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This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer, sarah Blackaby, from CVS Action Desk on behalf of Mr Finch and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Finch fully understands the site's terms and conditions

Two months after my nineteenth birthday I was cruising in my twin-engined Cessna Crane a few thousand feet above the sun-baked fields and woods of Northern Saskatchewan. It was 8th August 1942, and I was half way through my pilot training on the Commonwealth Air Training Plan.

The first phase had been learning to fly a light aircraft in Ontario, the friendly Tiger Moth biplane, beloved by pilots everywhere. I had been relieved to complete that task as there was, at that time, a surplus of pilots under training and those responsible were able to be sufficiently severe in standards that only half those starting the initial training were passed on to advanced training two months later.

I found the heavier, more powerful, Cranes formidable for the first few weeks, even after my solo flight on 29th July and had the uncanny feeling that it had a very strong will of its own, and that it was flying me, rather than me flying the Crane. However, the weekend was coming up, and I was in cheerful and confident mood 16 flights after my solo, 5 of them under my flying instructor’s guidance and the rest on my own.

One of my instructions was to practice steep turns and for this I had to be well away from the airfield. After taking off from the airfield just outside the little town of Yorkton I was cruising a long way to the north one hour and ten minutes later. I had to concentrate intently on my map-reading, as the country at this far northern point was a jigsaw puzzle of woods and lakes, broken by occasional fields. There were no roads or railway lines, and no towns, only scattered farmhouses, dust tracks for lanes, and no broad rivers or other aids to navigation. It was of the utmost importance not to get lost in that aerial desert.

Having roughly pinpointed my position, I eased into the first of the intended series of steep turns, clockwise, then anticlockwise. As the anticlockwise turn tightened I eased the control column first left, then farther and farther into my stomach so that I was looking left more than down to see the toy animals and trees rotating in an ever-decreasing radius until the required steep angle was achieved.

It was then I felt a pang of unease, as the smooth roar of the two engines was interrupted by a cough, then a rapid sequence of coughs and splutters, then silence, not only from one engine, but both, even as I was rapidly straightening the aircraft. Staggered, I found my mind flooded with thoughts. This was something for which my training had not prepared me. I ran hastily through possible causes as my momentum kept me level for, was it 30 seconds, or 60, but whatever it was it seemed a lifetime. I little realised that no cockpit check could help me, as the steep angle of the Crane in the turn had drained the petrol in the tank to one extreme end, causing an airlock, which could not clear as the plane recovered its equilibrium. I only found out this reason later.

There was nothing for it, I must accept the inevitability of the eerie silence, save for the wind whistling past the cabin, as that silence spoke volumes, and so did the fact that I was now beginning to glide, and lose height rapidly.

I told myself above all, I must keep icily calm and try to think clearly. I decided I had to do two things, apart from keeping control of the aircraft. I must decide which way the wind was blowing, in order to try to make my forced landing into wind. Next, with increasing urgency, I must decide where to attempt to crash land, as the ground was advancing at an alarming rate. I told myself I felt sure the airfield was ‘over there’, and if so the wind direction must be ‘so-and-so’, and that I must therefore land heading ‘that way’.

As to a place to try to land that was not so easy. The ground at this point was largely uninhabited and uncultivated, being almost completely woods and forest, lakes, and rocky outcrop. Perhaps 5% of the land surface was fields, and these were only two in number within landing range. I had to think out which was best. One was much larger, but square in shape. The other was much smaller, very narrow, but long. Well, about half a mile long, with luck.

It is not easy when you are a child spinning round and round to work out which way is which when you stop, and it is not much different in an aircraft pulling out of a series of steep turns. I chose exactly the opposite to correct direction for the airfield direction, and so for the wind direction, and therefore chose to approach the field from the wrong direction. Trying to settle an aircraft under perfect conditions on a perfect runway is asking for trouble, if not flying into wind, so the venture was doomed, but I did not yet know that.

By now I was only about 1,000 feet above ground level, so I must start to plan a methodical approach, just as if I were planning a careful landing on the familiar runway. For this reason I flew so the field was on my left and made the attempt, first to fly past it in the opposite direction to landing, then I would turn left about a mile away, and then left again to make the approach. Above all, I must not lose sight of the field, which became the one chance of survival. I did manage this orderly sequence of events but on the approach found myself far too high, not then realising that I was flying downwind at an alarming ground speed (the airspeed and the groundspeed being critical to pilots — even in normal situations).

I passed over the field and decided to repeat the turn; left, left, left, and left again, to hope to line up again, and did so while struggling to keep the field in sight at my lower altitude, and trying to take care this time not to ‘undershoot’ . I managed the four orderly turns and made the second approach. Still I was too high and the groundspeed, no wonder, was unusually fast, so I found myself instinctively forcing the nose forward to lose the height. At a few hundred feet, about a quarter of a mile from the edge of the field, I considered rapidly whether to go round again (I realised I was too low by then), to lift the aircraft over the large wood ahead and aim for the big square field (not enough height to clear the wood), or to try to force it down on the field, even though my speed was still far too high to land.

I decided on the latter as I hurtled (it seemed to me) over the edge of the field. I could not think why the speed would not drop and, as I realised the aircraft was not going to settle, aimed for a gap on the right side of the end of the field. As the big wood was about 45 degrees angle to my path beyond the end of the field I aimed to turn left as I crossed the boundary, to miss the wood. But as I crossed that field boundary at about 100 m.p.h. and was about to bank left I saw it — the farmhouse.

There was no alternative, so I ripped into the wood. There was a fearful grinding, wrenching cacophony of noise, then absolute, ominous silence, save for a strange tinkling noise which could not be accounted for by breaking glass as it persisted for what seemed like many seconds. I realised I was still alive, and did not seem to feel any pain, but knew I had some injury, as there was a steady drip, drip, drip of blood from somewhere. I found out later that my face had whiplashed forward, causing my upper lip to hit the signalling device projection by the dashboard. Without the waist seat belt I would have gone bodily into the windscreen. This was my only injury in the middle of a total wreck.

The back of the aircraft was broken, leaving the body in two crazy sections. The starboard wing was completely ripped off and the starboard engine smashed out of recognition. The port wing was still recognisable but badly smashed. The port engine could still be made out as such but was damaged irrevocably. I knew — all the fellows knew — there had been about 6 recent accidents, all ‘fatals’ on the station. I had even been the pallbearer at one of the funerals, for my roommate, when we were unable to swat off the plague of mosquitoes which had infested us on that hot, humid evening, as we slow marched the coffin on that long, long, path from the chapel to the graveside. In every other crash the Crane had gone up in flames; they had a reputation for doing so.

I knew it all added up to a miracle.

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