FIRE ON BOMBER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 July 1941, Page 5

FIRE ON BOMBER

NEW ZEALAND AIRMAN’S HEROIC EFFORT CLIMB ON TO WING IN MID-AIR IN ATTEMPT TO EXTINGUISH BLAZE. DAMAGED PLANE TAKEN HOME TO SAFE LANDING. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY. July 12. A thrilling story of a successful effort of bringing home a burning bomber is told by the Air Ministry. A Wellington bomber, returning with the crew well satisfied from a raid on Munster, ■ had reached the Zuider Zee when suddenly a Messerschmitt 110 came up from underneath and 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 wireless were put out of action, the undercarriage fell down, the bomb doors fell open and the intercommunication set failed.

The pilot’s cockpit filled with smoke and fumes, and, worst of all, a sheet of flames four or five feet long gushed out where one of the petrol feed pipes in the wing was split open by a cannon shell. It must have seemed to the German pilot that the bomber's end had come, for he closed in recklessly, then turned and exposed the belly of his aircraft. As he did so the rear gunner of the Wellington 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. HAZARDOUS FEAT. When all attempts to extinguish the fire from the leaking petrol pipe failed, the second pilot, a New Zealander from Wanganui, decided to climb out along the wing to try and smother the fire with a cockpit cover which he brought as a cushion. At first he was going without a parachute, as he thought this would lessen the wind resistance, but the rest of the crew insisted he should wear it. They tide a rope from the dinghy round his waist, and with the navigator holding the end of the rope he climbed out of the astrohatch. 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 I 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 a foothold. I held on with one hand, till I had got two footholds on the wing. Fire and blast from the Messerschmitt's cannon shells had stripped part of the wing covering, and that helped. Then I caught hold of some of the sections of the wing with my 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 *bould 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 astropatch, and worked, myself back on to the wing again. It was just a matter of getting something to hang on to. It was like being in a terrific gale, only much worse than any gale I have ever known. As I got along the wing I was behind the airscrew, and so I was in the slip-stream as well.

“THOUGHT 1 WAS GOING

"Once or twice I though I was going. I had the cockpit cover tucked underneath me 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 on my chest prevented me from getting close enough to the wing, and the wind kept on lifting me. 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. As soon as I moved my right hand the cover blew out of the hole again, and had gone before I could grab it. “After that there was nothing to do but 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, and by this time I was pretty well all in. Hardest of the lot was getting my right leg in. In the end the navigator reached out and pulled it in.” Over the North Sea the crew jettisoned the front guns and ammunition flares. 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 flame from the petrol pipe went out. The pilot flew inland, and with no flaps and no brakes, and with the bomb door open, 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. I hope we don’t mess up your flare path too badly when we land.” He landed safely.