The funeral procession for downed Luftwaffe pilot Friedrish Shulz, whose body was found at the mouth of Kenmare River, makes its way across Kenmare Suspension Bridge. Shulz was buried with full military honours near Kenmare though his remains were later repatriated to Germany

For years people used to talk about German and Allied airmen landing in Ireland during the second world war, or about the bodies being washed up around the coast. The wartime censorship was such that little was reported about these incidents at the time. The identity of the bodies was rarely published, or what they were doing when they were killed.

Justin Horgan has done a magnificent job in getting behind the stories of the German airmen. In many cases the Germans deliberately headed for Ireland rather than allow themselves to be taken prisoners-of-war by the British. They were interned at a special camp built at the Curragh. It was one of the strangest concentration camps of the war.

They were housed in a compound beside a similar compound with British airmen. Each set of internees were allowed out on parole every day to go anywhere within the triangular area bordered by the towns of Nass, Newbridge and Kilcullen. Then, once a week, they were allowed to visit Dublin.

The first six German internees arrived in Kerry on August 20, 1940. They crashed on the slopes of Mount Brandon at Bulnaleacan, near Clahane.

Kurt Mollenhaur, the commander of the German bomber, told me when I was researching Guests of the State, a book about the internment camp, that they were flying in fog, or low-lying cloud, and thought they were well off the west coast of Ireland when suddenly the clouds broke and they could see the Maherees off their port wing. He immediately ordered the pilot to head west away from the Irish coast, not realising they were actually over Brandon Bay and turning towards Mount Brandon, shrouded in cloud.

At the last moment they saw the mountain in front of them. The pilot pulled up the nose the aircraft instinctively, and they crashed running almost parallel up the slope. It was nearly miraculous that all six members of the crew survived.

Mollenhaur remained the senior Luftwaffe officer among the internees throughout the war, or the Emergency, as it was called in this country. Both he and the youngest member of his crew, Kurt Kyck, met their respective wives while they were interned. Kyck later settled in Ireland and his son Wolfgang became a senior pilot with Aer Lingus.

This book is clearly a labour of love that the author has published himself. There are magnificent photographs which give real life to the story.

A commercial publisher would probably insist on dropping many of the reports as superfluous. There are, for instance, facsimile reports from the first authorities on the scene of the specific crashes. This material will be invaluable for students interested in writing on some aspect of the landings as a Leaving Certificate project.

Although only four German warplanes were involved in the landings in Kerry, forty-eight pages are devoted to these. The second German landing was a seaplane that set down on November 25, 1940 in the sound between the Blasket Islands. The plane was experiencing mechanical difficulties, and the crew set it down to effect repairs, but the sea was so rough the craft suffered irreversible damage in the process, and they had to abandon it. They headed for shelter on Inishvickillaun.

During three days on the island, they sheltered in a deserted building and butchered one of the sheep for food. They fired distress flares but nobody on the mainland, or the Great Blasket, seemed to notice. Hence they decided to try to make it to the Great Blasket in two rubber dinghies.

The sea was running very heavy and one of the dinghies overturned, throwing two men - Hans Biegel and Wilhelm Krupp - into the sea. They were swept away and presumed drowned.

On reaching the larger island Konrad Neymeyr and his colleagues - Erwin Sack and Ernst Kalkowski - reported the tragedy. They were glad to learn shortly afterwards that Biegel and Krupp, both strong swimmers, had managed swim to the island. All five men were suffering from exposure and were held overnight in hospital before being to the Curragh internment camp.

The next Kerry incident was on March 1, 1941 when the body of a German airman was discovered in the water just off Clonee Strand, near the mouth of the Kenmare River. It was assumed that he had been on a plane that must have crashed unseen into Kenmare Bay, and that other members of the crew had gone down with the aircraft. The body had been kept afloat by an air jacket. He had some superficial injuries but the coroner, Dr W. O'Sullivan of Killarney, concluded that he died of exposure, as he had been in the cold water for two or three days. From the contents of his pocket they were able to identify him as Friedrich Shultz.

Justin Horgan looked into his background in the German records and learned that Shultz was one of a five-man crew of a German bomber that had attacked some armed British trawlers fishing about fifteen miles south of the Fastnet Rock on February 23rd. One of the attacking German aircraft was damaged by the machine gun from one of the trawlers and was seen to ditch at sea.

Shultz was possibly the only airman to get out of the aircraft in time, but he had no time to inflate a raft and had little chance in the open sea, even with his life jacket. The last German plane that came down in Kerry made a forced landing on St. Stephen's Day, 1941 in the townland of Foildrenagh, about a mile from Mastergeehy, five miles northeast of Waterville.

None of the four men aboard the JU 88 were injured. Artur Klanke, a meteorologist onboard, had a good command of English but, like all other German airmen, he was unwilling to give details of their mission. The author has, however, done a magnificent job in getting behind the scenes of all of the downed-aircraft.

There was a certain amount of international press speculation about this landing, following a fanciful report emanating from Belfast that Field Marshal Heinrich von Brauchitsc was on the plane. He had resigned a few days earlier as Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, but there was actually no one on board with a military rank higher than sergeant.

After Charles Haughey bought Inishvickillaun many years later, he traced the five men who landed on the island and met them in Luxembourg. He invited them to the island for a couple of weeks. He had photographs taken with them.

There was a standing joke that somebody would suggest that one man in the photograph had been a notorious Gestapo officer, and the person to whom the picture was being shown would be asked to guess which one. They would promptly point to Haughey.

Justin Horgan, Luftwaffe -Eagles over Ireland is published by Horgan Press and costs €35.

Kerryman