The United Kingdom has an epic history,
and a wealth of secrets still to uncover.
Every year, hundreds of archaeologists dig,
dive,
and sieve
to find clues
to add to the great historical jigsaw of our ancestors' lives.
You know, when people say, "What's the best thing you've ever found?"
This!
I'm Professor Alice Roberts.
This year, we've uncovered some astonishing finds
and made some truly ground-breaking discoveries.
Wow, look at that!
Each team of archaeologists has been armed with a dig diary camera
so they can record their discoveries as they happen.
That is brilliant.
Dave, I love you.
Our roving archaeologist, Dr Naoise McSweeney,
is out on the digs.
Who are we looking at?
It's royal.
And I'll be inviting the teams to bring in their finds
for closer analysis.
That is absolutely beautiful.
In this special edition of Digging for Britain,
we're exploring the archaeology of World War II.
We're joining digs from across the country to give us an insight
into the lives of those who lived and fought during the war,
from the physical evidence they left behind.
We'll witness the raising of a World War II bomber
from the depths of the English Channel,
the unearthing of one of Hitler's feared V2 rockets,
and an excavation of a hostel where young Holocaust survivors
were brought after the war.
Welcome to Digging For Britain.
I've come to the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, Cambridgeshire.
It was from this airfield that the first Spitfires took off
for the Battle of Britain in July 1940.
Countless allied missions flew from airfields right across Britain,
heading for Nazi occupied Europe.
But some planes never made it that far.
And we head now to the Solent, where a chance discovery
has prompted a large scale diving operation.
They're attempting to recover the amazingly intact remains
of a Second World War bomber.
The excavation is located 500 metres offshore,
not far from Gosport Harbour.
It was here in 2018 that the National Grid planned
to lay an electricity cable to France,
and they first needed to conduct an underwater survey of the sea floor.
Right, that looks like something.
It's really hard to... hard to tell.
It's been down here a long time, whatever it is.
It looks like a section of an engine.
Got cables there, have you?
That looks like the framework of a wing, or something.
They'd stumbled upon a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
A World War II bomber, known as a Fairey Barracuda
that appeared to be completely intact.
The Barracuda was designed by British company, Fairey Aviation.
It was built as a torpedo dive-bomber,
the first of its kind, made entirely from metal.
It could carry a variety of deadly payloads,
from six 250lb bombs,
to a 450lb depth charge, or a huge 1600lb torpedo.
The Barracuda made its maiden flight in December 1940,
and was operated by the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm.
At the discovery site under the Solent,
a team from Wessex Archaeology have been brought in
to try to raise this extraordinary plane from the sea floor.
The aircraft is buried in a buttery type mud,
which is not easy when it comes to excavation.
Above the seabed, very little remains.
But as we are excavating down,
more and more is becoming open to us.
More than 2,600 Barracudas were built,
but not a single complete plane survives today.
Dave Morris from the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset
is heading up an ambitious project to reconstruct an entire Barracuda
using salvaged parts.
We have crash site remains from a number of our Barracudas,
which have been recovered over more than 40 years
of collecting now.
But they've all been subject to very fast collisions
to high ground mountainsides.
This is the first time that we've come across a Barracuda
which is largely still intact, and in most of its original shape.
It will be a dream come true for Dave's rebuild project
if the plane can be raised in one piece.
It's pretty amazing.
You descend down the shot line,
and you see the remains of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine -
that is quite prominent on the seabed.
As you go further back, there are the remains of the fuselage,
the cockpit, and the wings are still in place.
Records note that a Barracuda took off on January 6th, 1944,
from HMS Daedalus, which is now the nearby Lee-on-Solent airfield.
It suffered engine failure and pitched into the sea.
The pilot managed to bail out and survived the crash.
We know that it was a fairly smooth belly landing,
rather than a violent crash.
We know the pilot escaped OK.
So there's a lot of information we're putting together from records
and also matching that against the evidence that we're finding
on the seabed now.
Before the plane can be raised,
a powerful underwater siphon pump is used to suck the mud out
from around the fuselage and wings.
But working out how to raise the plane intact
is proving to be a significant challenge.
The divers realised the frame is much more fragile
than they previously thought.
The mud is tightly packed into the individual component parts,
making the plane very heavy,
and likely to break up on lifting.
We're going to have to dismantle the aircraft underwater
because unfortunately, it is too fragile to bring up in one piece.
Despite the setback, the divers have managed to isolate a large part
of one of the wings, and are carefully preparing it for lifting.
Slowly, the unbroken wing piece is brought up from the sea floor.
Once out of the water, the team needs to work quickly.
It starts to decay as soon as it comes out.
It's been in the sea for 75 years or so.
When you're trying to conserve archaeological material,
you want to try and keep it in the same conditions to how it's been.
What we're going to do is wrap it up,
and then keep it at least wet-damp
to try and stop the corrosion continuing.
The plane hasn't come up in one piece,
but, as more parts are slowly brought to the surface,
Dave Morris is optimistic.
Absolutely amazed to see, obviously,
a piece of the Barracuda coming up after 76 years.
Yeah, you can still tap on the aluminium.
