Read all about the Battle of Graveney Marsh in the Feb/Mar 2019 issue of HISTORY MAGAZINE

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London Irish Rifles training on Graveney Marsh in 1940. Note WWI-vintage SMLE rifles.

People forget that the 1940 Battle of Britain was fought to clear the skies, one way or another, ahead of a German cross-channel invasion. In that chaotic autumn, British preparations were not always what might be expected. In Kent, one of the authorities’ first moves was to order hops pickers home, lest they be caught in their fields by German paratroops. (The effect on beer production, consumption, and morale was considered a necessary sacrifice; this was war.) The 1st Battalion of the London Irish Rifles, 1st London Division, was charged with defending the easternmost peninsula of the county: next to Dover, the closest British soil to France, with 40 miles of undefended coastline and vast expanses of flat marshland ideal for a German airborne assault. Lt. Col. John Macnamara, commanding, disagreed with the linear defense tactics proposed by headquarters; the Germans had been blitzing over and around defensive lines for a year.

Instead he divvied his rifle companies into platoons and assigned each to its own self-contained strongpoint between Faversham and Whitstable on the River Swale estuary, the north coast of Kent. Besides patrolling the coast and delaying any enemy advance along the road network, his men were to contain any air assaults. (Airborne assault via parachute and glider was a key component of blitzkrieg.)

By the end of September, however, the only fliers coming down on Kent had either bailed out or crash-landed. A British pilot rescued was a prize; a German taken was a trophy and, as they had no reason to fight back, a welcome bit of sport. One party of London Irish, racing to get under a German swinging from his parachute, arrived to find a Royal Army Service Corps motorcyclist beating them to it. He drove off with the prisoner on his rear seat, his rifle slung over the German’s back.

Across the Channel Kampfgeschwader (Bomber Wing) 77 had spent the summer in Germany, equipping with the new Junkers Ju-88 Schnellbomber (fast bomber). Since arriving in France at the end of August they weren’t having an easy go of it. On a Sept. 18th mission to Gravesend they lost nine aircraft from III Gruppe, one of the worst single-mission losses of any German bomber unit.

Junkers Ju-88 A-1 #088-8099, 3Z+EL, III./KG 77

Of Germany's three main bombers at the beginning of WWII, the Junkers Ju-88 was faster than the Heinkel He-111 and Dornier Do-17 (in early 1939 it set speed records comparable to British fighters of the day) and furthermore doubled as a dive-bomber. Unlike the Heinkel and Dornier, the Junkers was too late to see action in the Spanish Civil War, and in the Battle of Britain it suffered higher attrition, mostly due to light defensive armor and armament. However, it served for the duration the war, as a day bomber, fighter, night fighter, long-range reconnaissance aircraft, anti-tank aircraft, mine-layer, torpedo bomber and trainer, one of the most versatile and widely-produced aircraft of the war on any side.

Ju-88 A-1 #088 8099 was brand new, having been completed at the end of July and entered service in mid-September as “3Z+EL.” E being its individual aircraft designation, the crew nicknamed it Eule, (Owl). As confirmed by its factory identification plate, it was built as an A-1, but is often identified as an A-5, the model entering service that summer and recognized by increased wingspan; like many A-1s it may have been rebuilt as such. (The A-4, with more powerful engines, better speed and increased bomb load, was the most widely produced version but didn't appear until 1941.) III./KG 77 prop spinners were white with yellow, the III Gruppe color.

Around noon on Friday the 27th, six formations of Do-17 and Ju-88 bombers, some 300 aircraft flying at 12,000 up to 29,000 feet, crossed the coast between Dover and Lympne, headed for London. Twenty RAF squadrons rose in defiance. For some two hours dogfights wove white contrails and black smoke over Kent and East Sussex.

Unteroffizier (Sergeant) Fritz Ruhlandt of III./KG 77 was a veteran of Poland and France. His Ju-88 A1, serial #088 8099, was brand new, having been completed at the end of July and entered service two weeks earlier as 3Z+EL, adorned with the shield and banner of KG 77 and the name Eule, Owl. That Friday afternoon Ruhlandt was making his first flight with a new crew: observer/bombardier Sgt. Gotthard Richter; recently married radioman/gunner Erwin Richter, also a veteran of Poland and France; and belly gunner Pvt. Jakob Reiner.

I./KG 77 lost six aircraft that day. Walter Schmidt, a gunner in a 2 Staffel Ju-88, recounted, “It was one of the most memorable acts of enemy action that I took part in, of my 200 sorties from 1940-45. If I remember correctly, the target was a gas works in London. We were flying with eighteen machines of the first group in formation of two squadrons.

