HEROIC EXPLOIT

Camp News, Volume 2, Issue 85, 15 August 1941, Page 4

HEROIC EXPLOIT

Climb On To Wing At 13,000 Feet

SERGEANT WARD’S STORY

Hanging on to the wing of a

Wellington bomber by means of toeholes he had kicked in the surface, Sergeant J. A. Ward, R.N.Z.A.F., fought a petrol blaze at 13,000 feet after a recent raid on Munster, the Westphalian capital.

There had been very little opposition over. Munster and. the crew were returning well satisfied with the night’s work. But suddenly, when they were flying over the Zuyder Zee, a Messerschmitt 110 came' up from underneath and its guns raked the bomber from end to end.

The front gunner was wounded in the foot. The bomber’s starboard engine 'was badly damaged, the hydraulic system and the wireless were put out of action, the undercarriage fell down, the bomb-doors fell open, and the intercommunication set failed. The pilot’s cockpit was filled with smoke and fumes. But, worst of all, a sheet of flame four "or five feet long gushed out where one of the petrol feed-pipes in the wing had been split open by a cannon shell.

It must have seemed to the German pilot that the bomber’s end had come, for he did not break away, but closed in recklessly to about 20 yards. Then he turned and exposed the belly of his aircraft, and as he did so the rear gunner sent 200 rounds crashing into it.

The Messerschmitt rolled over on its back and apparently out of control, went down in a steep spiral dive with smoke pouring from its port engine. The bomber was flying at 13,000 feel over the sea and the pilot decided to make for the nearest land. The starboard engine was developing only a third of its power and the other engine was over-heating dangerously and had to be nursed.

The flame from the leaking petrol pipe settled down, after the first blaze up, to a strong jet of fire two or three feet long, blowing back from the wing. There was every danger of the fire spreading, and it was possible that it might reach the petrol tank- in the wing. The pilot ordered all the crew to stand by with parachutes on and ready to abandon aircraft. Some of the crew knocked a hole through the side of the fuselage and tried to reach the fire with the extinguisher, but the stream from the extinguisher was blown away by the wind. They threw out all the coffee from their thermos flasks at the flames but the only good this did was to damp the wing fabric round the fire. The Last Resort.

When all had failed the second pilot —Sergeant Ward —decided to climb out along the wing and try to smother the fire with the cockpit cover. In the ordinary way the cover would not have been there but the pilot had brought it to use as a cushion.

At first the second pilot was going out without a parachute as he thought this would lessen the wind resistance, but the rest of the crew insisted that he should wear it.

They tied a rope from the dinghy round his waist and with the navigator holding the end of the rope he climbed out of the astro-hatch. He had to get down about three feet from the hatch to the wing and then another three feet along the wing. “First I had to hang on to the astrohatch while I worked out how 1 was going to do it,” he said, “then I hopped out on to the wing. I kicked holes down the side of the fuselage which exposed the geodetics and gave me my foothold. I held on with one hand till I had got two foot-holds on the wing. Fire and blast from the Messerschmitt’s cannon shells had stripped part of the wing covering and that helped.

“Then 1 caught, hold of some of the sections of the wing with the other hand and managed to get down flat on to the wing with my feet well dug in and hanging on with both hands. Once I could not get enough hold and the wind lifted me partly off the wing and sent me against the fuselage again. But I still had my feet twisted in and I managed to get hold of the edge of the astro-hatch and worked myself back on to the wing again.

-“It was just a matter of getting something lo hang on to. It was like being in a terrific gale, only much worse than any gale I’ve ever known. Cover Blows Away. “As. I got along the'wing I wab behind the airscrew so I was in the slipstream as well. Once or twice I i bought 1 was going. I had the cockpit cover tucked underneath me and as I lay flat on the wing I tried to push the cover down through the hole in the wing on to the leaking pipe where the fire was coming from. But the parachute oh my chest prevented me from getting down close enough to the wing, and the wind kept on lifting me up.

“The cover nearly dragged me off. I stuffed it down through the hole but as soon as I took my hand away the terrific wind blew it out again. My arms were getting tired and I had to try a new hold. I was hanging on with my left arm when, as soon as I moved my right hand, the cover blew out of the hole again and was gone before I could grab it. The rear gunner told me afterward he saw it go past his turret.

. “After that there was nothin® to do but to get back again. The navigator kept a strain on the rope and I pulled myself back along the wing and up the side of the fuselage to the astrohatch, holding on as tight as I could. Getting back was worse than going out ami by this time I was pretty well all in. The hardest of the lot was getting my right leg in. In the end the

navigator reached out and pulled it in.” The pilot flew on. “All the time,” lie said. “1 kept thinking that it would be a prison camp for us and 1 thought we might just as well be in a dinghy in the sea if the worst happened. The sea looked nice and calm, anyhow.’’ Over the North Sea the crew jettisoned their front guns and tmmuni tion and their Hares. The wireles® operator got his wireless working again and sent a message to base. It took one hour and a naif to cross the North Sea. They were 10 miles off the coast of England when the petrol which had made a pool inside the wing -blazed up furiously and burnt more holes in the fabric. But then as suddenly the fire died down and at the same time the flaun from the petrol pipe went out. The pilot flew inland and. with no flaps and no brakes,‘and .'with bomb doors open, lie circled a strange aerodrome which he had chosen because it had a larger landing ground than his own base. He called up the flare path: “We have been badly shot up,” he said. “I hope we don’t moss up your flare path too badly when we land.” He landed safely.