I expected it to be a lot more corroded,
considering it's been down there for so many years.
Later on, we'll be following the recovered parts of the plane,
which will be taken to the Fleet Air Arm Museum.
For now, Dave still has high hopes he can use these parts
to help complete his reconstruction of this long-forgotten plane.
Our next dig is in the Lake District, where archaeologists
are excavating the site of a very special hostel.
It was a temporary home for hundreds of children who were rescued
from concentration camps in Nazi occupied Europe,
and brought to Britain to start a new life.
On the shore of Lake Windermere, in the heart of the Lake District
is the village of Troutbeck Bridge.
The archaeologists here are hoping to shed light on an incredible
wartime story of survival against the odds.
The Holocaust isn't just something that happened in Eastern Europe.
We have sites relating to the Holocaust here on British shores.
So this is one of them.
We're excavating the remains of what we think is
a hostel, where Jewish children were brought at the end of the war.
The dig is organised by the Lake District Holocaust Project.
It aims to remember the special role this area played in helping
to rehabilitate children liberated from Nazi concentration camps
at the end of the war.
Two boys that came here in 1945 were Ike Alterman and Sam Laskier.
That's me.
A cheerful little fella.
Life in Poland for these Jewish boys changed dramatically
the moment Germany invaded in September 1939.
We were lined up.
The assessment came and started counting.
Father was in front, and I was behind him,
and he said to me, "Stand on your tiptoe
"to make you look a bit taller than you are."
Next to him was my mother, my sister, my little brother.
"All those on the right, stay where you are.
"All those on the left, march out through the front of the square."
That's my mother, my little brother and sister,
never to be seen again.
Both boys were sent to a succession of concentration camps
before ending up in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
You had a number tattooed.
See, that was tattooed in Birkenau.
But then, in May 1945, the boys were finally liberated
from a camp in Czechoslovakia.
We were in the wagon. We didn't know what was going on.
But suddenly, I looked around and there were no guards.
They just disappeared.
And that is the moment that we realised we were free.
I am the one...
...waving his hat.
Everybody's so happy - "We're alive! We're alive!"
We couldn't believe it.
On August 13th, they were flown from Prague
and brought by bus up to Windermere.
Well, I knew wherever they were taking me,
it's going to be much better than where I was.
The boys were housed in one of three hostels located
on what was the Calgarth Estate -
a town that had been built during the war to house workers
from the nearby Sunderland Flying Boat Factory.
After the war, the town was demolished
and a school was built here.
This is the first time the site has been excavated.
The team are hoping to find evidence of one of the hostel buildings,
in the hope that they can learn something about the lives
of the children that were brought here.
We're finding huge amounts still exist within the ground.
So that includes the sort of types
of material that the structures were made from.
So we're finding bricks and concrete and mortar.
We're finding things like window glass.
300 orphaned Jewish children were brought to the Lake District.
They were known as the Windermere boys.
Many of the children who came here had been in Bergen-Belsen
some had been in Auschwitz, or other slave labour camps,
forced labour camps, in ghettos across Europe.
So for many, many years, they had experienced
terrible, terrible atrocities.
They were very much alone.
They didn't know how many of their family members survived.
But not all of the Windermere boys were actually boys.
In fact, 28 of them were girls.
Denise's mother Minya was one of them.
My mum was very proud to be one of the boys,
although they were in the minority
because they made a fuss of the girls as well.
There were plenty of boys to choose from!
Denise has been helping out with the dig.
We found lots of pieces of tiles
and water pipes, or sewage pipes.
We're thinking that it's probably some kind of bathroom.
I was thinking my mum must've had to wash in the bathroom over there!
The team are finding lots of evidence of the hostel building,
but precious few personal items.
One of the objects that we found, quite a poignant one, we think.
It's a little, tiny plastic unicorn,
which may or may not have been as a pendant round somebody's neck.
So this looks to be a really interesting find,
a small penknife.
Looks like it's made of mother of pearl,
but it's so corroded that the blade can't actually come out.
It's the kind of thing that a child would have had,
and really looked after and carried around with them everywhere.
It may have been more than 70 years ago,
but Sam and Ike's memories of arriving in Windermere
are still vivid.
We arrived at night, so we didn't see much.
The following morning, you see the hills and the lake.
We were at our place, near the lakes as well.
And we thought, "this is paradise".
This is the main hall.
That's me.
Over here.
There was beds, clean sheets, pillow cases...
We could run outside.
You know, we didn't have the proper things to wear -
some went out in their underpants.
We were wild. We were wild.
It was the most fantastic feeling.
Although the rescued children only lived here for six months,
it was a life-changing experience.
They were offered counselling and schooling,
including English lessons, before being resettled elsewhere in the UK.
It is a very positive story of hope in a terrible time of despair.
And I think it's really important
to humanise the stories of refugees.
Today, Ike and Sam have come back to the village
as they're keen to see the excavation.
It is very important, and it's very important that we also tell people
what it was like.
Although a lot of things have changed,
but we kept the memories.
The dig has helped local residents reconnect
with this unique and important time in their village's history.