“The approach height was about 5,300 m and the bomb release 5,100 m. At this height the warning came through the intercom of ‘fighters below right’. As I glanced below and slightly to the left, I could see fighters myself. I believe they had a big red circle on their wings without white. The green camouflage paint was very dark, by that we recognised the British fighters at once. They were flying about 200 m below us, against our flight direction. Then commenced the most hectic aerial combat I had experienced. We were attacked by fighters without a break. Often I saw several aircraft at once being shot down in flames, with black or white smoke trailing, or like red torches.

“The ‘3Z + HK’ broke in the middle at the point of the cross insignia. One couldn’t possibly observe everything. Our own fighters were more than likely too far behind and above. At this time, we were still under strong fighter attack. After a quick look round I saw several parachutes descending. Between the fighter attacks, I noticed to my horror that the release on my parachute harness, on which I was lying most of the time, had opened. It opens itself on a 90 degree turn and with light pressure and was now lying loose with the parachute on my back. Between single fighter actions, I managed to get my parachute operational again. Should it have been necessary to use my parachute in that condition, I would have had the same fate as comrade Menningmann, who fell out of his harness. In the meantime, both our squadrons were scattered all over the place and we returned home alone. After our return to base, we observed only nine aircraft returned from this action. The tenth Ju 88, managed to do an emergency landing on the Channel coast.”

“Not one of the four attacks has been successful,” reported the Air Ministry. “Moreover, [German] losses had been suffered in the type of medium-altitude bombing raid that had been so successful earlier in September when mounted on a large scale.... As they retired, they had relied on their own speed and evasive tactics to escape attack.”

Eule was one of those. Radioman Sgt. Erwin Richter, reported, “During an anti-aircraft engagement over London one engine failed.”

The bomber had been hit by an anti-aircraft gun at Upnor Castle on the Medway, on the south bank of the Thames east of London. With one Jumo 211 engine out a Ju-88 was difficult to fly level, let alone in a turn, and once down to 155mph had difficulty even maintaining altitude. Eule slowed and fell out of formation. “As a result,” recalled Richter, “we were separated from our unit and immediately attacked by three fighters.”

Numerous sources claim a Hurricane was involved; if so, its contribution was overshadowed (as usual) by Spitfires. Sgt. Claude Arthur Parsons of RAF 66 Squadron and Sgt. Hugh Bowen-Morris of 92 Squadron both attacked 3Z+EL.

A healthy Ju-88 could outdive even a Spitfire, but with only one engine, Ruhlandt could hardly outrun or outturn them. Getting down low, though, would deny them half the sky for maneuvers, and keep them up where radio operator Richter could take them on with his rear-facing 7.92mm MG 15 machine gun. “Ruhlandt dived at once,” remembered Richter, “and as he neared the ground he found that the second engine had failed as the result of fighter fire.”

Richter shot it out with the Brits, but was outgunned. Each Spitfire Mk.I mounted eight .303 Browning machine guns. At least one burst crazed the Ju-88’s canopy. Richter remembered, “During the fighter attack I was wounded in both eyes by glass splinters.”

Battle of Britain by Mark Bromley

Powerless, the Junkers was easy meat. But the British dearly wanted to lay hands on a new Ju-88 and had issued orders to get one intact. Parsons and Bowen-Morris contented themselves to see Eule headed down. Richter recounted, “There was no longer any opportunity to bale out as we were so near to the ground and we had to make an emergency landing.”

Down below, War Substantive Lieutenant (temporary captain) John Cantopher, commanding A Company, 1st Bn LIR, was on his way from company HQ at Faversham along the new Thanet Way road toward the coast. He was to conduct a pay parade and weapons inspection of one of his platoons, under Lt. Patrick “Paddy” Yeardsley, at Graveney, a small but scattered village built around a Norman-era church. The platoon was billeted at an inn built in 1642, now called the Sportsman, specializing in local seafood, particularly oysters from beds about a mile offshore.

The weather being fair, Cantopher saw the powerless Junkers, harried by the RAF Spits, sinking silently down toward the marsh. This in itself was nothing unusual. In the middle of August a Dornier Do-17 had crashed at nearby Seasalter, and three days after that another German bomber came down on the beach just up the road at Whitstable.

