Dakota Discovered Off Jersey
(Published in Dive Magazine, 2006).jpg)
On a stormy night at the end of October, 1944, the residents of Jersey were surprised to hear the rumble of an aeroplane overhead. The island had been occupied by German forces for over four years and, although the nearby mainland of France had been liberated since D Day in June, the Channel Islands were still very much under the jack boot. Shipping and aircraft movements had all but ceased and, desperately short of food and fuel, islanders and occupiers alike were facing their grimmest winter of the War.
The aircraft was an American air force C-47 transport plane, better known as a Dakota. En route from Paris to Cherbourg with twelve men on board, an error in navigation coupled with radio problems meant that the plane overshot the French coast and instead found itself over Jersey. The pilot, 1st Lieutenant Robert Blackler, circled the island with his navigation lights on, the international signal of an aircraft in distress and needing to land. Whether these signs were mis-read or deliberately ignored will never be known but the order was given to fire at the plane. The Dakota took several direct hits. One struck the port propeller and others destroyed the aircraft’s elevator controls.
Remarkably, Lieutenant Blackler somehow managed to ditch his aircraft reasonably smoothly in the sea close to Jersey’s north coast. Momentarily stunned by a sharp blow to the head, he scrambled out on to the wing and tried to launch the life raft. As the sea tossed the barely floating plane he lost his footing and fell into the bitterly cold water. The raft sank unopened. With only seven life jackets between them, all but one of the other eleven men leapt into the sea as the plane began to sink. One passenger clung to the tail and went down with the Dakota as it slipped beneath the heaving black waves. Cold and shocked, the men must have been able to make out the whiteness of the waves pounding against the rocks in the darkness and so thrashed towards the shore. Lieutenant Blackler helped one of the passengers who was struggling even more than the others but as they neared the rocks they were flung against the granite over and over again. Injured and unable to swim any longer, the man slipped from his arms and sank. Blackler swam away from the shore as, one by one, the rest of the men drowned, defeated by the rocks, the cold and sheer exhaustion.
Alone in the sea for an hour, Lieutenant Blackler was eventually rescued when German troops threw him a line and dragged him ashore. Badly cut and bruised by his battering on the rocks, he was taken Jersey’s General Hospital. His injuries were treated and the airman was interrogated by the Germans before being interned in the island’s American prisoner of war camp. The bodies of his drowned colleagues were recovered from the sea and buried with full military honours in Jersey’s Allied war cemetery where the stars and stripes are still flown every day. The officer who gave the command to fire on the Dakota was disciplined and demoted to the ranks as punishment. Lieutenant Blackler spent the last few months of the war in Jersey until the Channel Islands were finally liberated in May 1945 when he and his fellow Americans returned home.
The wreckage of the aeroplane lay undisturbed for nearly forty years until the propellers were discovered by divers in 1983. Blacker was traced in the USA and invited back to the island to commemorate the tragic events of the crash with the raising of the propellers. Still haunted by nightmares of that terrifying night, the retired airman declined the offer.
The propellers were given to one of Jersey’s museums and are still on display but the rest of the aircraft remained illusive. Over the years one or two scallop divers came across pieces of wreckage but kept the location to themselves. The seabed around the crash site is a mixture of low rocky heads and ever-shifting undulations of shingle. In May this year though the sea revealed a little more of its ill-gotten gains when divers Tom Baudains and Trevor Le Cornu were asked by a local fisherman to retrieve a string of pots snarled on the seabed east of Bonne Nuit Bay on Jersey’s north coast. They found the pots, along with a huge piece of trawler netting, tangled around a jumble of wreckage which soon revealed itself to be that of an aircraft. It didn’t take long to work out that they were looking at parts of the Dakota that met such a tragic end in the Second World War.
Within days the divers returned to the wreck site with lighting bags and carefully removed the trawler net to reveal the wreckage. One wing is easy to distinguish lying upside down on the seabed with the wheel and tyre of the semi-retractable landing gear still in place. Between the layers of aluminium a conger eel has taken up residence, a familiar feature on every Channel Island shipwreck. On top of the wing a feathery cluster of tube worms feed in the tide that sweeps along this part of the coast. A few metres away is the outer casing of one of the two engines with the propeller shaft clearly visible in the centre. Nearby, among a jumble of crumpled aluminium, cogs and wiring, lie the solid metal castings of the fourteen cylinder Pratt and Whitney radial engine. Ballan wrasse, rock cook and goldsinny wrasse flit above the tangled remains of the old aeroplane while tompot blennies and crabs peer out from the manmade cracks and crevices of the debris. Some of the wreckage is disguised by a summer camouflage of seaweeds but among the growth intriguing remnants of stainless steel gleam as if they’ve just come out of the factory, complete with clearly legible lettering. There are other, less recognisable pieces of wreckage around the site but Tom and Trevor know that the rest of the fuselage and the other wing and engine can’t be far away and are already methodically searching the area.
As with all diving in the Channel Islands, the water clarity is best during neap tides when it’s not unusual to have fifteen or more metres of visibility. Neap tides also provide over an hour of slack water on the site while good timing allows a look around the wreck followed by a drift dive over the nearby shingle banks in search of scallops, rays and flatfish. As wreck dives go, this is a small site but, in less than 18 metres of water, it’s ideal for the less experienced diver. It lies close to shore so is sheltered from the prevailing westerly wind and is a few minutes boat trip from either Bonne Nuit Bay to the west or the popular diving base of Bouley Bay to the east. The remains of the Dakota also make an interesting second or third plunge for the more experienced diver exploring the deeper shipwrecks off the north coast of Jersey. For any diver though it’s a fascinating reminder of a stark and not too distant period in the history of the Channel Islands.
Dive the Dakota with Jersey's T & T Divers and their rib Mr Grumpy based in Bonne Nuit Bay, just a few minutes boat trip from the wreck site. Contact Tom Baudins on 07797 722697 for more information or go to their web site www.ttdivers.co.uk