Clodagh Finn: French girl guides’ miracle crash-landing on a Wicklow mountain

Seventy-seven years ago this weekend, a group of French girl guides were on their way by plane from Paris to a holiday camp in Ireland after an invitation from their Irish counterparts. The old military plane crashed into a mountain in Wicklow, and a book recounts how they all survived

The wreckage of the plane that crash-landed in Wicklow in 1946 carrying 21 French girl guides. If it had gone 50 yards further it would have crashed into heavy boulders, which would almost certainly have resulted in many deaths.

Chantal de Vitry is in her late 90s now, but today she is likely to recall August 12, 1946, when she and 20 other French girl guides travelling to a holiday camp in Ireland on board an old military plane crashed into a mountain in Wicklow.

Mlle de Vitry, the leader of the group, managed to scramble out of the wreckage of the Junker 52 and make her way down the side of Powerscourt waterfall, with broken ribs, to get help. Hours later, she “stumbled, drenched through and injured, into the Mount Maulin Hotel, five miles from Enniskerry”, as one newspaper reported at the time.