Archaeology speaks to people in a special kind of way,
and I think we owe the survivors and the children
the chance to put their story out there,
and I think that's what archaeology can do.
I've invited Kevin to come and tell me more about the project.
Kevin, you've been digging in the Lake District,
but your usual work focusing on the Holocaust
takes you over to Eastern Europe.
So this is a very different kind of dig for you.
Yeah, absolutely. We do a lot in Eastern Europe.
Looking at the archaeology of what happened during the Holocaust
takes us to Poland and Ukraine and those sort of areas.
But this project gave us the opportunity to do something
a little bit closer to home.
And you did find a selection of quite personal objects. Absolutely.
I think this one really stands out for me, the little horse.
So, we're not sure whether it's a horse or a unicorn.
I think it's a unicorn. It's an important object.
It dates to around late '30s, '40s, so it's the right sort of period,
with a unicorn being a mythical creature
associated with hope and magic... Yeah.
To find that on the site where we were looking for evidence of what
these boys went through, and how they lived their life in Windermere
that was a perfect start for us.
Yes, it's lovely. Is it a little pendant? A little pendant.
Yeah, wear around the neck. Yeah.
What I find really kind of moving about this is that, you know,
that might be something that I dig up in my garden at home,
and it has very little meaning attached to it.
In this context... Absolutely.
...it comes with all that meaning.
And then... What's that?
Interesting. A tube. Curly Top. So, it's a hair curling gel,
but it's made for toddlers and babies.
Yes. It says "for toddlers".
For toddlers - Curly Top.
So it's to make your baby's hair grow curly.
The natural hair curler for toddlers.
So it would have been a culture shock to these children
to all of a sudden be in an environment
where you could curl your baby's hair using a gel. Yes!
And then what about this buckle?
Quite important. It's a belt buckle.
It's quite common to the period.
So we're talking sort of 1930s, 1940s, right through to the '50s.
It could well be that this belonged to one of them.
What else have you got? There's a bottle top.
Yes, Veno's. That is a cough medicine.
It just demonstrates that these children
went from having no medical care whatsoever, to all of a sudden
to find themselves in a place where if they got a cough,
they would be given some Veno's
cough medicine by a nurse or a doctor.
It demonstrates how dramatically their life changed overnight.
Yeah. And the care that was suddenly around them. Absolutely.
Do you think finding objects like this, does it make it feel
as though that time is more distant, or closer to the present day
when you find these objects?
The sort of argument here is that, why do we do archaeology
on such a recent period?
Because we already know the answers, because we've got books
and photographs, and all sorts of things.
But I think it's important because archaeologists
look at evidence and data in a slightly different way. Yes.
So we are asking new questions
of these archive documents and these data.
So actually, we can present new evidence.
That's what this project is all about,
bringing to the forefront this little section of Windermere
in the 1940s, just to see what life was like for these people.
We now turn our attention to another group of people who came
to Britain during the war.
In the build-up to D-Day, military camps sprung up
right across the country.
As well as housing British soldiers, these sites were home to
thousands of Canadian and American troops.
Our next dig comes from Salisbury,
where a team of British ex-military personnel
are hoping to find the remains of a barracks
used by the 2nd Battalion of the US Army's
506 Parachute Infantry Regiment,
otherwise known as Easy Company.
The men of this elite American parachute unit
also came to be known as the Band of Brothers.
They came to Britain in September 1943,
and remained here for nine months,
preparing alongside other allied troops for the D-Day invasion.
Their training camp was located
near the village of Aldbourne in Wiltshire.
MoD archaeologist Richard Osgood
is on site with members of Operation Nightingale.
This is an initiative using archaeology to support the recovery
of military personnel injured in conflict.
On the surface, you can see nothing. This is just a sports pitch.
What we wanted to see if archaeology could tell us anything
about what lies below this surface,
and link us to those men from Easy Company,
and take us back to those days of D-Day.
We know from military photographs that in 1943 and '44,
this field housed a number of wooden barracks.
This was the first time these young soldiers
had left their base in America.
Some of them described it as the best accommodation
they had in the whole war, and others said they felt
like they were on a Hollywood film set
because this village is so beautiful.
But the paratroopers would soon leave this quaint
Wiltshire village far behind.
In the early hours of June 6th, 1944,
the men of Easy Company were dropped behind enemy lines in Normandy.
Their mission, to seize key bridges and clear routes leading away
from Utah Beach to allow safe passage of US ground troops
who would arrive by sea just a few hours later.
The plan went awry, with many missing their drop zone.
But they still managed to capture and destroy four German field guns,
saving countless allied lives.
Easy Company went on to become one of the best known
allied fighting forces in the war, even making it all the way
to Hitler's mountaintop retreat in the Bavarian Alps.
Back at the dig, the team are hoping to find some personal items.
They want to gain a glimpse into the lives of these soldiers
when they were stationed here during the weeks
leading up to the D-Day invasion.
One of the really exciting bits about archaeology
is when you're able to put yourselves literally
in the footsteps of people that did incredible deeds in the past.
Already they're finding telltale structures just beneath the surface.
Not many people get excited by concrete, necessarily,
especially 20th century concrete,
but we've got one, two, three, four pads of a building
that were put it into this field in the 1940s.
