Entre ciel et terre. Histoire de l’aéronautique militaire et archéologie : l’exemple d’Hazebrouck

Abstract

Contrary to what might be expected, aerial warfare during the Second World War left many vestiges in the ground of Western Europe. This warfare represented a massive commitment on the part of the belligerents, a war front in its own right, causing considerable human and material losses. Since the end of the 1990s, research has begun to focus on these remains, like the wreck of a Lancaster bomber unearthed in 1997 in Lorraine. In 2006, Air France, in association with the Dutch airline company KLM, contacted the regional archaeological services of the Nord – Pas-de-Calais region, asking the service to carry out an excavation on the presumed place of the crash, on 1 September 1944, of a British Spitfire IX fighter, piloted by Captain Jan Plesman, son of the founder of KLM. The excavation, however, revealed the remains of a German aircraft, a Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-6 fighter, still containing the body of the pilot who, thanks to the plate bearing his registration number, was identified as the Sergeant Horst Seemann, shot down on 4 September 1943, a year earlier, during an interception flight during an allied raid on the Hazebrouck railway marshalling yard. The remains of Horst Seemann were buried on 11 July 2006 at the German military cemetery at Bourdon (Somme). The wife of his younger brother, now deceased, and some of his nephews and nieces came especially from Germany to attend the funeral. Military aircraft crash sites participate fully in questions of memory and history through their cultural value as historical artifacts and through the information they can provide regarding both the circumstances of the loss of the plane, and the plane as such.

Keywords

• Second World War
• aviation
• aviation archaeology
• German air force
• motor
• war vestiges