Air crash research links family across the Atlantic

John Griffiths-Colby has been looking into the crash landing in Kent of an American B-24 Liberator bomber in which one of the survivors was 21-year-old Sergeant Fred Ozbirn from Oakdale, California.

He discovered that Fred had a cousin, Bud Ozbirn, an American soldier who was based in Britain during the war. And as he dug deeper he came across a Star story from last September telling how Katie Ozbirn, a nurse from Newport, was travelling to London with her mother to pay their respects at the state funeral of the Queen.

It turns out that Katie’s husband Dean is Bud’s grandson.

“Bud’s family remain in touch with their UK cousins but the California Ozbirns were unaware of a UK branch of the family,” said John, who has told Dean and Katie of his findings, paving the way for two branches of the family on different sides of the Atlantic to connect up.

Dean said: “My auntie has got back to me and she says that Bud didn’t ever mention a Fred Ozbirn, let alone know he was in England at the same time.

“Katie has made contact with Leslie Ozbirn via Facebook. We used to live only about 10 miles from where the plane crashed in Kent. We lived in a town called Rainham, where my mum still lives. And also my dad was stationed at Chatham dockyard in the 1960s, which is only a few miles from the crash site.”

The impact of war has spanned generations of the family, because sadly Dean’s father, David Ozbirn, was killed in the sinking of the destroyer HMS Coventry during the Falklands War on May 25, 1982.

John said: “How curious it is that these two different generations of heroic liberators are linked, four decades apart but within only a few miles of each other, without ever knowing.”

Fred died in 2015 and speaking from California, Mark A. Ozbirn, his great nephew, said, “I just want to meet Dean one day and shake his hand.”

John lives in Reigate but used to live in Gravesend, which is where the stricken bomber had hoped to land at an RAF airfield, but never made it after running out of fuel.

The B-24, dubbed by its crew “Incendiary Blonde,” was part of 715 Squadron, 448th Bombardment Group (Heavy) based at Seething Airfield in Norfolk, and was returning after a mission on July 11, 1944, to bomb marshalling yards at Munich.

“The crew had only been in the UK three weeks. They had barely made it across the Channel with flak and fighter damage. The two waist gunners had been killed,” said John.

The eight other crewmen survived.

A friend, Victor Doe, now 85, was just six when the Liberator crash-landed on his parents’ farm at Cold Arbour, near Hoo St Werburgh on the Isle of Grain. Victor remembers the incident vividly and met the crew on that summer’s day in 1944.

With there being few records of the incident John has set about documenting the events and the crew and has found several of the crew’s families in America.

Bud’s wife was English, from Hull, but they divorced.

John has turned his research into a fundraising talk “The Bomber in the Back Yard” in support of the D118 HMS Coventry Association and The Seething Control Tower Museum.