And this is the remnants of the platoon sergeant's building.
What have you got there?
It looks like some sort of iron cooking pot...?
Possibly?
It's a coin.
It's a 1944 half penny.
They're also finding artefacts that directly link
to Easy Company's pivotal role on D-Day.
Just pulled this out the ground and didn't have a clue what it was,
but we borrowed Paul's book and we found exactly what it was.
You see, the handle for the emergency parachutes.
Yeah, fantastic. Oh, my God.
There are even finds that don't often survive being buried.
Our military expert has now identified this
as being parachute silk.
You're standing in a hut used by Easy Company
and you're touching a piece of parachute silk
used by those paratroopers, and that... That is amazing.
That is as good as a link to D-Day as you're ever going to get.
Eagerly sought personal items are also surfacing.
They're helping to paint a picture of life outside of combat training.
This is a fairly fun piece of evidence.
It's a bottle of Brylcreem that they'd have put in their hair
to make themselves look presentable,
having had their training and got themselves ready for an evening out.
One of the local buildings was a place where the Americans
did a lot of their dancing with the local girls.
The story goes that they made such good use of that venue
that, at the end of the war,
they had to pay for the floor to be re-laid.
The hall still exists today.
The floor's in really good condition.
The dig is giving a unique insight into the reality
of daily life for these brave men,
just at that moment before they left Britain for D-Day in June 1944.
This particular room, and I'm just standing by the entrance, looking
into the hut, is their last moment of quiet, peace, tranquillity,
and probably a great deal of reflection
before they dropped in on Normandy.
And that adds a real element of pathos, I think,
to this particular site.
I've asked Richard to bring in some of those personal items
for a closer look.
And you've got some of the finds here from inside the hut,
including that, which is extraordinary.
You know, the hairs on the back of my neck,
when you find something like this, and we're talking paratroopers,
this is the handle of a reserve parachute
used by somebody in Easy Company.
So that's for your backup parachute. That's right.
Your first parachute is what's called a static line,
it's pulled by the aircraft itself and it opens up,
and you parachute down, hopefully,
and if that doesn't work, you've got that to keep you alive.
And you've got some smaller objects. Talk me through these.
What have we got here? A badge?
Well, that's a little touch of them being very human, in fact.
It's a basketball supporter's badge.
Let's get it under there. So there's a little basketball on there...
That's right. It says, "I support", but tantalisingly,
we don't know who this individual soldier supported.
So you've got you've got a little trace
of them being keen on life back home,
but just whom, we don't know.
And this looks like something which you'd find on the head of a guitar.
I think it's a mandolin. Oh, right.
They're passing time playing musical instruments,
one of the ways that they kept themselves occupied in the evenings.
And what's this? That is a nylon stocking.
Found in the hut.
I don't know how far we go into that!
Maybe some chap had used a lot of Brylcreem
and had done pretty well, and his dancing skills...
Had a small gift with him.
There are numerous histories and anecdotes of the guys
giving kids sweets and chewing gum, things like that,
and luxuries, like these stockings.
So it's all part of that liaising with the locals
and getting them onside.
It's a nice, tantalising touch again,
that this soldier might have had maybe happier things happening
before they went to D-Day. Yeah.
And it is... It is like we're looking at a little
American colony in 1940s Britain. That's right.
We've got one small trench, but it's given us loads of finds
relating to a pivotal moment in history,
and a really famous group of young men.
And it is about Americana.
It's about what they're doing to fight,
what they're doing to try and stay human,
and it's just a small keyhole into those days of 1943, 1944.
And, as such, I think it's actually
quite a fascinating little collection of finds.
And I think what's interesting too is that you're digging with veterans
who are bringing their own experiences to bear
on the archaeology they're uncovering. Completely.
We had several British military guys with us who have faced combat.
So they know the sorts of experiences and traumas
that these men have faced.
And for them, that was a really important and powerful thing
because they could directly connect to the men of Easy Company,
albeit from a 21st century perspective.
And therefore, finding this sort of thing, for them,
was quite an emotional experience, I think.
We now return to the raising of the Fairey Barracuda bomber
from the murky waters just off the South coast.
All of the parts that were recovered
have now been transferred to the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset.
Our roving archaeologist Naoise McSweeney is there
to see how the team is attempting to reconstruct
this long forgotten bomber.
The discovery of an intact Barracuda bomber was a world first,
but sadly, the salvage team could not raise it in one piece
and had to bring it up in parts.
At the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Dave Morris is head of an ambitious
project, to rebuild a whole Barracuda using only original parts.
For the last 40 years, they've been collecting fragments
salvaged from various crash sites.
But these are very difficult to use in the rebuild
because they're so battered and mangled.
This could all be about to change with the treasure trove of parts
raised over several days from the Solent.
So, Dave, where are we so far with the project,
putting these giant multiple jigsaw pieces back together?
If you were to look at, basically, the plan form of a Barracuda
and think, "OK, let's build one of those",
I think you would stop on day one.
It would just be too mind-boggling.
Chief engineer William Gibbs has been working on the project
for five years.
