History of Sport: The Munich Air Disaster

In February 1958, Manchester United suffered one of the grimmest fates ever to befall a sports team. Eight of the club’s players were killed in an accident at Munich-Riem Airport in West Germany.

Old Trafford rears above the surrounding buildings like a monument to commercialism. Every match brings more than 76,000 fans to the home of Manchester United, the dominant team in world football's most popular league. Some 12,000 of them sit behind one goal in the East Stand – also home to the Manchester United Megastore, a 1,600 square metre jungle of red shirts, scarves, posters and merchandise operated by Nike, the club’s commercial partner. Images and advertisements for Nike products regularly adorn the stand’s tinted glass exterior.

A few moments’ walk from the Megastore doors is the corner of the stadium where the East and South Stands meet. On the curved wall is a clock, with the date permanently set to ‘Feb 6th 1958.’ That was the day, to quote the International Herald Tribune, when ‘time stopped for Manchester United.’ The loss of eight of the club’s playing staff was described by The Times newspaper the next day as ‘the blackest hand yet set upon football in these islands.’

It came in a year that had started off so brightly for Manchester United’s young stars, nicknamed the Busby Babes after their inspirational coach. When Matt Busby had been appointed manager of Manchester United in 1945, the club did not even have a home ground; Old Trafford had been reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. In little over a decade, he had overseen its reconstruction, while at the same time building perhaps the finest team ever to play soccer. United had an average age of just 21 when they captured the 1956 league title. They retained it in 1957, and paid back Aston Villa, the side who beat them in the 1957 FA Cup final, with a 4-0 thrashing in the opening match of the following campaign.

All the talk in English soccer was that the Busby Babes’ 1957/58 season could be the greatest of all time. It is easy to understand why. The team included names like Bobby Charlton, who would go on to play more than 100 games for England and be his country’s greatest-ever goal scorer, and Duncan Edwards, who had caught Busby’s eye at the age of 12, made his debut at 16 and won the first of his England caps just months after his 18th birthday. “In the character and spirit of Duncan Edwards, I saw the true revival of British football,” said the England coach Walter Winterbottom later. Edwards and Charlton had even managed to retain their places in the United team while on National Service. They were stationed together in Shropshire, 70 miles from Manchester, and travelled to Old Trafford at weekends to play key roles in the side’s league championship victories.

But for all United’s domestic success, Busby’s dream was to win the European Cup - the precursor to the modern-day Uefa Champions League – which had been launched in the 1955/56 season. The first competition had been captured by Real Madrid, a club already well on the way to establishing itself as Europe’s dominant force. Busby, a visionary, knew that United needed to enter the European Cup to have any hope of creating a similar legend. The 1955 English champions, Chelsea, had been barred from doing so by the Football League, which deemed it a meaningless distraction; a similar error of judgment to the one that saw England refuse to enter the three Fifa World Cups prior to World War II. Perhaps mindful of that mistake, the Football Association chairman, Stanley Rous, supported Busby as he defied the league and entered his team in the second season of the competition. They were knocked out by Real Madrid who would go on to retain the trophy, but United’s league title win of 1957 secured their place in the following season’s competition, and their dominance of English soccer guaranteed their position as one of the favourites to win it.

The early rounds of the competition did little to dispel that notion. Irish champions Shamrock Rovers and Dukla Prague of Czechoslovakia were dismissed as the Busby Babes marched to a quarter-final clash with Red Star Belgrade. The Yugoslavian champions were beaten 2-1 at Old Trafford, with goals from Charlton and wing-half Eddie Colman. The second leg was to be played three weeks later in Belgrade. If that had been United’s only priority, tragedy might have been averted. But as January turned to February, the team were chasing leaders Wolverhampton Wanderers in an effort to capture what would be their third consecutive league title – a feat no club had accomplished in more than 20 years – and the European campaign was taking its toll.

