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Having made the climb to the crash site on a pleasant
Autumn day, one can only imagine howit must have felt
for those young airmen in 1944. The trauma of crash-landing
in any circumstances is quite unthinkable, but the horror
of meeting a solid mountain peak in the pitch blackness
of a bitterly cold Winter's night defies imagination.
It has to be remembered that the five young men who
miraculourly survived were injured, disorientated and
far from home.
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Gilchrist and Gowens, who saw no sign of human habitation
and nothing but desolation around them, decided on a route
of descent along a mountain stream and eventually reached
McDermott's, Croleck (The Croaghs), about 10:30am on the 1/2/1944.
McDermott's was the most visible dwelling in the valley,
not then being surrounded by trees as it is now.
 Mrs.
Catherine McDermott (whose husband, Peter, had died the previous
year) was there with her five young children. The family must
have been very frightened by the arrival of strangers - something
seldom seen in the Blue Stacks. Few hillwalkers would have
been around in those days - and especially not in deepest
Winter - and the only visitors would have been either relations
or neighbours or the occasional travelling journeyman.
She took them in and provided all the comfort and assistance
possible. She sent Joe, then in his teens with Gowens on bicycles
to raise the alarm and report the accident to the Guards at
Brockagh - a journey which Joe well remembers.
At about 11am Gowens reported the crash to Sergeant O'Connor,
Brockagh, and having got the required information, the Sergeant
left Gowens with Garda Lydon. Sergeant O'Conner, the District
Nurse (Pat McGinley), Joe McDermott and the late Dan McMenamin,
Brockagh, went in the latter's hackney car to the Croaghs.
By this time a third survivor, Tubby Richardson, having first
approached another house, was at McDermott's.
Sergeant O'Connor, familiarly known as just Tadhg, 4796,
a native of Lispole, Tralee, joined the Guards in 1923 and
served in Brockagh from 1943 until he retired in 1967. He described
the scene to me [Liam Briody]
as being "like a town burned and bombed. The pilot and
co-pilot were charred black - roasted alive in the cockpit".
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