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The small aircraft was on fire as it flew low over two children playing in the yard of their family’s farm near Kilmore, north of Melbourne.
In seconds, the plane clipped trees and a shearing shed in front of them, then smashed into a stockyard, killing two of the three men on board.
Don Comans and sister June Ryan at the farm their family owned where they witnessed a fatal plane crash in 1943.Credit: Justin McManus
It was January 15, 1943. Don Comans was seven years old and his sister, June Ryan, was four, but they’ve never forgotten that day.
“I can remember it like it was yesterday,” said Comans, now 87.
He said the plane hit the ground with a loud “bang” and he and his sister fell to the ground.
Rushing behind the shed, Comans saw some horrific sights in the burning wreckage, but said he was too young for it to sink in.
Siblings Don and June as children can be seen in this photo of the plane wreckage.Credit: Ann Comans
The siblings will join relatives of two of the crew members at a memorial service next Saturday to mark the 80th year since the crash, at the Kilmore Cenotaph, starting at 10am.
Speaking at his Kilmore home, Comans remembered that soon after the crash, his mother, Ann, brought the survivor, co-pilot James Harper, back to the farmhouse. Harper had parachuted into a nearby field.
Comans said Harper, who had ejected before impact, looked dazed. He had a bloody face and was carrying his parachute.
“He was hanging on to Mum’s skirt like a little child,” he said. “He didn’t know where he was.”
The Comans family: Tom, Ann and their children June, Ian and Don around 1943.
Decades later, Ryan’s daughter – librarian and family historian Liz Pidgeon – found photos in a scrapbook that her grandmother Ann took of the wreckage.
Pidgeon often reflects on how she “wouldn’t be here” had her mother died that day.
“It brings home how life can turn on a dime,” she said.
Two years ago, Ian Dudgeon – the son of Lionel Dudgeon, one of the men who died in the crash – read an article about it on Pidgeon family’s website. He approached the RSL and asked Pidgeon to help organise the memorial service.
A Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation CA-4 Woomera bomber at Fishermans Bend circa 1941.Credit: State Library of South Australia
Ian, who will travel from Canberra to attend, hopes it will bring closure.
Ian was six months old and his sister, Suzanne, was two when the accident happened. Their mother, Phyllis, was not eligible for war service assistance because her husband was a civilian.
A newspaper report on the fatal crash in January 1943.Credit: Kilmore Free Press
Lionel Dudgeon was 32 and an aeronautical draftsman with the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (CAC) when on the flight as an observer. The co-pilot who died was James Carter, an English immigrant also working for CAC.
The survivor, Harper, then 26, was a test pilot with the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF).
At the memorial service, wreaths will be laid and a bugler will play the Last Post.
Attendees will include Wing Commander Rob Gill, the commanding officer at RAAF Base Point Cook, and representatives of the Air Force Association and the Kilmore Wallan RSL. There will be a flypast of vintage aircraft.
Gill said the event would “commemorate the service and sacrifice of the three men on board the aircraft”. He said that although the men weren’t on war service, it was fitting the memorial was held.
According to the RAAF, the crashed aircraft was a Woomera prototype being developed by CAC after the war cabinet gave approval in June 1940 for development of a bomber-torpedo strike aircraft.
Ian Dudgeon said his father died contributing to the development of air power capability for the RAAF.
“So he was not in uniform, but he was certainly contributing towards the war effort. So in the broad sense, it was war service.”
Ryan said a memorial was appropriate. “I think those men should be recognised after all these years,” she said.
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