JU-88: Stealing Jerry's Petrol

A couple of pictures from Dr. Alfred Price's book, Battle of Britain.

A Ju-88 from KG-54 crashed while attacking Tangmere Airfield. One of the RAF personnel has pulled his private car next to the bomber and is refueling from it. This was illegal but did not occur often enough for the authorities to be too concerned about it.

A rather well off RAF chap, owning a Bentley.

I have heard of even kids taking the machine guns and ammo from crashed aircraft in the BoB but I doubt there were very many that got down intact with substantial quantities of gasoline still in the tanks. But there probably was enough in that 88 to fill up that car several times. I hope he had some Jerry cans for Jerry's fuel.

A Polish friend of mine who spent most of WWII in a German POW camp said that occasionally Allied fighters would fly over and drop their paper drop tanks into the camp. There sometimes was enough fuel left in them to fill a cigarette lighter. I suppose it was simply a way for the pilots's to say "Hi." But of course when they saw something fall from an aircraft everyone ran the other way.

Not just machine guns and petrol but the crew could be robbed too. A Junkers Ju 88 was shot down over Exeter during the war the crew bailing out at night. The pilot came down on his parachute and landed high up in a tree. He was dead. After hanging there all night a local boy having heard the stricken bomber crash during the night spotted him. He observed that the pilot was wearing a rather nice flying jacket. With no one about the boy shinned up the tree and removed the jacket from the pilot's corpse. The boy was twelve years old.
Alas the story did not have a happy ending for the lad. His friends jealous of his new jacket shopped him to the police who searched his home, found It, confiscated it and severely reprimanded the lad. You have to remember that these boys were from poor families and in wartime there were shortages of the most basic necessities including food.