United had been using scheduled airline services to avoid the fatigue of long journeys by road, rail or sea. However, their return journey from Prague in the previous round had been beset by problems. Fog over England forced the aeroplane carrying the team to Manchester to divert to Amsterdam. There was a real fear United would be unable to return home in time to fulfill their next league fixture, an away game against Birmingham City – a mistake that would almost certainly have seen points docked from the side and a significant weight added to the argument that English clubs had no business getting mixed up in foreign soccer. Eventually the club secretary, Walter Crickmer, managed to book passage on a ferry that brought the team to Harwich, in the south-east of England, in the early hours of the morning. From there, the players travelled north for their clash with Birmingham, but their problems were only just beginning. Despite scoring three goals, the effects of the grueling journey were undeniable. United slumped to a 3-3 draw. To compound the problem, Wolverhampton Wanderers defeated Preston North End 2-1 just a few miles down the road. The victory moved Wolves eight points clear at the top of the table.

Determined to avoid similar problems in the quarter-final, United chartered a plane through British European Airways from Manchester to Belgrade for the second leg. It was an extravagant move, but one that Busby and his colleagues deemed necessary if the club was to continue challenging both at home and abroad.

No-one knew at the time that Manchester United’s clash with Arsenal on February 1st would be the last time that the majority of the Busby Babes would play a game on British soil. If ever a match could have stood up to such a billing, though, this was it. Arsenal had been the last team to win three league titles in a row, in the 1930s, and the Gunners were determined to stop United from matching the achievement. One of the most thrilling games in either club’s history ended in a 5-4 victory for Busby’s young stars. Charlton and Edwards both found the net in a victory that kept their dreams of a third consecutive league title alive.

Shortly afterwards, United undertook the first stage of the 2,000-mile round trip to eastern Europe, arriving in Belgrade in good time to prepare for their match with Red Star. It looked, in every way, to be the perfect smash-and-grab mission behind the Iron Curtain; Busby’s side took the lead through Dennis Viollet after just two minutes, before Charlton scored two goals just seconds apart at the half-hour mark. Red Star were shell-shocked. Though the Yugoslavs fought back in the second half, a 3-3 draw was enough to take the Busby Babes into the semi-finals. Before that, according to the plan, the team would return to England and reassert its dominance over the domestic league.
British European Airways Flight 609 was scheduled to carry its delighted passengers – the team, club officials, a selection of journalists and supporters, and a few others who had secured passage – from Belgrade to Manchester, with one stop for refueling at Munich-Riem Airport in West Germany. The players spent approximately half an hour in a cold, grey building with a single café and shop; the coffee, said the Daily Herald’s George Follows, one of the journalists accompanying the team on the flight, was “like wet sawdust.” When the call came to reboard the plane, no-one dawdled. Captains James Thain and Kenneth Rayment, the pilot and co-pilot, prepared the plane for take-off. But as it raced down the runway, the pair noticed a fluctuation in the boost readings. It was a fairly common problem in planes of the Airspeed Ambassador Elizabethan class, but Thain and Rayment aborted, asking the control tower for permission to begin take-off again. The second run down the runway produced the same problem, and the plane returned to the terminal for a mechanical inspection.

By now, the possibility of spending the night in Munich was being discussed seriously. Edwards even sent a telegram to his landlady: ‘All flights cancelled – stop – flying tomorrow – stop – Duncan’. But the pilots were confident a third attempt would be successful, the players were far from eager to spend another evening so far from home and a clash with Wolverhampton Wanderers that could potentially decide the league title beckoned on the Saturday afternoon. So, once again, the party reboarded the plane for a third attempt at take-off. “The third time,” remembered Charlton. “I think everyone was concerned maybe a little bit.”

