On this day in 1944, a United States Army Air Forces B-24 Liberator took off from the base at Warton in Lancashire on a test flight. A violent storm came in over the estuary that morning. Aircraft were recalled to base; for this one the recall came too late, and it came down into the centre of Freckleton, into the infant school and the cafe beside it.
Sixty-one people died. Thirty-eight of them were children between four and six years old, in their classroom on a Wednesday morning. The three crewmen were killed, and so were villagers and American and British servicemen who had been sheltering nearby. Men from the base at Warton were among the first into the wreckage, digging alongside the villagers and the fire crews in the rain, and the base hospital took in the injured. Seven children were brought out alive; three of them lived.
The children were buried together in a communal grave in the churchyard at Holy Trinity, and the memorial in the photograph below stands over it, with fresh flowers in the vases. The village and the airmen who had been stationed among them gave the money for it. It is tended still.
The joint funeral was held two days later, and American airmen from Warton helped carry the small coffins to the churchyard at Holy Trinity. Villagers remembered that the men from the base stood among the mourners rather than apart from them.
Harold, the part that stays with me is the tending. For decades afterwards the village and the men who had been stationed at Warton kept that memorial together, sending money and coming back for the anniversary long after the base had gone.