“It just missed our house when it came over with the Spitfires after it,” a Graveney resident wrote the Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald after the war, recalling that her brother and a friend “were close to the spot taking cover as it passed over their heads, and could have been first to it, only they saw the soldiers coming and wisely kept under cover.”

The Ju-88 bellied in, bouncing and slithering some 300 yards on the soft ground, jumping a ditch and shearing off both propellers before slewing to a stop some quarter mile west of the inn. It was about 3:45PM local time.

Photos courtesy Phil Harris, Sportsman Inn

Cantopher arrived at the Sportsman to find Lt. Yeardsley gone. He confirmed with platoon sergeant P. Allworth that the unit was aware of the nearby landing. “Yes sir! I have sent some men.”

Noting the unit’s WWI-vintage Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles and revolvers all laid out for review, Cantopher inquired, “They took arms, I hope?”

“No sir!” said Allworth, standing at attention. “The arms inspection, Sir!”

Out on the marsh, Ruhlandt and his crew, unhurt except for Richter, clambered from the wreck of the Ju-88. With at most a few minutes before British troops arrived, their job now was to render their aircraft useless to the enemy. The Junkers was equipped with a Kuvi (Kursvizier, course sight) for the observer/bombardier, and a Revi (Reflexvisier, reflector sight) for the pilot, both standard. However, the new top-secret BZA (Bomben Ziel Anlage, bomb target system) analog computer, to assist in dive-bombing, was then coming into service aboard German twin-engine dive-bombers; whether Eule was so equipped has gone unrecorded, perhaps for reasons soon apparent.

That very month the Luftwaffe had issued illustrated, 12-page Service Regulation D.(Luft) 4601, regarding destruction of aircraft landed on enemy territory, using the Sprengbüchse (explosive box) 24, a one-kilogram charge of TNT with a six-foot delay fuze. Ruhlandt and his crew had only to hold off the British for the few minutes it would take to rig the explosive. No more than 3½ minutes after that, the Ju-88’s cockpit would be reduced to scrap.

They salvaged two belt-fed machine guns from the wreck and somebody had brought a submachine gun, probably a 9mm MP 40 machine pistol, with one or two 32-round box magazines—maybe 2,000 rounds total. The Irish Rifles’ vintage SMLE bolt-actions used 10-round boxes, each man carrying at most 25 rounds of reloads, perhaps 350 rounds all told. Outgunned victims in the air, down on the ground the four Germans had suddenly become the most dangerous army on Graveney Marsh, as the London Irish were about to find out.

LIR Capt. Nigel Wilkinson was told, “On approaching the aircraft the men fired on by the German crew with the aircraft’s two machine guns.”

No one on the British mainland had fired a weapon in anger in almost 200 years, let alone a machine gun on full auto. Sheila and Brenda Walden lived half a mile from the crash site; 70 years later, Sheila remembered, “I was 10 and Brenda was eight. We heard the machine guns making a terrible noise and got on our bikes to have a closer look.”

At the Sportsman, Cantopher told Allworth, “Forget the inspection! I am going over there. Tell Mr. Yeardsley and bring some of your men with rifles,” and perhaps just to make sure, added, “…and ammunition.” If the Germans wanted a fight, a fight they would have.

Cantopher, apparently taking a different route though the marsh than the A Company advance force, arrived on the marsh alone, having nothing more than a revolver with which to demand surrender from Germans with machine guns. He was spared the attempt by the timely arrival of Lt. Yeardsley and Sgt. Allworth, with ten men and rifles. Yeardsley had binoculars, through which they could see the four Germans milling around the wreck.

The Brits laid plans. While Allworth and five men gave covering fire, Yeardsley and the rest would advance along the dikes and ditches to within range for a final assault. Wilkinson recalled, “The London Irishmen got into attack formation and having laid down heavy rifle fire on the aircraft mounted an assault of the Junkers across the marsh.”

It seems uncertain that Ruhlandt and his crew were even aware of the Home Guard troops and half the village children in the vicinity—presumably after their first burst rang out, the locals all ducked for cover—until bullets started coming their way. Looking into the incident, the RAF Air Historical Branch later determined, “some sort of fight took place, but it is far from clear that the [German] crew fired at anything but their own aircraft.” They were simply making sure of Eule’s destruction. But the Brits didn’t know that.

Keeping to cover, Yeardsley and his men closed to within 50 yards of the wreck and opened fire. The Battle of Graveney Marsh was hitting full tilt. 70 years later, Sheila Walden remembered, “We could see it across the marshes but couldn’t get nearer because the Army blocked off the road.”

