Jonny Mc Nee and his six year old daughter had been travelling through Gleneely when she asked him to stop at a filling station for chocolate buttons. Little did Jonny know when he pulled into the station that the encounters about to ensue in the shop would lead to the biggest discovery of his career.
Jonny, an aviation historian who now lives in Claudy, has been searching for a rumoured crashed spitfire for several years, leading the BBC dig at the City of Derry airport, which had once been an RAF base at Eglinton. Claims that the plane was sabotaged by nationalists from Donegal in 1941 had been dismissed.
The search was given up on when nothing had been found, however Jonny never gave up hope of finding it. He had heard claims that it had come down somewhere on the Inishowen penninsula, but no solid evidence ever came to light.
Jonny with his little history protégé Grace
Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, he said; “Grace said that chocolate buttons might help us find the plane and I stopped at a filling station to buy her a packet”. On a whim, Jonny decided to ask the lady behind the counter if she had ever heard of a spitfire which may have crashed on the penninsula during World War Two.
She told him to ask a man called Kieran Faulkner. At the mention of his name he walked into the shop and instead directed Jonny to Martin Kearney. The woman behind the till let out a scream as Martin had just pulled up on the forecourt to fill up his car!
Martin’s father had been at the site of the crash and took Jonny and Grace up to it.
“Even more bizarrely, the next customer was the son of the landlowner into whose field the Spitfire’s pilot had parachuted.”
After carrying out 3D scans of the bog in which Martin directed them to, they found the remnants of the plane 30 foot below the peat.
They found the pilot’s leather helmet along with papers which had been preserved by the bog.
In his book, ‘The Story of the Donegal Spitfire’, Jonny said; “An army officer told me they looked as if they’d been buried only a week before”. In fact, everything was so well preserved by the peat that one of the machine guns was still capable of firing!
Further research revealed much more than just remnants of a fallen plane – the pilot, Roland ‘Bud’ Wolfe had been arrested in Donegal when he parachuted down to safety and was detained in a camp in Kildare to protect Ireland’s neutrality.
Despite writing to Eamon de Valera, he wasn’t allowed to be released. He escaped and fled to Northern Ireland, only to be caught and brought back down to the camp.
Roland ‘Bud’ Wolfe
When Wolfe was eventually released, he continued his career with the American army. He passed in 1994 so never got to see the day when his spitfire was recovered.
Exactly 70 years after he crashed, his family were brought to Ireland to view the spitfire which had crashed so many decades before.
The spitfire will be on display at the Air Waves festival at Portrush this weekend.
Grace, who is now 12, will be attending, too.
Jonny framed the empty packet of buttons which lead him to this spectacular discovery.
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