COURAGEOUS PILOT

Southland Times, Issue 25483, 2 October 1944, Page 7

COURAGEOUS PILOT

Trapped For Eight Days

A recent dispatch from France by the well-known American war correspondent Erne Pyle tells the story of the remarkable endurance and courage of a British night-fighter pilot, Flight-Lieutenant R. G. Lee, who was shot down near the small villeg of La Detinais and trapped in his wrecked plane. Describing the finding of the pilot, the correspondent says: “We ran to a wrecked British plane that was lying upside down, and looked through a tiny hole in the side. A man lay on his back in the small space of the up-side-down cockpit. His feet disappeared somewhere in the jumble of dials and rubber pedals above him. He was smoking a cigarette. He turned his eyes towards me and said, in a typical British manner of offhand friendliness, ‘Oh, hello.’

“I asked him if he was all right and he answered: ‘Yes, quite, now that you chaps are here.’ He did not know how long he had been trapped in the plane, but he knew the date on which he had been shot down. .Wounded, he had been there for eight days. His left leg was broken and punctured by ‘ack-ack’ and his back was terribly burned. The foot of his injured leg was pinned under the rudder bar. He had not had a bite to eat or a drop of water. “Yet when we found him his physical condition .was strong and his mind as calm and rational as though he were sitting in a London club. He was in agony, yet in his correct Oxford accent he even apologized for taking up our time to get him out.” To release the pilot occupied an hour and when the Americans finally laid him tenderly on to a canvas litter and straightened his wounded leg he gave a long half-groan, half-sigh of relief. “And that was the one sound of human weakness uttered by that man of great courage in his hour of liberation,” says Mr Pyle. “We do not know whether he will live or not; but he has a chance.”