He has to identify each specific part, then work out where they go.
It's a complex process.
So we might put something together and then it has to come apart again.
OK. Which is annoying, but it's just part of the process.
So far, he's rebuilt the cockpit.
So just help me visualise this a bit more.
You've got the pilot sitting here, you've got the wings over here.
This is the nose of the airplane
going behind us... The engine, yeah.
The engine would fit in front, there in front of the pilot,
so the engine and propeller there,
and then the remainder of the aircraft,
and the tail would be 30 or so feet down in that direction.
So she's a big airplane. It's... This is a huge plane.
The project is already providing a glimpse into the working lives
of the people who built these planes more than 70 years ago.
On here, we've got drawings - pencil drawings -
done in the factory.
We were the first people to see those drawings
since they were doodled on in the factory...
In the factory! Pretty poor factory behaviour. Well...
You shouldn't go scribbling and doodling on airplanes,
but this was wartime Great Britain,
and there was a little bit of camaraderie and morale going on.
Dave is now pinning his hopes on sections of the Barracuda raised
from the Solent, providing a mountain of usable parts
to help complete the build.
We started finding there were hundreds of really valuable
fittings, tube ends, constructional details,
components for the Barracuda that we could harvest.
You can't even begin to measure how useful this is for the project.
As well as large sections, such as the fuselage and the wing piece,
outside the hangar individual parts harvested from the Solent wreck
are undergoing chemical preservation.
So what have you got in these tanks?
What's the magic solution to get rid of all this gunk?
This is just ordinary fresh water.
Tap water mixed with citric acid.
The citric acid helps reduce the alkalinity of the sea water,
producing a more neutral PH solution.
This helps to stabilise the parts and reduce any further degradation.
Let's see what we've got. Yeah.
Oh!
It's a pipe, bit of connecting pipe.
Then we've got... Ooh! Yuck.
And the rubber's incredibly supple. Rubber? Yeah. Oh, yeah!
Oh, this one does not smell good.
There's a long way to go before all the components salvaged
from the Solent wreck will be ready for use
in the reconstruction of the plane.
But Dave has already made some astonishing discoveries.
These are a pair of batteries from the Solent wreck,
two 12 volt batteries, dated June '43.
We couldn't resist putting a tester on the batteries, and one of them
still has not a 0.86 residual volts of current in it!
It's absolutely remarkable, after 76 years on the seabed.
Underwater. Absolutely.
So there are some remarkable, quirky little finds
coming up from the Solent wreck.
I don't think I've ever seen a conservation challenge
quite like this one.
I'm used to working out on site with conservators to put together
ancient pottery, or other kinds of artefact,
and that's extremely difficult to do,
but this is something on a different scale.
The complexity of it is just ramped up hugely.
The rebuild project has many years of work ahead, but Dave is now
confident that, with the Solent wreck,
one day he will be able to wheel out a complete Barracuda,
the very last of its kind.
We now move from British planes to German military hardware.
One of the most destructive weapons developed by Nazi Germany
was the V-2 rocket, the forerunner to later ballistic missiles.
Each rocket bore a warhead containing 900kgs of explosives.
It's thought that around 3,000 rockets were launched at allied
targets during the Second World War.
We now join two brothers who are on the search for
a V-2 rocket, which fortunately never hit its target
and ended up in a farmer's field.
The hunt is focused near the village of Mardan in Kent.
Amateur military archaeologists Colin and Sean Welch
are on the trail of a V-2 that struck here at 2:15 am
on March 9th, 1945.
Aerial imagery taken after the war shows it came down in this field.
We've excavated several V-2 rockets and V-1 flying bombs,
so I'm afraid to say we've become experts.
The V-2 was the fore-runner to rockets that would eventually
put a man on the moon.
It was invented in Germany in the 1930s,
and later developed as an explosive missile by the Nazis.
The key to its long range was the innovation
of using liquid oxygen and alcohol to propel the rocket.
At the dig in Kent, the brothers hope that the remains of the rocket
could reveal clues to its trajectory and how it detonated.
To help locate the impact site, they use a portable magnetometer.
If there are large steel parts in the ground,
that will then cause a disturbance
to the magnetic orientation in the ground.
The magnetometer will detect that and give us a signal.
Using the survey results, they map out what they believe
is the extent of the impact crater, now buried underground.
And they start to dig.
Just a metre down, and they're already finding indirect evidence
of the detonation.
There was an orchard here and obviously the trees
were destroyed, and the damaged trees were pushed back into the hole
and buried with the infill,
and the one that you can see standing up just there,
that's got a broken off top,
which would have been caused by the blast of the device.
Strong magnetometer readings down in the hole
indicate they're still on target.
The heavy clay soil makes it difficult to locate small finds,
but it does have its benefits.
This is the tiniest little bit here,
and the aluminium looks almost fresh in the find.
And that's because of the absence of oxygen in the hole.
That's a good sign.
It means that any future finds are going to be
hopefully in a good state of preservation.
The V-2 had a maximum range of 320km,
and travelled at over 1000 metres per second.
It was travelling so fast that you could be stood on the spot
and not know that a V-2 was approaching.