Snow had been falling steadily as the plane sat on the Munich tarmac, and a layer of slush had built up at the end of the runway. As the pilot prepared to pull up, the plane’s wheels hit it, and the aircraft lost velocity. “There was a bit of snow on the runway and the plane didn't get into the air,” said Charlton. “Then I saw us hit the perimeter fence.” They ploughed through it. The left wing hit a nearby house and was torn off. As the aircraft smashed into the ground, a shattered ruin, 21 of the 44 people on board were killed instantly.

Thain, aware of the danger of explosion, immediately began trying to evacuate the survivors from the nightmarish scene. 'I scrambled out through a jagged hole and ran,’ wrote centre back Bill Foulkes in his autobiography, United In Triumph And Tragedy. ‘When I looked around I could not believe my eyes. The aircraft was cut in half; it was just a mass of jagged metal. Bodies were strewn in the slush where the snow had melted.’

Harry Gregg, the United goalkeeper, remembers the silence: “I thought I was dead until I felt the blood running down my face,” he told The Times years later. “I didn’t want to feel my head because I thought the top had been taken off like a hard-boiled egg. I was so confused. It was total darkness yet it was only three in the afternoon – it was hard to reconcile.” Gregg dragged himself to a hole in the fuselage, and was confronted with, “the first dead person I saw, not a mark on him. It was Bert Whalley, the chief coach, who’d been taken with us as a bonus for developing all those great young players.”

Gregg kicked the hole large enough to pull himself out of the wreckage: “At first I thought I was the only one left alive. In the distance I noticed five people running away, they shouted at me to run. At that moment, the aircraft captain came around from what had been the nose of the aircraft carrying a little fire extinguisher. When he saw me he shouted in his best pucker English accent: ‘Run, you stupid bastard, it’s going to explode.’”

And then Gregg heard a baby cry. “The crying seemed to bring me back to reality and I shouted at the people running away to come back. But they were still shouting at me to run. I could hear the child crying and felt angry they were running away, so I shouted again, ‘Come back, you bastards, there’s people alive in here.’ For me to shout that was difficult because, at that time, I was a God-fearing man and wouldn’t normally have cursed. But the people just kept running.”

Gregg climbed back into the torn body of the plane, following the cry. He found the baby, “beneath a pile of debris and, remarkably, she only had a cut over her eye. I scrabbled back to the hole with her and got her out.” Then the goalkeeper went back again, and dragged the baby’s mother, Vera Lukic, the wife of a Yugoslav diplomat who had secured passage on the flight, through the hole, before again returning to the plane: “I began to search for Jackie Blanchflower and I shouted out his name. Blanchy and I had been friends since we played together for Ireland Schoolboys as 14-year-olds and I was desperate to find him.” First he found Charlton and Viollet, the men who had scored United’s goals in Belgrade, lying unconscious and dragged them to safety, before finally discovering Blanchflower: “When I found Blanchy the lower part of his right arm had been almost completely severed. It was horrendous, a scene of utter devastation.”

Blanchflower’s injuries would force his retirement from soccer. His team-mate, Johnny Berry, suffered the same fate; he broke his jaw, elbow, pelvis, leg and cracked his skull. All his teeth were removed in hospital as doctors treated his jaw injuries. But both men survived. So did Viollet and Charlton, who woke up in the snow where Gregg had dragged them: ‘I couldn’t understand how I could have been 50 yards away from the aeroplane, still strapped in my seat, without suffering anything but a bang on my head,’ wrote Charlton later. ‘How could that be? How could I feel myself all over and find out that I was all right, completely whole, and my pals were dead? I think about this every day of my life.’ His brother Jack, a footballer for Leeds United and a teammate of Bobby’s in the 1966 World Cup winning England side, said: “I saw a big change in our kid from that day on. He stopped smiling.”

