GERMAN ’PLANES AS SCRAP

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21788, 18 October 1940, Page 4

GERMAN ’PLANES AS SCRAP

BRITAIN’S 20-ACRE “GKAVEYaRD" /From Our Own Correspondent) LONDON. August 24. Twenty acres of grassland, somewhere in England, have been turned into a “graveyard”—one of several—for German ’planes brought down by the R.A.F. and by anti-aircraft guns. It is a dumping place to which, from all over the country, R.A.F. lorries bring the broken. bullet-riddled remains of Heinkels, Dorniers, Messerschmitts and Junkers. They represent thousands of pounds worth of scrap They will lie here until technicians have analysed the material, and they will be broken up still further and melted down for use as weapons against the country which produced them. It takes an hour and a-half to make a tour of this burial ground. Like cattle pens at a market, the ground is divided into separate lots, each one railed off by the wings of crashed aircraft; each one a dump of debris 12ft. high and covering an acre to an acre and a-half of ground. The metal and produce recovering depot employs 157 men. who do nothing else but unload and pile up the lorry-loads of airplanes. The men wear thick leather gauntlets as protection against the jagged edges of the metal. And they cheer each time a lorry rumbles in from the Roman road which runs up to the gates. A man leaning over a tangled heap of burnt-out engines swore quietly to himself. “It’s the reek of them that makes one swear," he explained. “The bad sulphurous smell which comes from the vegetable oil they burn makes one feel sick.”