Saturday - January 15, 2011

Flight Lieutenant Tom Hughes, RAF, RIP

In spite of Obama’s apparent lack of respect (I perceive) for this messed up island, today brings another one of those obits honoring a Battling Brit from the last war.  And how appropriate is should concern the RAF.

This is the obit of the only RAF pilot to bail out of a Bf-109.  Read on.

Flight Lieutenant Tom Hughes (RIP)

Flight Lieutenant Tom Hughes, who has died aged 89, was almost certainly the only member of the wartime RAF to bail out of an enemy fighter – in his case a Messerschmitt Bf 109; later in the conflict (back in his Spitfire) he was shot down during the battle of Monte Cassino.

Hughes had flown to Gibraltar in late 1942 to test Spitfires that had been shipped to the airfield in crates. He then joined No 72 Squadron ahead of Operation Torch – the invasion of north-west Africa.

From January 1943 he was constantly in action, flying from desert airstrips in support of the British First Army as it advanced towards Tunisia. On March 2 the engine of his Spitfire failed and he had to crash-land. The next day a search party found him walking back to his lines and he was flying two days later.

After victory in the desert, No 72 moved to Malta in June in preparation for the invasion of Sicily. On July 5 his formation was escorting USAAF bombers when they encountered a large force of Axis fighters. In the ensuing melee Hughes thought he damaged a Messerschmitt Bf 109, though postwar analysis suggests that it probably crashed.

On July 12, two days after the Sicily landings, No 72 encountered another large mixed force of enemy fighters and bombers. Squadron pilots accounted for a number and Hughes was credited with destroying an Italian fighter-bomber.

When the squadron moved to the Sicilian airfield of Comiso, RAF pilots discovered a number of flyable Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters. Hughes flew one against a Spitfire to compare their respective capabilities, but on another flight the German aircraft suffered an engine failure and he had to bail out. He ended up parachuting into a vineyard and, after convincing the locals that he was not a German, enjoyed their hospitality. Hughes thus had the unique distinction of qualifying for the Caterpillar Club having bailed out of an enemy aircraft.

Returning from a dive-bombing sortie supporting the troops attacking Monte Cassino, Hughes’s aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he crash-landed, suffering severe burns to his legs.

He was made a PoW and transported to Germany, where he was put into a hospital. Hughes later related that the patients on his ward were used by German staff as guinea pigs for drugs testing, and that some of them died.

He managed to escape, he said, after a visit from a German general whom he managed to annoy by claiming: “I have flown both the Me 109 and the Spitfire and can confirm that the Spitfire is the better aircraft.” His insolence saw him transferred to solitary confinement, but he always said that his quip had saved his life by getting him removed from the hospital.

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Posted by peiper     on 01/15/2011 at 11:08 AM   
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