You wouldn't see it coming. You wouldn't hear it coming.
Launched at Britain from sites in the Nazi-controlled Netherlands,
the V-2s caused an estimated 9,000 British civilian
and military deaths.
As the brothers dig deeper, recognisable pieces of the rocket
are now starting to emerge.
This is one of the support brackets
for either the oxygen tank, or the alcohol tank.
That's quite a nice find.
Let's just see what my brother concurs.
Right, well I know what it is.
That's one of the clamps for the fuel tanks.
I just said that I'd get you to confirm it with me.
OK. So you haven't...? I've told them. OK, well...
...that shows what a pair of nerds we are,
that we know every bit of a V-2 rocket!
Deeper still, and key parts of the supersonic engine
are coming to light.
Doesn't look like much at the moment, but this is a burner cup
from the combustion chamber of the V-2 rocket.
I can tell that it's a burner cup
because of that little bit of brass there, which was
an injector nozzle.
So alcohol was pushed through that
to squirt a feed into the combustion chamber.
There were 18 of these, and this is the first one out of our excavation.
3.1.
As the excavation continues, the brothers make an intriguing
discovery, linked to the precise moment of impact.
When we look down in there, we can see the clay itself
has changed colour - rather than the nice bright yellow, orange
of the surrounds, it's a horrible grey colour,
which I think is due to the carbonisation of the materials.
The V-2 was exploding
as it travelled into the ground at three times the speed of sound.
The detonation couldn't keep up with how fast it was travelling,
so it got in at least five feet into the ground
before it actually detonated.
This is a fascinating revelation.
The original intention was to try and create something like
a blast weapon on the surface.
What they didn't bargain for,
the supersonic speed took the rocket further into soft ground
than they might have expected.
This V-2 rocket had clearly gone off target when it hit the field,
and it only detonated once it had penetrated the ground.
The blast from its warhead would have been absorbed by the clay.
Six metres down,
the brothers finally reach the bottom of the impact crater.
The plan now is to clean and preserve the finds,
and scan them to create a digital archive.
I quite enjoy the physics of the excavation.
I particularly enjoy building a representation
of what it was that happened at the site.
We've found a lot about the geology and what it does to the finds.
I think we've done pretty well.
Colin and Shaun's excavation is part of an ongoing investigation
into the role this terrifying weapon had on Britain during the war.
Prior to D-Day in June 1944,
the allied forces staged a number of rehearsals of the landings,
all in top secret.
One of these was called Operation Tiger,
and it would end in absolute tragedy.
But, because of the secrecy, very few people knew about it.
Then in the 1970s, one man uncovered evidence of the event
and fought to bring the story to light.
Naoise McSweeney met his son.
The incident took place off the Devon coast,
near Slapton Sands.
Operation Tiger may have remained a forgotten moment in history
if it wasn't for the amateur archaeological sleuthing
of a local man named Ken Small.
I'm meeting his son Dean to find out more.
When did your father first begin to suspect
that there was something out there?
He was beachcombing and he came across things like
tunic buttons, empty shell cases,
identity bracelets... Oh, right!
Various parts - all these bits - knives and forks, spoons,
parts of them, and he thought,
"This is weird. Why would this be on a beach?"
A local fisherman added to the mystery.
He told Ken about a spot just out from the beach
where their nets would snag on something large underwater.
In the summer of 1974,
Ken persuaded a diver friend to go down and take a look.
My dad took him out in a boat. He dived down.
He came up and he said to my dad, "It's a tank."
My dad said, "What, an oil tank? A water tank?"
He said, "No, it's like an Army tank."
My dad just thought, "This is crazy. How can this be?"
Ken started to search local records and military archives for answers.
It was then that he stumbled across a wartime exercise
codenamed Operation Tiger.
Operation Tiger was carried out in April 1944.
It was one of a number of practice exercises
involving troops from Britain, the US and Canada
that all took place in preparation for the Normandy landings.
30,000 US troops were sent to Slapton Sands
to rehearse their part in D-Day.
All of this stuff was completely covered up,
so there was very little evidence as to what went on,
the actual exercises themselves.
Determined to find out more about the tank,
in May 1984, Ken took amateur maritime archaeology to a new level.
With the help of friends and local divers,
he raised the tank off the sea floor.
They got a big bulldozer,
they strapped a cable to it and they started to pull it
along the concrete slipway.
And amazingly, the tracks started to turn.
It's incredible. Yeah.
And then all the crustaceans, and stuff that had grown on the tank
over years of being under the water all started to break away
and crumble, and you could actually see grease still on the thing.
It's just amazing.
The tank was immediately jet cleaned and sprayed with rust preventer
to protect it from decay.
So, this is it!
This is the tank. It's enormous!
It's amazing to think about this under the water.
And of course they were snagging their nets on it! Yeah.
Dean, this is crazy for me.
I'm used to, when I dig up, you know,
iron objects from the Iron Age,
they come up as really crusty, corroded...
It's hard to tell what they are, but this, it's in fabulous condition.
Ken had recovered an American amphibious Sherman DD tank.
