00:00Back in World War II, Kent was the country's first line of defence and with flying bombs
00:04being sent over the channel towards London, plenty landed here in the Garden of England.
00:09And this man, Colin Welch, has been dedicating his time to finding these bombs, with the
00:15tail end of this V1 flying bomb found in private farmland in Eyewade near Sittingbourne, now
00:20on his front garden.
00:22To the untrained eye, this might just look like a hunk of old metal, but it's actually
00:26a rare piece of Kent's military history that shows a special method pilots would use to
00:30alter the course of the bombs.
00:33It doesn't involve metal-to-metal contact, it's about disturbing the airflow between the wings
00:38of the flying bomb and the aircraft.
00:41So the pilot has got to gently get close to the wing, underneath the wing, or on top of
00:48it, possibly, but the records I've read talk about underneath.
00:53So it disturbs the airflow to confuse the gyros, because they'll be working hard to try and
00:59keep the flying bomb level and true.
01:02Eventually, it tips the flying bomb over.
01:06And that wing tipping brought it down in Sittingbourne, where Colin and his team managed
01:10to find it using GPS tracking and metal detecting, as well as combat reports to connect it to specific
01:15pilots.
01:17In an aerial archive, there was a survey after the Second World War, where you can see a crater.
01:23Because we've done this quite a lot, we know the size of crater that we're looking for,
01:27that may represent a flying bomb or a rocket.
01:30So we begin to drill down into that information, looking for accurate records that support our
01:38guess that that is what we think it is.
01:41Now, here it is, this is part of the V1 flying bomb.
01:44This is only about a third of the length of the full thing, so you can imagine the scale
01:48of what one of these would have looked like.
01:51Now, what makes this find particularly special is, obviously, we know that it was wingtipped
01:55thanks to those combat reports.
01:57But what's interesting is it also has a bullet hole in the side of it, which adds another
02:01layer to the research that Colin's been doing.
02:03This is because flying bombs were typically brought down by wingtipping, air defence artillery,
02:09or by balloons sent up to alter its course.
02:11But an intact part of the bomb that shows signs of both wingtipping and artillery damage
02:16is particularly rare.
02:18According to Colin, the part that comes next is plenty of paperwork and cleaning for the
02:22conservation of the bomb.
02:23He needs to make sure it's in a good enough condition to be further examined.
02:26So, wherever you may be in Kent, there could be a London-bound bomb from the 1940s beneath
02:32your feet waiting to be discovered.
02:34Finn McDermid for KMTV in Sittingbourne.
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