"Limies Have Guts"

Wrote Ernie Pyle from France:

We drove into the tiny town of La Detinais, a sweet old stone village. . . . As we stood there talking in the lonely field a soldier in coveralls ran up breathlessly and almost shouted:

"Hey, there's a man alive in one of those planes across the road! He's been trapped there for days! . . ."

We ran to the wrecked British plane, lying there upside down, and dropped on our hands and knees and peeked through a tiny hole in the side.

A man lay on his back in the small space of the upside-down cockpit. His feet disappeared somewhere in the jumble of dials and rubber pedals above him. His shirt was open and his chest was bare to the waist. He was smoking a cigaret.

"Oh, Hello." He turned his eyes toward me when I peeked in, and he said in a typical British manner of offhand friendliness, "Oh, hello."

"Are you all right?" I asked, stupidly.

He answered, "Yes, quite. Now that you chaps are here."

I asked him how long he had been trapped in the wrecked plane. He said he didn't know for sure as he had got mixed up about the passage of time. But he did know the date of the month he was shot down. He told me the date. And I said out loud, "Good God!"

For, wounded and trapped, he had been lying there for eight days!

Cockpit to Prison. His left leg was broken and punctured by an ack-ack burst. His back was terribly burned by raw gasoline. The foot of his injured leg was pinned rigidly under the rudder bar.

His space was so small he couldn't squirm around. He couldn't see out of his little prison. He had not had a bite to eat or a drop of water. . . .

Yet when we found him his physical condition was strong, and his mind as calm and rational as though he were sitting in a London club. He was in agony, yet in his correct Oxford accent he even apologized for taking up our time to get him out.

The American soldiers of our rescue party cussed . . . with open admiration. . . . One of them said, "God, but.these Limies have got guts!"

It took us almost an hour to get him out. We don't know whether he will live or not, but he has a chance. . . .

He was an R.A.F. flight lieutenant [Robert Gordon Lee] piloting a night fighter. Over a certain area the Germans began letting him have it from the ground with machine-gun fire. . . .

The plane's belly hit the ground. . . . Then it flopped tail over nose, onto its back. The pilot was absolutely sealed into the upside-down cockpit. . . .

When they finally laid him tenderly onto the canvas litter and straightened his left leg you could see the tendons relax and his facial muscles subside, and he gave a long half-groan, half-sigh of relief.

And that was the one sound of human weakness uttered by that man of great courage in his hour of liberation.

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