08/10/2026
RAF ground crews said the Halifaxes looked like pregnant mayflies.
They had a reason. In April 1942, at RAF Kinloss in Scotland, each Halifax of No. 35 Squadron was loaded with four mines 31 inches across. They did not quite fit the bomb bay, so the doors would not fully close. The target was the German battleship Tirpitz, moored in a fjord near Trondheim, and 31 Halifaxes were going.
One of them came back 31 years later with her duralumin frame in good condition and little rust, because she had lain in a freshwater lake. This is how she got there.
She was W1048, S for Sugar. English Electric had built her at Samlesbury, near Preston, one of 6,178 Halifaxes. Handley Page designed the bomber in big sections, so that widely spread factories could each build a part. W1048 had just 13 hours in her logbook.
Her pilot was Pilot Officer Don MacIntyre, a 24 year old Canadian. With him were the navigator, Pilot Officer Ian Hewitt, Sergeant Dave Perry, Sergeant Pierre Blanchet, another Canadian, the flight engineer, Sergeant Vic Stevens, and in the tail turret Sergeant Ron Wilson, who drove a London cab in later life.
They reached the target at half past midnight, and a smoke screen quickly hid the Tirpitz. They dived to 200 feet and dropped their mines. But the flak was intense from the ship and the shore, and it hit them at once. The starboard outer engine caught fire, and so did the fuel tanks in that wing.
She could not reach home. She could not reach neutral Sweden either. Therefore MacIntyre looked for somewhere flat, and found Lake Hoklingen, frozen over, 25 miles east of Trondheim. He put her down on the ice with the wheels up, and she slithered to a stop.
All six got out.
Stevens had broken his ankle. The others helped him over 150 yards of ice to the shore, and they set off on foot for Sweden. Slowed by his ankle, Stevens asked a farm to turn him in to the police, so that his companions could go on without him. He became a prisoner of war. The rest, helped by Norwegians, reached Sweden after a three-day hike. A farmer named Jens Jenssen fed three of them, gave them a bed, and led them part of the way.
About twelve hours after the landing, W1048 sank through the ice into 92 feet of water.
Local divers found her in 1971. In June 1973 a team of RAF and civilian divers flew out, joined by Norwegian divers from Trondheim. They fixed more than 50 borrowed oil drums to her wing and tail spars and filled them with compressed air. On the first lift she sank again. On 30 June, at ten past two in the afternoon, she broke the surface.
Inside were 8,000 rounds of am******on, survival rations, first aid kits, and the navigator's gloves, folded in his table drawer.
The engines could still be turned by hand. An RAF maintenance team took her apart and shipped her to Ipswich, and in 1983 she went on display at Hendon. Ian Hewitt and the crew of S for Sugar were presented to the Queen Mother at the opening.
She is there now, in Hangar 5 of the RAF Museum in London. A full restoration was never attempted. She is shown unrestored, as a tribute to the bomber crews.