No wonder. Seven Manchester United players lay dead in the wreckage: Geoff Bent, aged 25; Roger Byrne, the captain, 29; Eddie Colman, 21; Mark Jones, 24; David Pegg, 22; Tommy Taylor, 26; and Billy Whelan, 22. Three members of the club staff – Walter Crickmer, Tom Curry and Bert Whalley; eight journalists – Alf Clarke, Donny Davies, George Follows, Tom Jackson, Archie Ledbrooke, Henry Rose, Frank Swift (the former England goalkeeper) and Eric Thompson; and two other passengers – Bela Miklos and Willie Satinoff – also lost their lives. The survivors were taken to hospital in makeshift ambulances. Busby’s ribs had been caved in by the impact. ‘I remember kneeling beside Matt. He kept saying, “It’s my side, it’s my side” in a horrible moan,’ wrote Foulkes.
Britain was at a standstill. Queen Elizabeth II, just six years into her reign, said she was “deeply shocked” and extended her “sympathy and that of [her] husband to the families of those who have been killed and to the injured”, as did Yugoslavia’s President Tito.

George Best was an 11-year-old child in Belfast who would go on to be arguably the greatest player in the game of soccer. Years later, he wrote in his autobiography: ‘The crash had happened in the middle of the afternoon and I remember people talking about it as I came home from school on the bus. I then turned on the radio when I got home and heard all the details. The whole thing had an air of unreality about it because for most normal people then, flying was a fantasy in itself.’

Nobby Stiles, a 15-year-old apprentice at Manchester United who would play alongside Charlton in the 1966 World Cup final, remembers a trainer coming into the dressing rooms and telling the young boys there had been a problem in Munich. ‘Stiles recalled that he was in denial for much of the day, even when, as he changed buses in a funereal city centre, he saw so many of the faces of the great team lined up on the front page of the evening newspaper under the bleakest of all headlines, “DEAD”’, wrote The Independent. The teenager knew his parents would not be home from work, so instead went to a nearby church: “I prayed and I wept, and I rocked back and forth in the pew. It could have been an hour or two, I don’t really know. There was no one else in the church. Then I went home. The lads were dead, or so I’d read, but people still had to work. I put the dinner in the oven, as my mum had told me to do that morning, in that other life.” Stiles, an altar boy, attended ten funerals in the aftermath of the crash.

Two questions stood out above all others: Would the club fold, and would the likes of Edwards and Busby, both critically ill in hospital, survive? ‘Jimmy Murphy and all the people from Old Trafford came to my bedside and one of the questions I kept asking was: “Where’s Duncan Edwards?”’ wrote Charlton in the United Opus, the club’s official history. ‘When I learnt that he was in the hospital and still alive, I said I had to see him. As soon as they let me put my clothes on I went upstairs to find him – and then he gave me a bollocking. He said: “Where the bloody hell have you been?” – just as he had that day when I reported late at the Army camp in Shropshire where we did our National Service, and he went off to find me a better mattress when he saw that the one I’d been given had bits falling out of it.’

Busby, meanwhile, was suffering from injuries so severe that he received the last rites. ‘We do not have much hope of saving him,’ read a simple statement from the Rechts der Isar Hospital doctors. Of the pair, he certainly appeared more likely to pass away than Edwards, described by doctors the day after the crash as being “a little better”, though the multiple leg fractures he had sustained meant they privately deemed him unlikely to play soccer again.

The same could be said for the club. The bodies of the dead were flown home on 7th February, and lay overnight in the Old Trafford gym. Thousands lined the streets of Manchester for the funerals, and two minutes’ silence were impeccably observed before every league match on the following Saturday. Or rather, every league match but one. Despite Edwards’ cheeky question to the men around his bedside – “What time is the kick off against Wolves? I mustn't miss that match!”  – United’s game with the challengers for their league title was cancelled.

Speculation that the club would have to close down continued. Desperate meetings were held: in the club offices; at the training ground; in hospital corridors. Then the club chairman, Harold Hardman, issued a statement which the world received with a mixture of disbelief and admiration: “Even if it means being heavily defeated, we will carry on with this season's programme. We have a duty to the public and a duty to football to carry out.”

