Imperial German Gotha G.IV twin engine bomber (1055/16) in the Royal Dutch Airforce base at Soesterberg.
On 18 August 1917 this brand-new craft along with another were returning from a bombing sortie above Great Britain when they accidentally entered Dutch airspace.
Dutch Army regulations during the war was to enforce neutrality by shooting at all foreign airplanes without discrimination, so when on 18 August Dutch Army Sergeant Lok was on patrol with his men along the Northern Dutch border at Tutjeshut to Germany when he spotted the two aircraft flying quite low across the landscape.
He quickly grabbed his M.95 Mannlicher and unloaded 5 shots at one of the bombers and he must’ve been very lucky as he managed to shoot apart one of its propellors.
The hapless machine managed to make an emergency landing in the land of a farmer a few kilometers away in the village Beerta where they found the 3-man crew being surrounded by the villagers who gifted the Germans with Cheese, meat, milk and beer. The crew exclaimed they haven’t eaten such a feast in a long while and were not too happy to be captured it seems when Lok and his men arrived.
Strangely enough the 2nd Gotha also landed for unknown reasons despite not being hit at nearby Blijham but it was burned by its crew who were promptly also taken prisoner.
The 1st crew was sent to the prisoner camp at Finsterwolde and the 2nd to Winschoten, the nationality of the crews was kept from the newspapers.
The damaged Gotha G.IV bomber which was taken down by Sergeant Lok was taken to Soesterberg, where the rather new Royal Dutch Airforce which almost entirely was composed of foreign airplanes that ended up in Holland throughout the war, where it was repaired, or so they thought because it crashed by engine malfunction during takeoff and crashed, being damaged beyond repair on 18 October 1917.