The Eagles Over Europe Project

[Larry Hickey]

Hello,

In our efforts to acquire photos to document every German and Allied a/c shot down during the Phoney War/Sitzkrieg/drole de guerre, our EoE team recently acquired these scans from items offered on a French auction site. This series, showing burning wreckage, is captioned as a German plane crashed in the Ardennes on April 30, 1940 This would be a Phoney War crash, but it just doesn't seem to match any German loss on April 30th or near that time. I'm not even sure that it matches the description of the Bloch 174 from the FAF that crashed that day. Since the wreckage is still smoking you would think that the date would be reliable, and not something that happened previously. I note, however, that one of the photo backs may have 20-4-40 written on the back, with a possible location. Could we be interpreting the handwriting incorrectly and looking on the wrong day? There were Luftwaffe a/c shot down on the 20th that could be our crash. Is anyone familiar with this crash site and incident, perhaps from other photos that exist from it?

http://ihra.smugmug.com/photos/i-Cwn...-CwnS5j5-L.jpg

http://ihra.smugmug.com/photos/i-PKK...-PKKppPM-L.jpg

http://ihra.smugmug.com/photos/i-ppj...-ppjDgXg-L.jpg

http://ihra.smugmug.com/photos/i-W5j...-W5jJZqD-L.jpg

http://ihra.smugmug.com/photos/i-jx4...-jx4hdss-L.jpg

At about the same time we acquired this photo, which may not be related to the photos above, but could be. Is this crash familiar to anyone? It is probably also a Phoney War crash in France.

http://ihra.smugmug.com/photos/i-5nP...-5nPnNWG-L.jpg

I know that these "smoking wreckage" photos are very difficult to ID precisely, but I'm hoping that other photos exist with accurate captions, or someone has found French unit records that ID this incident.

Once again, I'd like to appeal to anyone who has photos of Allied or German crashes lost during the Phoney War to make me aware of them. We have all the most well known aircraft photos, but there are bound to be others that are from personal, local or regional sources that we don't have or know about.

Any help would be appreciated.