大象传媒

MISFORTUNES OF WAR

During WW11 when I was about 9 or 10 years old. My friend Ivor Luscombe and I were collecting food for our pet rabbits near the coast above the Devon village of Stoke-in-Teignhead where we lived. A Spitfire, in obvious trouble, spluttered over and crashed in the hills on the other side of the village. We ran to Ivor's bungalow about half a mile away and told his father who then went hotfoot to see if he could find the crash site. After a frantic search, Ivor's father found the crashed spitfire. It had ploughed into a hedge where the Merlin had parted company from the airframe, which had then travelled on about a further 50 yards. Fortunately it had not caught fire and the pilot was still alive, albeit with two broken legs.

Ivor's father then ran about a mile down hill to a phone box in the village. People generally didn't have phones in those days. In due course, an old ambulance arrived ftom Newton Abbot which looked a bit like Corporal Jones van in Dad's Army. This vehicle could not negotiate the steep and narrow lanes, so the ambulance crew consisting of an old driver and a very portly middle aged nurse, neither of whom were much better than the ambulance on the hills. I remember my mother being a strong country woman, placed her hand in the small of that nurse's back and propelled her onwards and upwards at a brisk pace to the crash site. The pilot was carried back ftom the hills on a stretcher to the ambulance and thence off to hospital. Some three months later, the pilot sent a thank you message ftom a temporary military hospital (previously a hotel) in Torquay where he was convalescing.

Unfortunately, at that time, Torquay sustained one of it's few raids of the war. The attack was made by a squadron of Focke Wolfe F190 Butcher Birds, three of which were brought down by the local Bofors Gunners positioned around the coast. One of these crashed in a cliff top field near Maidencombe, our favourite fishing spot. It gouged a furrow across the field, sliced through some saplings on the cliff edge, and then fell into the water some 200ft below. The Luftwaffe pilot did not get out of the cockpit. Sad news followed later when we learned that the Butcher Birds had hit the military hospital and our Spitfire pilot was among those killed. No sympathy for the dead Luftwaffe pilot in our village. Such are the misfortunes of war.

Stan Lock

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.