Jimmy Murphy, Busby’s assistant, had not travelled to Munich; he had been coaching the national team of his native Wales for a World Cup qualifying match in Cardiff. He was handed the reins for the rest of the season, with an FA Cup match against Sheffield Wednesday the first challenge, and he swiftly set about organising the players available to him – mainly reserves and youth players who had been deeply affected by the tragedy. Rival clubs offered their assistance. Liverpool and Nottingham Forest were the first two to contact United asking what they could do to help. The FA waived its rule which ‘cup-ties’ a player once he has played in an FA Cup round in any particular season; Stan Crowther, bought from Aston Villa and ineligible but for the governing body’s decision, started against Sheffield Wednesday an hour after signing his name on the contract.

Murphy remembers a man far from keen to do so: “Eric Houghton was Villa manager at the time and he had told Stan that we were interested in him. He didn't want to leave Villa, but Eric got him to come to Old Trafford to watch the Sheffield Wednesday game. On the way up he told him he thought that he should help us out, but Stan told him he hadn't brought any kit with him. ‘Don't worry, I've got your boots in my bag,’ Eric said. We met at about half-past five and an hour before the kick-off he'd signed.”

Astonishingly, the team’s numbers and spirits were boosted by the inclusion of Foulkes and Gregg, the latter already being called the Hero of Munich. It was a title he hated: “I did what had to be done without thinking about it. I've lived with being called a hero but I'm not really a hero. Heroes are people who do brave things knowing the consequences of their actions. That day, I had no idea what I was doing,” he said later.

There were reminders everywhere of the tragedy that had befallen the champions. Where the United players’ names should have appeared in the match programme were blank spaces. Ian Greaves, who had come through United’s junior sides and was a regular in the reserves, found himself playing in club captain Byrne’s left back position: “I can remember the dressing room was very quiet. I couldn't get Roger out of my mind; I was getting changed where he would have sat. I was wearing his shirt.”
United’s cobbled-together team of youngsters, reserves and emergency transfers crushed their Yorkshire rivals 3-0. “I don't think anyone who played in the game or who watched it will ever forget that night,” said Wednesday’s Albert Quixall. “United ran their hearts out, and no matter how well we had played they would have beaten us.” Shay Brennan, a 20-year-old right back, made his first team debut on the left wing, and scored twice. Alex Dawson, a 17-year-old, added a third. “Those older players had always encouraged me,” he remembered later. “They used to turn up to reserve games and give tips. Duncan [Edwards] I really liked. He’d say, ‘That’s what the boss likes to see: you moving around, listening, learning.’ When people like that were talking to you, you felt on a pedestal. And you wanted to remain up there. That’s why the club worked so well. We were the future, or we were supposed to be. Except the future came round too quickly.” Two days later, on Dawson’s 18th birthday, Edwards died in hospital.

His kidneys had been badly damaged in the accident. An artificial kidney had been enough to save his life, but reduced his blood’s ability to clot. Edwards began bleeding internally and, after a long struggle, passed away. It was as if the accident had happened all over again. United’s talisman was gone. Edwards had been a force of nature, a perfect footballer. “He was the only player who ever made me feel inferior. Compared to him the rest of us were like pygmies. If I had to play for my life and could take one man with me, it would be him,” said Charlton, the man widely regarded today as England’s greatest-ever player – in, he would surely say, Edwards’ place. Tommy Docherty, a Preston North End player who would go on to manage United in the 1970s, was likewise unequivocal: “There is no doubt in my mind that Duncan would have become the greatest player ever. Not just in British football, with United and England, but the best in the world. George Best was something special, as was Pele and Maradona, but in my mind Duncan was much better in terms of all-round ability and skill.” Stiles’ memories once again turn to the inside of a church: “At his funeral back in Worcestershire, the vicar said that we would see great talent again, even genius, but there would only be one Duncan Edwards.”