So what happens is, all around the tank,
there's this flotation collar,
and it's raised with compressed air upwards,
and it forms a complete skirt around the tank.
Fantastic, so it's a fully amphibious tank.
Tank, boat, tank.
While the DD tank was ahead of its time,
it could be quite unreliable.
Several of them, including the one Ken raised off the sea floor,
were known to have sunk during the D-Day rehearsals
due to mechanical faults.
But, as Ken investigated further, he discovered that Operation Tiger
wasn't just blighted by technical problems.
Something far more deadly had occurred.
By early 1944, the Germans knew allied forces
were planning to invade Nazi-controlled France.
They just weren't sure where or when.
By listening in to the allied radio chatter,
they got wind of Operation Tiger.
On April 28th 1944, nine German E-boats were sent out on patrol
and headed for the coast of Devon.
Armed with torpedoes, these were highly manoeuvrable,
deadly attack craft.
That night, allied ships taking part in Operation Tiger
came under attack.
Two US tank landing ships were sunk and three more badly damaged.
More than 700 US servicemen drowned, or died of hypothermia
as they waited to be rescued.
In 2012, two wartime shipwrecks known to lie off the Devon coast
were formally identified as the two tank landing ships, or LSTs,
that were sunk during Operation Tiger.
As part of a project to grant the wrecks special status,
maritime archaeologist Graham Scott is heading out to survey them.
What's really important about these wrecks
is that they're associated with D-Day,
and they're associated with practices for D-Day.
Historic England have asked us to investigate these wrecks for them
and to advise them what's left of them,
and how important they are.
Now anchored over the wrecks, they prepare to send down a remotely
operated vehicle, or ROV.
Equipped with sonar and specialist low light cameras,
the team can stream a live feed from 50 metres down
direct to the control room.
OK, mate. That's us. We've got a visual.
We'll just work out what we're doing.
Let's orientate ourselves. Let's move along to the west.
Today, Graham is concentrating on one of the ships.
He wants to assess what state it's in,
what equipment it was carrying,
and any potentially live munitions still on board.
We are wondering whether we have found a gun here.
We are rather hoping that this is evidence of the ship's armaments.
We could be wrong.
Start tethering easy. Tethering easy.
One thing we have to be careful with on a wreck like this
is the presence of ammunition.
We don't touch any of that.
We back the ROV away to a safe distance.
We've no real idea whether these things are still viable.
We've got to treat them as though they could still potentially explode
if we blunder into them.
Moving along the boat, the ROV camera captures a lifeboat crane...
...a cargo net...
...and the engine.
The hull is upside down.
These were very shallow drafted vessels,
and they tended to capsize when they sank.
We now know that on the night of the attack, chaos ensued.
The men on board the landing ships
thought that the firing initially was part of the exercise.
And it was only when one of the ships was torpedoed
and they saw this massive explosion that they realised
they were actually under attack.
And then all hell breaks loose.
Everybody starts firing everywhere.
Very confusing.
Following the deadly Nazi attack,
the Operation Tiger disaster was quickly covered up.
It remained largely unknown for decades,
until Ken Small found, and raised, his tank.
While the tank was not sunk in the enemy attack,
it now stands as a permanent memorial to all the US servicemen
who lost their lives during the D-Day rehearsal.
Ken's son Dean still has his father's collection of artefacts.
These didn't come out of the tank? Yeah, they did.
Yeah, they... Seriously? Yeah, they did.
This one here is a range finder.
And this, I believe, is used to work out
the elevation for the main gun.
The main gun in the turret of the tank. Yes.
Line of fire. Line of fire, yeah.
In recognition of Ken's determination to bring the story
of Operation Tiger to light, and remember the American soldiers
who lost their lives, he received
a letter of gratitude from the President.
"Dear Mr Small..." Yeah!
"..On behalf of all Americans,
"thank you for your kind and generous efforts.
"Sincerely, Ronald Reagan". Yeah, yeah!
I think it's a really important story
that deserves to be much more widely told.
I mean, it's a big kind of part of the preparations for D-Day,
which we just haven't heard about.
It took someone like Ken to get that story out there,
and to give those people who died, and their families,
and the survivors, a voice and something to kind of remember it by.
During the war, Northern Ireland had 28 airfields,
home to both RAF and US Army Air Force crews.
Whether through combat damage, mechanical failure or pilot error,
not every plane returned home.
For our final dig, a team of archaeologists has been joined
by an army of volunteer schoolchildren
from both sides of the Irish border,
and they are excavating the site of a crashed American fighter plane.
On December 17th, 1942, 22-year-old American pilot,
Second Lieutenant Milo Randall
was returning to the Royal Naval Air Station at Eglinton
when he went off course.
As part of an ongoing project to highlight the role played
by Northern Ireland during the war,
aviation historian Johnny McNee
has been trying to find Randall's plane.
Eyewitnesses said a plane crashed in this direction.
What we're trying to work out from the archaeology,
is that correct?
And the orientation of the aircraft - did it go in vertically?
Did it bounce across the field and then sadly bury itself in a corner?
Randall parachuted safely down into Northern Ireland
and returned to base, but his plane hit the ground
somewhere near the town of Castleblayney in County Monaghan,
just south of the border in Ireland.
