READER Martin Dawson has contacted us with a harrowing story about death in the sky above Copmanthorpe 70 years ago.

It was August 19, 1943. Martin's father John, then a 13-year-old, was out helping to get in the crops on the farm his father (Martin's granddad) ran near Copmanthorpe. John and a family friend were on a tractor – a friend, Matt Atkinson, was driving, and John riding on the mudguard.

It was a sunny day, Martin said. The pair saw a Halifax bomber flying overhead – it was on a training mission from Rufforth airfield, they were later to learn.

As they were watching, another aircraft appeared in the sky – another Halifax, this one on a training mission from Riccall.

As they watched, appalled, the two aircraft collided in the sky above them.

Martin said: “Debris rained down all around them and over a large area. My dad's legs were badly burned. Matt jumped off the tractor, and dragged him away.”

Fourteen young airmen died in that collision. Some were buried in Harrogate, Martin believes, and the bodies of others were repatriated to Canada.

The young John spent six months in hospital. He never learned to swim, because of the scarring on his legs, and would never go sunbathing. And what he saw never left him.

Even towards the end of his life he continued to have nightmares. He would wake up shouting “It’s the lads! It's the lads,” Martin recalls. He remembers trying to calm his father. I said “Pops, the lads are all right. The lads are all right.”

Rufforth during the war was home to the RAF’s 1663 Heavy Conversion Unit, where pilots trained to fly heavy bombers.

The collision of two Halifaxes above Copmanthorpe came the day after the RAF had mounted a major raid on Peenemunde in Germany, where the V-2 was being developed. It was one of the RAF’s largest raids, involving almost 600 aircraft – Lancasters, Halifaxes and Stirlings – over a period of two days, August 17 and 18, 1943.

The V-2 was seen as a threat to a planned Allied invasion of Europe, said Martin, who gives talks on astronomy and on aviation. “The Allies only needed to delay V-2 production and development by a few months, but it would be enough.”

The Peenemunde raid, he said, is now a part of history and one that, sadly, not many people are aware of.

The two Halifax bombers that the young John Dawson saw collide in the air above Companthorpe would not have been involved in the raid as the crews were still in training.

But their deaths in the skies above the village illustrates just what a price the young men of Bomber Command continued to pay throughout the war.

There is a quirky end to this tale, however, which will bring a smile to your lips despite the sadness of the loss of those young lives.

John’s father wrote to the RAF to reclaim the cost of his son’s trousers which had been damaged by fire. The claim was declined, said Martin, on the grounds that John was too young and should not have been riding on the tractor in the first place.