The Air Ministry interrogation report noted, “The crew are also said to have fired at people trying to prevent them from destroying their aircraft and coming to arrest them; this, however, cannot be confirmed and is completely denied by the crew.”

At some point Ruhlandt was shot in the foot. With half the Germans wounded, the fight, if there ever had been any, went out of them. They waved a white cloth. By now, though, British blood was up. Sgt. Allworth’s covering force kept up their steady fire until Lt. Yeardsley and his assault team left the safety of their drainage ditch and, as had their fathers at Ypres, Somme, and Passchendaele, went over the top. They crossed the open ground and stormed the enemy position at bayonet point.

The prisoners were all taken alive. As they were sorted out one warned that the Junkers would explode at any moment. LIR accounts consider this “a typical Teutonic practical joke,” Nazis being noted for their jovial humor in such moments. To be certain, Cantopher ordered everyone off to a safe distance while he personally conducted a search for self-destruct charges. He found what's been described only as a “black box” about the size of a small suitcase. Unable to figure out how to open it, let alone disarm it, he safed it by the expedient of tossing it into a nearby drainage ditch.

With that the London Irish marched their prisoners back to the Sportsman. Regimental piper Corporal George Willis remembered, “The men were in good spirits and came into the pub with the Germans. We gave the Germans pints of beer in exchange for a few souvenirs. I got a set of enamel Luftwaffe wings.”

With Britain badly in need of a victory on the ground, everybody wanted in on this one. “Went off early to see about the Junkers 88,” reported the Army’s XII Corps RAF intelligence officer, Flt Lt Laurence Irving, the next day. He met Macnamara and divisional commander Maj. Gen. Sir Claude Francis Liardet at the crash site. The colonel told them, “The crew of the enemy aircraft got out and opened fire on his platoon with two machine guns and a sub-machine gun….Colonel Macnamara deployed his men and advanced across 300 yards of absolutely flat country, cut up with dykes. When they were within 100 yards of the enemy aircraft the crew waved a white rag.”

In no version of the story but his own is Macnamara even on-scene, much less the victorious commander. (As a minister of Parliament, he was a friend of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but also a member of the pre-war Anglo-German Fellowship, some of whose members were pro-Nazi. His parliamentary secretary was Guy Burgess, then already a member of Soviet Russia’s infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring.) XII Corps Lt. Gen. Andrew Thorne complimented Macnamara on the capture. The platoon received mention in dispatches for their exploit (though also an unofficial reprimand for spraying some 50 rifle-caliber rounds around Graveney), and Cantopher was awarded the George Medal in recognition of bravery. Yet the details of the battle went unpublished.

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The Battle of Graveney Marsh

By Don Hollway
Full color 16" x 20" art print. Only $49.99 + shipping & handling!

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I'm honored that my illustration “The Battle of Graveney Marsh” has been used on a plaque commemorating the site of "The Last Battle on English Soil." Plaque at left, detail at right. Many thanks to Ashley J Clark, Canterbury City Councillor for Seasalter and cabinet member for enforcement and open spaces.

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The Walden girls’ father helped remove part of the Junkers and stored it in his garage until Army specialists took it to Farnborough airfield, where RAF engineers reportedly discovered a new, secret bombsight. As “suitcase sized black box” is less a description of a Sprengbüchse 24 charge than the housing for the BZA dive-bombing computer (which was sealed such that it could only be opened by specially trained maintenance personnel) and the Germans shot up their bomber as though it had no functioning self-destruct charge, a little speculation takes Cantopher’s find in a whole new direction.

“The matter was hushed up at the time,” Wilkinson told the Daily Mail in 2010, “because the Air Ministry didn’t want it known that the British had recovered the plane and knew the German secrets behind it.”

So the Battle of Graveney Marsh was almost lost to history. 70 years later, however, more than 120 members of the London Irish Rifles Regimental Association re-enacted the fight, trudging over the marsh from the scene of the crash to the Sportsman Inn, where they unveiled a plaque commemorating the battle. Sheila and Brenda, then aged 80 and 78, attended. “The service brought back lots of little memories,” said Sheila. “It was wonderful.”

Wilkinson said, “Hardly anybody knows about what really happened at Graveney Marsh apart from the men of the regiment and residents.” It’s been called the last battle fought on mainland Britain. The RAF Air Historical Branch sniffs “that to characterise this skirmish as a battle would be something of an exaggeration.” But any skirmish is a battle when it’s the only one you’ve got. Ask the victors of Graveney Marsh.

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