War over Oude IJsselstreek: Megchelen Landfort

March 1945. How the war, just before it ended, became fatal to the American Harold Chauncy Bird. The only fighter plane that crashed near the Landfort Estate within the municipality of Oude IJsselstreek.

“Disappeared after leaving formation” can be read in the logbook of his colleague Walter Neil Dove. Possibly the emergency landing had been estimated wrongly, causing the aircraft to slide into the forest between the trees. There, Bird had his field grave (with his flyer cap on top of the cross) for two years before he was buried on the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Gendringen.