'LUCKY' DEERE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 20, 23 February 1942, Page 6

'LUCKY' DEERE

| HARD-HITTING N.Z. PILOT EXPLOITS OF "HEFTY" D.F.C. WITH NINE LIVES This is the story of "Lucky" Deere, lie is the commanding officer of a famous northern squadron which lias recently been prominent in cross-Channel sweeps, but. he is still only a boy of 23 and his intimates call him Al. Sometimes, remembering that ho won the R.A.F. i middle-weight championship at Uxbridge two years, they call him "Hefty." Squadron-Leader Alan Deere, D.F.C and Bar, lias a Jock McAvoy punch and a Jack Oakic smile. Even before the war the R.A.F. knew this New Zealander from Wanganui as one of the hardest punching boxers in the * Service —a man who was never floored. Now, with over 20 destroyed I 7 enemy aircraft to his credit, the '' Nazis fear him as one of the hard- ' est hitting aces. 1 Shot down in 110 fewer than seven of the 60 odd conflicts in which he ■ has been involved, he lias escaped > every time. Upside Down. He has been trapped in a blazing plane and he is one of the few flyers to have survived after ramming a Nazi plane head-on. He has been saved from a broken neck only by his harness straps and from a bullet by his wristwatch. Once he was taking off with his squadron to intercept the enemy when a formation of Heinkles divebombed the aerodrome. One bomb landed just in front of Deerc's plane and blew it to smithereens. The engine went one way and the tail unit another. The starboard wing was blown hundreds of yards and Deere himself, upside down in what was left of the cockpit, went hurtling along the ground for ~100 yards. ; He scraped the earth in a long furrow, bashing and banging against every stone. Yet he escaped with nothing worse than slight concussion. On another occasion he was having what he called a quiet time teaching lighter tactics to a pupil pilot at 25,000 feet when one of those . rare emergencies occurred which can always happen, the pupil misjudged distances and crashed into his instructor's Spitfire, slicing the machine in two. Miraculous Deere found himself falling with the wreckage and so entangled that it was impossible to bale out. By the time he struggled free the plane had fallen to 7000 feet. Then Deere leapt . . . only to realise that his parachute harness had been half torn off and the ripcord handle was dangling six feet out of reach belowHe was falling plumb, and he could see the earth swirling up to meet him and there was nothing he could do. In point of fact the "brolley" never opened. At the last moment, as he closed his eyes and waited, the silk billowed in the wind and broke his fall. But subsequent examina- 1 ticn showed that the ripcord and ring had never functioned.

This staggered liis aerodrome staff, but it was tame to some of the other exploits of "the man with nine lives." Although he left New Zealand in 1939 to join the Air Force, he had onl5 r seen one German plane in his life when his adventures began with the now-famous rescue of a fellowpilot from the aerodrome at Calais Marck. Six to One For 11 days while on patrol over the French coast lie sighted nothing but the one Jerry, which made a getaway into the clouds. Then came the rescue flight when he acted as an escort and suddenly, as an untried pilot, he found himself taking on a half-dozen Messerschmitts. In the desperate melee that followed he shot down two tinenemy for certain, find probably another. Then in the height of the battle, while his finger.-- were still'pressed on the gun button. the firing suddenly cea.sed . Hi> ;rminunltiou was exhausted . ]-'("• ;i few liiinut'-; lit' fought the enemy ljv sheer skill in manoeuvres. Tb"n his engine coughed and s il'dtered and 'went dewn tu staging point. It. was a terrible moment. Maybe no pilot but '"Lucky" Deere fould have got away. Two hours la't '■ he was back in action againsL 1Z He inkles and ni:ir

Messerschmitts 110s —a battle that brought a bag of 13 to No. 54 Squadron. During Dunkirk he shot, down a Dornier 17 and then, at extreme range, he Avas shot down himself by the enemy while falling out. of control. Dunkirk Thrills J As the Dornier swept over his head with both* engines blazing, 1 Deere pancaked down on the beach with such fcrce that the shock knocked him out. Recovering consciousness he only just succeeded in scrambling from the smoking craft and running free when the petrol tank exploded. 1 Then as he staggered along the beach with his head bleeding, a ' string of Belgian soldiers took pot 1 shots at him, mistaking him for a ! Hun! Only two days before, Deere had been shot down by a cannon shell ' exploding under his wheels yet he " had managed to right the machine and. fly it back to England. ' This time he boarded a troop bus ! for five miles and then helped him- " self to a series of abandoned cars. None of them contained very much petrol and he had swapped : six before he finally reached Dunkirk ahead of the panzers—on a motor bicycle. Swimming to a small boat, he was rowed to a destroyer, and had hardly gone aboard before the Huns bombed it. A few days later, in a new plane painted with his Kiwi mascot, he was in action against 20 Nazis when there came a collision witli a Messerschmitt. Collision "I was a fool," he said, "I thought the Hun would give way, and he thought I Avon Id. We -were dead head-on, and he AA*as right in mv sights. . . With a screeching of splintering steel the belly of the 109 tore along the top of the fuselage, slicing it clean. "I thought my engine must surely shake itself off the bearers," Deere told me afterwards. "Black smoke poured into the cockpit and flames appeared from the engines." He reached to open the hood to bale out, and discovered that it was so jammed and twisted that, it wouldn't budge. , He could scarcely see for smoke, scarcely breathe for fumes. The engine had seized, and liis only chance lay in keeping the plane in a blind glide. Tn that crucial moment only the casual act of tightening up his straps saved his life. The plane struck an anti-invasion post at the edge of the sea with a fearful jerk. 'With a wing torn off, the engine hanging free, the flames streaking from the fuselage, the machine then AA T ent slithering on its side through a couple of cornfields. [ The straps held, saving Deere's | neck. Frantically at last he broke open the hood and ran for it. Next day he Avas back on patrol! Calais Chase The Battle of Britain Avas in full swing when he watched three German bombers floating doAA r n in flames and then discovered a couple of 113's trespassing over the North Foreland and chased them back to Calais. There he shot one down over the 'drome, but the relatiatory swarm of escort fighters seemed to stream from all directions. Bullets seemed to come from everywhere and fragments were flying off his aircraft.

A splinter entered the flesh near his eye and the flow of blood blinded him. A bullet shot his wristwatch clean away ... This was one of the many occasions when Deere refuted the sneers o<" those who said that he flung away aircraft. "The Channel seemed an awful long way across," he l-uefully explained, but he nursed the plane till he was back ever Kent, where the machine literally began to fall to pieces. "[ was too low to jump and 1 could not have landed the plane. I was still doing 250 m.p.h. so I pulled back the stick hoping to climb a llew hundred feet before dropping out.''' he said. Thrown Clear The few hundred extra feet were iii V"-saving. For once again the unexpected happened at the last moment . Deere turned the plane over in order to drop out and found his 'rlui'te .somehow caught lip with the fitseiage. lie twisted and turned, unable to get out of the' plane or back into it. The nose of the machine was now pointing to the ground, and field? and houses were rushing up at trein e; ulcus speed.

Then somehow lie was 1)1 own along the side of the fuselage and was thrown clear. The ground was so close that Deere didn't stop to count before he pulled*the ripcord. A matter of seconds remained. The 'chute opened, but he> landed in a plantation of shrubs, which broke his fall. Such is Deere! The Deere who was once lying in sick bay with concussion when a raid began—and went up against doctor's orders and brought down a Dornier and thus disproved that he was too sick to fly! The Deere who found that he had cost the country nine Spitfires—and so blushing went to address 4,500 factory girls and beg for their war savings!— Harold A. Albert in the Empire News.