Deep within the forest close to Lake Anten, near Alingsås, Sweden, is a unique monument made of a pile of stones and a plane propeller, with American names of military personnel. What happened here?, you might think. The answer is from way back in 1944.
That year, on October 19, 6 American C-87 airplanes took off from Leuthars Air Base in Scotland heading for Bromma Airport in Stockholm as part of Operation Sonnie, a secret Allied intelligence operation over neutral Swedish territory. During the flight, one of the planes suddenly got an engine failure and returned to Scotland. The others chose to continue on the mission.
Upon arriving in Bromma, the weather conditions had gotten quite severe and foggy, and the route was rescheduled to Torslanda Airport in Gothenburg instead. The plane, filled with oil barrels, crashed in a forest in the middle of the Swedish countryside around midnight and caught on fire. The official explanation to the crash was wrongful navigation.
Ruth Andersson lived only a few hundred meters from the crash site. Her testimony from the accident is horrific. She described that she heard a loud bang and her whole cabin was shaking. When she ran out to check out the origin of the noise she saw that despite the fog and the darkness of the night, the whole forest was lit up by a large blaze. She saw the airplane in pieces on the forest floor on fire. Because of the immense heat she couldn’t get close to the site and look for survivors. She screamed out amid the rumbling noise of the fire but the only response she heard was silence.
When police and fire ighters later arrived and managed to put out the fire, the radio operator Oakley Ragland was found alive, but he later died in the hospital. The charred remains of the other crew members were found inside the airplane.
The monument was constructed to commemorate this event in 1945 by the area’s local cultural heritage association. Since then, there has been an annual commemoration ceremony on October 20, with Swedish and also in some years American participation.