On Sunday 10 May I headed out of Bucharest to the tranquil wetlands of the Neajlov Delta south of the city. With representatives of the local community, an Embassy group took a boat through channels framed by rushes and yellow irises to a large billboard, emerging out of the water and backed by reeds. The billboard tells a remarkable tale.
Wellington bombers of 150 Squadron, based at Regina in Italy, were flying sorties into Romania in 1944. Their targets included the important oil fields around Ploiesti. The German air defences south of Bucharest included a unit at the improbably bucolic-sounding “Nut Fountain”. On the night of 6 May 1944 this unit shot down a Wellington being piloted by Warrant Officer Stanley Clarke. According to the testimony of local people the pilot appeared deliberately to land his stricken plane in the wetlands, steering it away from the village of Comana.
All five British airmen on board were killed. But the local people of Comana ensured that their bodies were treated with respect, taking them from the wreckage to the mausoleum of Romanian First World War heroes in the grounds of Comana Monastery, which, some say, also marks the final resting place of Vlad the Impaler. They were buried in the village cemetery before being transferred to the Bucharest war cemetery at Tâncăbeşti, where graves tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission remind us of the great sacrifice made by Stanley Clarke, Leonard Cox, Clifford Walker, Robert Scott and George Vaughan.
The people of Comana mark the anniversary of these events in May every year, in a moving ceremony organised by Gelu Palamaru, a businessman and owner of the Casa Comana resort complex, whose late mother Ileana was one of the witnesses of the events of 1944. We laid candles at the site of the crash, necessitating that boat trip across the waters of the inland delta. And a service of remembrance was held at Comana Monastery, where my Defence Attaché and I laid a wreath at the place where the five airmen had been taken.
The respect shown by the people of Comana to the British airmen, at a point of the conflict when Romania and the United Kingdom were at war, was a moving gesture. The continued commemoration of this event is a sign of the strength of the friendship between our two countries.