The breakthrough came in a series of events stretching across the globe after Cologne\u2011based aviation historian Manfred Weichert identified a Wellington bomber lost in the forest.<\/p>\n
Sergeant Thomas Otto Metcalfe, born on July 18, 1923, in Norsewood, near Dannevirke, was the pilot. <\/p>\n
The watch is believed to be an 18th\u2011birthday gift to Metcalfe, the eldest of eight children, from his parents – an engraving reads \u201cTom From Dad & Mum 18.7.41\u201d. <\/p>\n
The engraving on the wristwatch gave a clue as who the owner might be. <\/p>\n
Like thousands of young New Zealanders, Metcalfe volunteered early and joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1941.<\/p>\n
By 1942, he was serving as a pilot with No. 75 (New Zealand) Squadron RAF, flying Vickers Wellington bombers from bases in eastern England.<\/p>\n
Metcalfe\u2019s crew included five men, four of them New Zealanders, with an average age of just 23. They had flown only a handful of operations together<\/p>\n
On the night of September 10, 1942, Bomber Command launched a major raid on D\u00fcsseldorf, sending 480 aircraft across the North Sea. <\/p>\n
Anti\u2011aircraft fire (flak) and night fighters took a heavy toll. Thirty\u2011three aircraft and crews did not return that night.<\/p>\n
One of those aircraft was Metcalfe\u2019s, Wellington BJ974.<\/p>\n
Hit by flak on the way home, the bomber crashed into woodland at Refrath, east of Cologne just before 1am on September 11. <\/p>\n
All five crew members were killed instantly, and were buried together first in Cologne, and later reinterred at the Rheinberg War Cemetery.<\/p>\n
Back in New Zealand, an amateur historian from Milton, Paul Kelcher, had found himself researching his great uncle Walter Foch Kelcher, of Maheno in North Otago, who was the front gunner in Metcalfe\u2019s crew.<\/p>\n
A German website Kelcher translated, to learn more about the area where the bomber crashed, led him to the watch. <\/p>\n
\u201cAt the bottom of it, there was an addendum that said that a pilot\u2019s watch had been found at the crash site and handed to researchers.\u201d <\/p>\n
Suddenly, the fragments aligned, and Kelcher connected with Weichert and Benkel. <\/p>\n
\u201cBetween the three of us, we all knew about it, but no one knew to contact each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a sense of disbelief … this watch exists, and it\u2019s not in a small museum somewhere, someone is actually looking after it and caring for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kelcher then enlisted the help of the New Zealand Remembrance Army and Norsewood local Kath Mulinder, and has now connected with Greg Bennett, Metcalfe\u2019s nephew, his niece Louise Taylor and, incredibly, Metcalfe\u2019s 97-year-old sister Sandra Taylor in Kaitaia. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t know how to react…they were all just really impressed that something had been found,\u201d Kelcher said.<\/p>\n
Kelcher said he hoped to be there in person when the family was reunited with the watch fragments. <\/p>\n
Michaela Gower joined Hawke\u2019s Bay Today in 2023 and is based out of the Hastings newsroom. She covers Dannevirke and Hawke\u2019s Bay news and loves sharing stories about farming and rural communities. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The breakthrough came in a series of events stretching across the globe after Cologne\u2011based aviation historian Manfred Weichert…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[33914,34555,31047,13912,3595,3549,9060,2837,13845,11784,3247,1874,31091,49753,538,78,3375,194,9933,5836,130,111,43,139,161039,69,19723,131,10419,16670,377,175199,41297],"class_list":["post-324798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-19yearold","tag-belonging","tag-beneath","tag-broken","tag-by","tag-crash","tag-decades","tag-during","tag-eight","tag-fatal","tag-forest","tag-found","tag-fragments","tag-german","tag-hidden","tag-in","tag-killed","tag-kiwi","tag-later","tag-lost","tag-more","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-norsewood","tag-nz","tag-pilot","tag-than","tag-trees","tag-watch","tag-world","tag-wristwatch","tag-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}