Are those memories misled by sentiment? Charlton does not give the idea a moment’s thought: “Sentiment can throw a man’s judgment out of perspective, yet it is not the case with him. Duncan Edwards was the greatest. I see him in my mind’s eye and I wonder that anyone should have so much talent.”

Sustaining a league challenge was too much for United’s makeshift and devastated squad, which slipped to mid-table, and despite beating AC Milan 2-1 at Old Trafford in the first leg of the European Cup semi-final, Murphy’s team were beaten 4-0 in Italy. The European dream was over. But the FA Cup was a different story. In the sixth round, United drew 2-2 with West Bromwich Albion, winning the replay 1-0. In the semi-final, they repeated the same score, drawing 2-2 with Fulham – both goals scored by Charlton, who had made an emotional return to the side. This time the victory in the replay was emphatic; Fulham were beaten 5-3, Charlton and Brennan adding to a Dawson hat-trick.

When Murphy led out his team at Wembley for the FA Cup final in May, it contained four men who had survived the crash in February: Charlton, Foulkes, Gregg and Viollet. Busby himself hobbled to the side of the pitch, albeit on crutches. It was widely reported, mistakenly but appropriately, that the eagle which adorned United’s cup final shirts – finals were the only time in those days that the club wore a club crest – was a phoenix.

The match would prove to be one step too far. Bolton Wanderers beat United 2-0, and a season that had started so brightly was over, with no medals and tragedy the only outcome. But there was something else, something which shaped the future of the club. “It galvanised the fans – the fans would never ever think about supporting anyone else – which in the old days they used to do,” was Charlton’s take. “It made our fans that bit more passionate. They wanted Man United to be the best, and they expected us to be the best, and that has continued.”

Simon Barnes, writing in The Times 50 years later, stated: ‘The eight Manchester United players who died in Munich have created a thing of perfection. Instead of memories of real deeds, they left an imperishable legend of beauty and glory, a team who could never lose, the greatest team ever.’ From that point, nothing but the best was good enough for Manchester United or the club’s fans. Today, 50 years later, men, women and children across the planet have bought into that legacy. People who have never been within a thousand miles of Old Trafford can tell the story of the Munich disaster, with every detail remembered.

Busby returned that summer, and once again set about rebuilding the club. Within five years, he had again signed some of the best players ever to wear the shirt. This time, the tragedy and romance of the disaster helped attract them. ‘I couldn’t wait to get to Manchester United,’ wrote Best, who signed for the club in 1961 at the age of just 15. ‘Wolves might have been the team I supported and dreamed about playing for, but United were a glamorous club, and the Munich air crash had brought them an enormous amount of interest and public sympathy.’ More than anything, Best remembered the moment he met Busby. 'I probably would not even have known he was United’s manager but for the coverage of the Munich disaster. Busby's chest was crushed in the crash and he was not expected to live. He actually received the last rites twice and was in a critical condition for days… His stature in the game was enormous after that so you can imagine how I felt, a 15-year-old triallist from Belfast, when I shook his hand. It was like being introduced to God.’

Seven years later, at the age of just 22 – a year older than Edwards had been when he died – Best was named European Player of the Year and scored the second goal as United beat Benfica 4-1 at London’s Wembley Stadium to be crowned champions of Europe. Another youngster, Brian Kidd, netted the third on his 19th birthday. The first and fourth were scored by a veteran: Bobby Charlton, a decade after eight of his team-mates died in Munich. Busby, in his 22nd year as manager of the club, had finally fulfilled his dream: “They've done us proud,” he said. “They came back with all their hearts to show everyone what Manchester United are made of. This is the most wonderful thing that has happened in my life and I am the proudest man in England tonight.”

Busby’s era, in which he had twice brought a club back from ruin, was drawing to a close. The legend he and his players had established was just beginning.

This article is part of SportsPro's History of Sport series. Click below for the other features in the series:

History of Sport: South Africa emerges from its dark past
History of Sport: Yankee Stadium
History of Sport: Sail of the Century

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