Excerpt from forthcoming book by Joe Molyson
1Lt John Drummond oral history, January 22, 2003

The ALGs were dangerous, cramped places limited by lack of available real estate and surfacing materials. Based at one of these was the 405th Fighter Group, the unit of then 1Lt John “Ace” Drummond. Drummond is now President Pro Tempore Emeritus of the South Carolina Senate but his memories of Christchurch are vivid after almost sixty years. Christchurch was sandwiched into the local terrain just west of Southampton on England’s Channel coast. The airfield was tiny and surfaced with PSP (pierced steel planking). The men lived in tiny neighboring cottages taken over for the war and in tents. The runway was very short for a loaded Thunderbolt. On June 29, 1944 the hazards of a temporary airfield claimed 13 lives and caused 14 other casualties in what came to be known as the “Foxwood Avenue Disaster”:

It was a very small, short runway. You know we had some of the rookies come in there. To get off that strip with bombs you had to go down to the end and lock your brakes, kick in the water (injection) in and turn it loose! This one guy came in and I had just landed from a mission and this young boy tried to get off and he didn’t make it. He crashed near a house down at the end of the runway. Actually it didn’t kill him. That old P-47 was pretty tough. So they brought him back and they put him back in another plane for the next mission!

So I’m standing there with my wing man ol’ Williams (Lt Arthur F. Williams Jr.). He had just gotten some mail. The little girl he was engaged to had finished high school and he had sent her a ring. The letter had a picture of her showing him that ring. All of a sudden BOOM! And we looked out at the end of the runway and there was a big old smoke cloud where a bomb had gone off. So we ran across to it. The kid (the one who had just crashed a few minutes before) had crashed again, this time into a house that had a lot of children in it. We knew the family made the children go in the basement when we were taking off.

There was a big group of firemen and engineers clearing that wreck from that morning and he had crashed the same way in the same place. Except this time the plane had gone up in fire. They said it had blown him on top of the roof. The house was on fire. So we ran across and I went in that house and the woman was coming up out of the basement and my God  -- her skin was hanging off her arms. I starting getting her out and just as we went out – and my wingman ol’Williams was taking one of the little kids out – and as went we by they were hosing the wall. They knocked loose one of those bombs that they though had already exploded.

It was white hot and I remember seeing it and I hollered something but – no one’s ever been able to explain this to me –it was total slow motion. I know I was picked up – and rolling around in the air – and I saw Williams come up off the ground – and I saw a big hole in him –I saw blood –and I don’t know how far I was thrown and I hit on my right shoulder. And I thought, “What is my mother going to think?” I guess I thought I was dead. I was rolling and everything. A piece of shrapnel had gone through here (in front of the left ear) and just barely cut me and through my ear and out the back. This is how lucky I’ve been.

And Williams was … I didn’t know what had happened to him but I walked on up to end of the runway and there were people coming from everywhere. The captain in charge of the crash crew was sitting on the curb and he had blood all over him. Of course I had blood all over me. And here comes a little car and I helped this guy get inside. He was holding his neck; the shrapnel had gone through the back of his neck. We were sitting in the back seat. I’ll never forget this, he looked down and blood was flowing from the back of his boot. I grabbed his leg and tried to put pressure, as I pulled his leg up his foot was raised and the blood that had coagulated on the floor came loose. He had part of his heel shot off too. He was happy as a lark when he saw that, it could have been worse.

They got us to the hospital at Bournemouth. I wasn’t hurt much and they put me aside. 27 people were hurt or killed and they were bringing them in. Here was Williams lying on an old stretcher. He was lying there and all his blood was running down into a bucket at the end of the stretcher.