Croston's link to Kansas, USA

You may have noticed a recent addition on the wall next to the memorial in Croston. A plaque has been installed in honour of an American pilot who died during the second world war – Kenneth V. Burnett Jr from Kinsey in Kansas, USA.

You may be wondering what the connection is….read on…

To discover what happened we need to go back to January 1943. On that day, Burnett and and another pilot, 1st Lieutenant A.C. Vernon Luber, had volunteered to ferry two new P-38s back to their base with Second Lieutenant Otto Hioucal leading them in a new P-47. Hioucal knew the area while Burnett had just recently arrived in England.

When they took off, Burnett got separated from the other two. It was a cold, gray late afternoon with low lying mist. Witnesses around Croston could hear his plane circling above as evening came on. The pilot attempted a forced landing over the River Douglas just outside Croston. However the aircraft turned steeply in the last moments and made an apparent wheels down landing in a field bordering the river. With the aircraft close to the ground the wingtip struck an area of brush and the pilot ‘gunned’ his engines in an attempt to gain lift.

Instead of rising the plane went down hitting some trees. It came apart, exploded and burst into flames. After the fire was extinguished, Ken Burnett’s body was removed to a mortuary, and his body was buried at the Brookwood American Cemetery in Surrey.

Kath Almond of Croston Village Archive recently wrote, “The Second World War was still raging. We had lost many young men on land, sea and air. The plight of this young man was soon forgotten amidst our own troubles. That was over 75 years ago, and the incident has faded with the passage of time. The names of the men we lost are named on our War Memorial, but Kenneth Burnett’s body was taken back to America to be buried with his mother. When it was mentioned that before the incident was lost in the mists of time, a plaque should be placed by our memorial in his memory, a local resident, who was 8 years old at the time of the crash, offered to pay for the plaque.

And thus a plaque was placed in his honour next to the memorial in May 2020, but the planned VE Day ceremony was cancelled because of Covid 19.