Initially five men survived the crash but one of them died in an ambulance on his way to hospital in Dundalk and two more died in the Louth Infirmary on the following day, so that the crash took a toll of 17 lives of British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and U.S.A. pilots. The plane had left an Advanced Landing Ground in Egypt at 4.55 p.m. on the previous evening, en route to the South of England. Their wireless broke down and they went off course. Sometime before the crash they saw lights below them and thought it might be Dublin.
Censorship, which was an international requirement of neutrality, was very strict at the time and no reports of this crash appeared in the local media or on radio. It was almost 40 years later that Lt. Col. N. C. Harrington, who was a Commandant in charge of military intelligence at Eastern Command Headquarters at Portabello Barracks, Dublin, at the time, disclosed details of the incident when writing to An Cosantoir, the Irish Army magazine. Col. Harrington stated that the crash was reported to the authorities by a man named McKevitt who lived at the foot of Slievenaglogh. He said that this man told him he worked in a beet factory in Dundalk but this must have been incorrect as I do not think there was a beet factory in Dundalk at the time and he probably meant the Alcohol Factory at Riverstown. McKevitt told him that he was standing at the door of his home at about 7.45 a.m. when he saw a large plane flying northwards. There was heavy mist at the time and a few minutes after the plane went out of his view, he heard a crash, followed by two dull explosions.
At about 12.30 p.m. Supt Thomas McDonough from Dundalk informed him that Det. Sergt. James McCabe had located the plane about two miles away in a bog. The Supt. told him that there appeared to be about 15 dead. He reached the scene at about 1.30 p.m. and wrote 'it would be impossible to describe that scene. The whole area was strewn with bodies, baggage and debris.' He then goes on to described the rescue of the survivors and the removal of the bodies. He was assisted by a party from Dundalk Military Barracks who were made up of the 3rd Cyclist battalion, under the command of Lieuts. Walshe and Joseph Sweeney.
Col. Harrington, in his recollections, says 'Pilfering was always a hazard in the circumstances of a crash. For myself, I was always rigid about such matters. I would allow nothing to be removed unless to official accountancy.'
In spite of this, it is my own memory of the times is that many people from Dundalk went out to the scene of the crash in the days and weeks that followed-- hunting for souvenirs. The wreckage of the plane was scattered over a wide area and I recall that at about that time we got a load of turf from the mountain delivered to our home in Dundalk. Fuel was very scarce at the point in the war and we burned anything we could get to keep us warm in cold weather. Later, when the bottom of the turf pile was reached, my brother found several aeroplane parts, including some heavy ammunition cases, buried in the mould.
Another memory I have of this crash at Slievenaglogh was that my father, who was attached to the Detective branch of an Garda Siochana, had interviewed one of the surviving airmen at the Louth Hospital. He told us that this man has said that they 'flew into a ten-tenths cloud', meaning they had no visibility, which was an expression we had never hard before in these parts. I thought my father told us that this man was an American but, looking at the list of survivors named by Col Harrington, I think he must have been a New Zealander.