The Crash
On the 6th February 1945 a B24 Liberator bomber assigned to the 734th Bomb Squadron 453rd Bomb Group based at Old Buckenham crashed some fifty yards from the house at Crown Farm.
The occupants were lucky escaping injury and major damage to the house, but all ten of the aircraft’s crew were killed in the crash. During assembly when endless formations of American bombers circled above East Anglia while individual aircraft formed into flights, flights into squadrons, squadrons into groups, groups into wings, the opportunity for collision was at its highest. Lieutenant Roy Flatt and his crew in B24J 44-10515 clipped the underside of Lieutenant Mateckos’s aircraft. The cause wasn’t established for sure but it is likely that Lt. Flatt briefly lost control as his aircraft hit the prop wash, or turbulence from the propellers of another aircraft within the formation. Although Lt Matecko’s machine was only slightly damaged and managed to fly on to the target, both vertical stabilisers of Lt. Flatt’s aircraft were broken off and it spun away out of control. A heavily laden B24 in a spin was something that few crews survived to talk about. This crew, on their third mission, was no different; all ten men died in the crash.
Ironically more damage was done to Crown Farm, Deopham, when the bomb load was detonated some days later than when the aircraft actually crashed.
Many small items were found in the field in front of the house including a crushed flak helmet. This would have been worn in the target area as protection, it was stuffed with ‘chaff’, thin aluminium strips, to be dropped to confuse the German radar targeted anti-aircraft guns. Another find was the remnants of a torch, essential for the crew inside the unlit fuselage on dark winter mornings.
The Crew
The crew was listed as:-
| Lt Roy F Flatt | Pilot |
| Lt Robert W McCormack | Co-pilot |
| Lt Henry Daniel | Navigator |
| Lt Ralph W Andrew | Bombardier |
| Sgt James E Tyree | Engineer |
| Sgt Fred H Dieckhoff | Radio operator |
| Sgt Joseph K Rilett | Tail gunner |
| Sgt Carl W Toll | Nose gunner |
| Sgt Hubert W Williams | Top gunner |
| Sgt Antonio Ortella | Waist gunner |
I am grateful to Sue and Michael Skinner for providing the above text and photograph. The original author has not been identified, but will of course be credited when this becomes clear.
The following image appears on page 72 of Philip Yaxley’s Around Wymondham in World War Two:
Accident summary
The Aviation Safety Network has the following entry for this incident:
| Date: | 06-FEB-1945 |
| Type: |  Consolidated B-24J Liberator First flight: 1939 4 piston engines |
| Owner/operator: | United States Army Air Force (USAAF) |
| Registration: | 44-10515 |
| Aircraft damage: | Written off (damaged beyond repair) |
| Location: | Crown Fm, Hingham –  United Kingdom |
| Nature: | Military |
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 19/12/23 | Yaxley photo added |
| 30/6/23 | Reformatted list of crew so it displays correctly on mobile devices. |
| 14/6/23 | Comment on authorship |
| 7/6/23 | Published |
Deopham History 