The Eagles Over Europe Project

[Larry Hickey]

Hello,

Were Etaples and Le Touquet the same airfield used by the LW during the Battle of Britain, or were they two different places?

[Alfred.MONZAT]

They are the same airfield. The Germans sometimes mentionned it as Etaples due to the proximity of the city but the official french name is Le Touquet.

[Larry]

I recon that N series Hurricane is an anomaly and has had an old mast fitted from stores!

However N2319 was the second of the new batch so I'll concede that early N's had these masts but not many so L series is still more likely.

[Hans Nauta]

Hi Larry,

Just a wild guess: could it be Montdidier (with some misspelling) in northern France? That would tie up with the time frame June 1940, but is none of your loss possibilities...

Regards,
Hans

[Dénes Bernád]

I have several photos of this wreck. I will check them out, hopefully the location is marked on the verso of some of them.

[Larry Hickey]

Hello to both of you and thanks for trying to help.

Hans,

I had originally thought of that as a possible resolution several days ago. It is the only town I know of with that possible similar ending.

Peter C. now thinks that this is the 15 May incident 15 kms S of Wavre, Belgium, although he can't find the source attribution for this information in his records. Unfortunately, Montdidier, France, is around 200 kms from Wavre, so it certainly doesn't fit that location.

Dénes, please do check and see if you can turn up anything. The photo I posted was the only one that I could find with any location info. There have been around a dozen images of this crash posted on eBay, and I only won one of them, which alas had no location information. This is the only one that had a any possible location info posted with it on eBay that I know of. We want to profile this a/c for the EoE project if we can firmly identify it.

Regards,

[ClinA-78]

Hello Larry,

I would like to be your hero .

I was told many years ago about a German crash occured at the East end of Saint-Géry village. 'Altiau' or Rue Altiau is a street located in this same village, which is situated roughly 6 km West of Gembloux.
I don't know if this case can be linked to your crash on the picture. You know, this scarce testimony dates many years ago (no more witnesses now) but perhaps if there is a landmark appearing on your pictures, I would be able to make a matching?

Best regards

ClinA-78

[Nick Beale]

It may be relevant that because the country has two official languages, places in Belgium often have both a Flemish and a French form of their names: Tienen is also known as Tirlemont for example.

[ClinA-78]

'Altiau' is situated well inside the French-speaking part of Belgium.

ClinA-78

[Jochen Prien]

Larry,

to me this looks definitely like a mis-spelt form of Montdidier, spelt here like Monditier. Looking at the captions on many German photos from that period you'll find much worse deformations of French names than this one.

Hope this helps

Jochen