On the night of 30 March 1944, Halifax LW696 of 76 Squadron took off from RAF Holme-on-Spalding-Moor as part of the Nuremberg raid — Bomber Command's costliest single operation of the entire war. Around 95 aircraft would not return.
At approximately 00:40, over the village of Daubhausen in Hesse, the Halifax was attacked by a German nightfighter and exploded in mid-air. Of the eight men aboard, seven were killed. The pilot, Squadron Leader Kenneth Arthur Clack DFM, was just twenty-one years old.
The sole survivor was Sergeant Guy Leonard Edwards, the mid-upper gunner. He was twenty.
In October 2026, Jackie Simpson — Guy's daughter — contacted the Bomber Command Memorial Register after finding the site online. She had been searching for her father's crash site and knew there was a memorial in Germany with the remains of his Halifax displayed in a glass pavilion.
What she shared changed everything we knew about that night.
"The crew only had one parachute"
In Jackie's words:
Dad passed away in October 2006. It's sad he didn't get to see it but maybe for the best as I know the memories haunted him. The day after he was shot down the Germans brought him back to his crash site to identify all his friends. The pigeon all bombers carried also died. The crew only had one parachute which they gave him as he was only 20.
That single detail — seven men with one parachute, giving it to the youngest among them — is the kind of story that no archive holds. It survived because a daughter remembered what her father told her, and because she chose to share it.
The logbook
Jackie holds her father's original flight logbook. It was the key to identifying the six crew members whose names had never been recorded on any public memorial. Until Jackie came forward, only Squadron Leader Clack was confirmed by name.
The logbook named them all:
- Flying Officer Richard Keith Thomson, RCAF — Navigator
- Flying Officer David Clifford Nowell, RAF — Flight Engineer
- Pilot Officer Douglas Hinton Edwards, RAFVR — Air Gunner
- Warrant Officer Roy Edwards Mogalki, RCAF — from Lake Alma, Saskatchewan, aged 23
- Flight Sergeant Keith James Shropshall, RAFVR — Air Bomber
- Sergeant Leslie Wilfred Arthur Peall, RAFVR — Wireless Operator/Air Gunner
Seven men who gave their lives. Two Canadians. Two, by coincidence, named Edwards — no relation to each other. All now lie in a collective grave at Hanover War Cemetery.
The village that remembered
In 2003, villagers in Daubhausen who had witnessed the crash as children began searching for the aircraft's remains. They located one of the Halifax's engines buried four metres deep in a meadow. Local firms helped recover it and build a pavilion to house it, with an information panel telling the story of that night.
The memorial was inaugurated on 31 March 2007 — the sixty-third anniversary of the crash.
Guy Leonard Edwards died in October 2006, one year before the memorial was completed. He never saw it.
Going back
After we updated the memorial page with her father's story and the full crew, Jackie wrote:
Thank you so much for all your work in keeping these stories alive for future generations, we have accomplished a lot in one day! My husband and I are flying over to see the memorial site late November. I have no doubt I will shed a few tears.
A German village that built a memorial from living memory, and a British family that carried the same night for eighty years, are now connected through one page on this Register.