PARACHUTE LEAP

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23618, 30 March 1940, Page 8

PARACHUTE LEAP

BITTER WINTER NIGHT FIVE AIRMEN SAVED [from OCR OWN correspondent] LONDON, March 5 What detectives call a "hunch"— something born of instinct plus experience.—enabled a country police sergeant to save the lives of five men who 'had jumped into the blackness of a bitter winter's night from a crippled Royal Air Force aeroplane. It' happened on Christmas Eve, but only now is it possible to give the full Etory. The aeroplane, badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire, and with its radio shot away, came in from over the North Sea, avoiding a coastal balloon barrage by luck which afterward seemed to the pilot miraculous. Chances of a safe landing, however, seemed so meagre that, the coast once safely crossed, the pilot ordered his crew of five to jump out. One by one they dropped with their parachutes into the dark depths of the winter night. The pilot flew on and made a landing. To Police-Sergeant Murray Baxter, sitting in the police station in Aideburgh, Suffolk, came a sudden order to search the district. Sergeant Baxter thought of the many square miles of his district—and of Tangham Forest. He marshalled a search party. Bonfires were lit as rallying points. For hours the searchers groped their way through the wilderness of trees, stiff and heavy with hoarfrost. Then came a shout. One of the men had been found. Soon afterward three more were found.

None of .the rescued men would consent to return to warmth and food until the fifth, the wireless operator, had been found. He was finally located in a tree, unhurt.