Fall From Bomber Recalled

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30043, 30 January 1963, Page 13

Fall From Bomber Recalled

“The Press” Special Service

HASTINGS, January 29. The death has occurred of a man who belonged to the world’s njost exclusive "club” —for those who have fallen from an aircraft without a parachute and have lived to tell the tale. He was Mr H. English, of Hastings formerly a member of No. 75 Squadron. •

In December, 1940, Sergeant English was the navigator of a Wellington bomber returning from a raid on the Ruhr when the aircraft was badly shot up. Pilot Officer C. F. Scott of Timaru, was peering through the rain-ewept darkness looking for a place to put his aircraft down. Steadily losing height, the aircraft flew back across the border of Germany and into occupied France. The captain warned his crew: "Prepare to bail out” The Wellington staggered s cross a mountainous ridge, "mushed” into trees on the summit, and flew on.

Sergeant English told later of feeling a terrific shock.

and an agonising pain in his legs. Then he was turning over in the blackness of the night Although conscious of the receding flrone of the aircraft's engines. Sergeant English did not remember landing in a haystack, but that is where he fell. He recalled hearing German voices, hands lifting him on to a stretcher, the white walls of a military hospital and the voices of French nurses.

The Germans treated Sergeant English with great respect. This was the man, they said, who had fallen from an aircraft without a parachute. Subsequent computations showed that he had fallen 1500 feet—and by a million-to-one chance had landed in a haystack in the valley below.

Pilot Officer Scott brought the Wellington in for a crash landing: All the crew survived. Pilot Officer Scott made off into the rain-sodden French countryside and the following day was found by

the French underground. He made an incredible escape through Spain to fly again. Mr English spent weeks in a German military hospital before entering a prison camp. Shot Through Astrodome Later he was able to reconstruct the events which had smashed his thigh and inflicted injuries which were to plague him for the rest of hir life. The upward jerk of the bomber when it hit the trees on the mountain-top had shot him right through the navigator’s astrodome. Still suffering from his injuries, he was repatriated to England in 1943. After two years in hospital in Wellington he returned to his native Hawke’s Bay, married, and had two children. He dealt in wool for two years until an illness put him back in hospital. On discharge he was taken on the staff of Memorial Hospital, Hastings, where he worked intermittently until his death in the Palmerston North Hospital.