New Zealand Pilot Survives Two Crashes

Manawatu Times, Volume 66, Issue 142, 17 June 1941, Page 5

New Zealand Pilot Survives Two Crashes

SPECTACULAR ESCAPES (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, June 15. A former bank clerk from New Zealand now serving as a sergeant pilot in a famous fifhtet* squadron in the Western Desect is in hospital after a series of spectacular escapes in the past two weeks. “In the first,” he related, “I founu myself on a landing-ground with my aircraft destroyed. Germans armed with tommy-guns were only half a mile away. I was got out of that by squeezing into the cockpit of a Hurricane with another pilot, who flew me 360 miles to safety. “A day or two after my return,” the New Zealander added, “I was groundstraffing an enemy landing-ground and had set fire to two German aircraft when a couple of Breda gun shells hit my radiator. Fumes came into the cockpit, and two Messerschmitt-109’s were hot on my tail. One got a burst into my aircraft, and I began to lose altitude. The elevator control began to misbehave, and I was flying along the top of some cliffs trying to shake off the Germans when I saw the outer defences of Tobruk.

“Just as safety seemed within reach, my aircraft flattened out into a field and burst into flames, which were licking round my legs before I could clamber out. I thought I was still in enemy territory, and dragged myselJ to a cave, where I lay for hours. A party of English troops out on s skirmish took me into Tobruk.”