After a break on
the 6th, Stuart Walch was in the air again. He led Blue Section on 238 Squadron’s
second morning patrol. They were ordered to patrol Portland at 17,000 feet then
on to Swanage. No enemy aircraft were spotted.
At Aston Down, Ken
Holland was really getting the hang of the Spitfire, putting in two hours of acrobatics
and dog fighting practice.
Meanwhile, over
at Hornchurch, Gordon Olive, Jack Kennedy’s old flight commander and fellow
cadet of Des Sheen and Pat Hughes, was in a spot of bother. He was leading 65
Squadron on an operation but, within minutes of take-off, his oxygen regulator
caught fire. He had to bale, but did not have enough height. As the cockpit filled
with smoke, he went into a vertical climb until he had reached an optimum
bale-out height. He jumped but the parachute failed to open. He saw that the
small pilot chute had caught in his flying boots. As he plummeted he managed to
untangle it and force the main canopy out. The jerk as it opened rendered him
unconscious. He came too and realised he was floating towards high tension
cables and was in rifle sight of two home guards. As he tried to avoid the cables
the canopy split, the keen home guarders fired and the potato field below appeared
to be rushing to greet him. Happily, the canopy held out, the home guard were
bad shots and the soil was soft. Safely back at Hornchurch, something suddenly
hit him: he had not aired and repacked the chute since Dunkirk. It had been
sitting in his cockpit, forgotten. No wonder it had failed. A cautionary tale. Interestingly,
when the squadron diarist wrote up the day’s events, he noted that there was
nothing of importance to report!
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Photo of Gordon Olive at Point Cook, 1936
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