about 01.22 on 25 September 1942 Gudrun Laigaard, then 22, woke up in her bedroom in Grønhøj Inn. ”I woke up because suddenly my bedroom got light. There was a very loud noise,” she states. A few minutes earlier a British Avro Lancaster bomber was on the return flight to England after having dropped mines into the Baltic Sea, but here it ran out of luck. The bomber was attacked by a German night fighter piloted by Oberleutnant Elstermann from Nachtjagdgeschwader 3 and burst into flames near Grønhøj. In the house Gudrun Laigaard could hear the noise from the propeller engines of the big aircraft as it, burning, came roaring at low height over the village. ”It passed very close over the house. I nearly thought that it was going to crash here,” relates Gudrun, now 89, while we sit in the old inn looking out of the window to the western outskirts of Grønhøj where the plane fell to the ground.

Another aircraft also from 61 Squadron was hit by flak and then attacked by Lt. Karl-Heinz Brandes (4) 7./NJG2 an hour later at 02.13 hrs. The crew (3) put up a fierce fight and managed to drive him and another off. The aircraft Lancaster R5724, although badly damaged was skilfully flown back to England and crash landed at Wittering, Northamptonshire. All the crew survived, some were injured and all were awarded immediate D.F.M.'s. In Brandes report there is no mention of the location of the action.