Lieutenant Joseph Phillips’ lonely memorial
One day, driving down a Norfolk byway, I spotted this lonely, neglected wooden cross, silhouetted against a country skyline. I asked a neighbour. He said it was erected to mark the place where a cornered German bomber pilot, shot-down during World War Two, had been beaten to death by angry locals before he could be rescued by the authorities. Intrigued, as this was the first I’d heard of any Luftwaffe pilot suffering such a fate in the UK, I did a little research. The truth wasn’t hard to find. This was no guilty memorial to a hapless Nazi but a cross to mark the site where a Canadian pilot had crashed in 1917, after steering his stricken plane clear of the nearby town of Harleston. By his efforts he saved lives that day. By his efforts, he lost own. Fatally wounded, he a few hours later. And so it comes down to this: within the space of three generations, a hero’s honest death reduced to a forgotten, crumbling cross and a muddied, muddled memory.