Survivors
On May 3, 1945, the city of Hamburg surrendered to the British Army, who ordered everyone out of the Blohm & Voss plant. BV 155 V1 was found in a flyable state, and the British brought in a pilot to fly it to the UK for testing. Unfortunately, the aircraft encountered problems immediately and crash-landed. All the parts for the still-incomplete V2 and V3 were shipped to Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, and V2 was put on public display in October. There was some discussion of completing the aircraft using parts of V3, but it was believed this did not take place, and one of the aircraft was later handed over to the U.S. The aircraft was evaluated at Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio, and was given the foreign equipment number FE-505.
This aircraft was eventually transferred to the National Air and Space Museum's storage facility in Suitland, Maryland. For years it was believed that this aircraft was the incomplete V3 aircraft, and that the British had retained V2 for their own display, though no record of the aircraft's fate could be found. In 1998 restoration efforts by two of the NASM staff revealed that the sole surviving aircraft is in fact V2, with some of V3's parts applied to the airframe. It is now believed that the British attempted to restore V2 by combining both aircraft prior to donating it to the U.S. This also explains why no record of V3 exists after the U.S. received the aircraft.
Read more about this topic: Blohm & Voss BV 155
Famous quotes containing the word survivors:
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)
“I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how to handle their parents. They see that their parents are traumatized: they scream and don’t react normally.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)