While parts of the plane were recovered at the time of the crash,
it hit the ground so hard that much of it still lies buried.
We're fairly sure these are engine parts - lots of cables,
clamps, ducts, bits of very contorted and smashed up metalwork,
with a distinct aroma of fuel off it.
It looks to be part of the outside, we're thinking,
because it has that greenish paint on it.
I'm 100% sure.
We have a long, hinged object here.
Could be a door. Could be...
It's very light material.
Records reveal that Lieutenant Randall was flying
a US fighter plane known as a Lockheed P-38 Lightning.
The P-38 was the first fighter aircraft to fly faster than 400mph.
With its four nose-mounted machine guns,
and 20mm cannon, it was feared by allied enemies.
The Japanese called it "two planes, one pilot"
because of its unusual design.
The Germans knew it as "the fork-tailed devil".
Back at the dig, Johnny is now finding clues that can be
traced back to where the plane was manufactured.
We're finding lots of these little fuel clamps.
These clamps hold the insulation and rubber tubing
around various parts.
You can see the manufacturer, a patent number
so it's Witex Manufacturing Company, Chicago, USA.
And look at that. Still threaded, still working.
We know that Witex made fuel clamps for the P-38,
so the team are definitely digging in the right place.
Johnny is now recognising other specific parts of the plane.
That's a serious bit of sheet steel.
That must be five, six, seven mils thick
You know, so it's not like aluminium. It's there for a purpose,
and that purpose would be to stop bullets hitting the pilot
or the engine components.
Confident they have found Rundall's P-38 Lightning,
the layout and condition of the wreckage
is also providing clues as to how it crashed.
The debris that we're getting here suggests that the aircraft
did enter the ground, but almost, I would say, at about
a 70, 80 degree angle into the ground.
You've got to imagine this iconic design, twin engines,
without a pilot,
roaring from across the sky,
running low on fuel, from the West.
It's come in almost vertical into a stony field,
and this iconic design has been turned in a matter of seconds
into this crumpled pile of metal that you can see.
For the schoolchildren volunteers,
the dig is giving them a tangible connection to the brave young pilots
that were based near here almost 80 years ago.
So it is bringing history to life.
So it's like relating the artefacts to what we're learning,
and we can see really what happened,
and how it would have looked from an outside perspective.
I've asked Johnny to bring in some of the finds to see what else
we can learn about this plane and its pilot.
So, what have we got here?
Where do these parts belong on the Lightning?
You've got little inlet exhaust valves from the engine,
broken bits of the cockpit - that locks the cockpit latches down
when you shut it and go flying.
You can see the little serrated buttons here,
just for locking your cockpit closed. Yeah.
We've some of the Perspex,
still with the distinct wartime olive drab paint on it. Yeah!
And some of the very fearsome nose armament
was also recovered.
We have two 50-calibre bullets.
There are four 50-calibre Browning machine guns on the front,
plus a 20mm cannon.
And then there's a plate here. Yes.
That was one of the star finds by the pupils.
I mean, they really were forensically going through the soil.
And one of them said, "Oh, I've got a little plate with writing on it."
And you can see there all the drawing information -
the contract, the date, it tells you the oil capacity.
And then right at the bottom, "Lockheed Aviation Corps".
So that 100% proves that we were dealing with the crash
of a Lockheed P-38.
That was a good find. What on earth are those?
They came out, if you can imagine, in our profile with engine wreckage,
cockpit wreckage and engine wreckage,
these were in the cockpit.
There was a lot of head scratching amongst the team.
People were suggesting they were like butter paddles,
or they were something agricultural. Yeah.
And we put some articles into the P-38 Association magazine
in America and said, "Does anybody know what these are,
"before we make some grand announcement and look stupid?!"
And a guy came back and said the plane was going to fly
in the Mediterranean theatre of operations.
Those go into the air intakes to stop that sandy wind
from blowing in and clogging up your engines.
You can see traces of yellow paint on the handle.
They would flag up as you're doing your walk around in the morning -
"Right, I'd better take these out."
You don't want to fly with them still in, do you?
No. That would be a bad thing.
And what happened to the pilot himself? Yes, so...
...Second Lieutenant Milo Randall from Iowa,
he then goes to Tunisia, and less than a month later,
he was shot down and he ends up being captured,
and then taken to Stalag Luft III,
and he was there for the rest of the war, and he was there
during the time when the great escape was taking place.
Is he still with us? No. Sadly, he passed away in 2006.
But, as his daughter tells us, he was a great patriot,
loved the P-38, and he did a lot of flying after the war as well.
But a lot of time for the P-38.
When I said, "What do you think he would think of what we
"and the pupils are doing here?"
They said, that generation, he would have laughed and said,
"What are you doing, you know, looking after my old P-38? What's all the fuss about?" Yeah.
He was just that generation, that type of a character.
Although the Second World War happened just 80 years ago
and we have plenty of historical records of the time,
archaeology provides us with different insights
and personal connections with this important episode
in our country's history.
That's all from us for this year.
I hope you'll join us next time
when we continue Digging For Britain.