Description
Mr. Hatch describes being wounded in the head, blinded by his own blood, and not remembering how he landed his aircraft after a dogfight with a German aircraft.
George Frederick Hatch
George Frederick Hatch was born in Manchester, England, on May 15, 1898. He moved to Colborne, Ontario, with his parents in 1904. After his father was killed in the Boer War, Mr. Hatch worked on the family farm. He ran away to enlist at the age of sixteen, and, with the help of a creative recruiter, was accepted into the 20th Canadian Overseas Infantry Battalion, going overseas in May 1915. He spent Christmas at Ypres, and then saw serious action at the Somme, where he was wounded. Mr. Hatch then joined the Royal Flying Corps, firstly as a “volunteer” machine gunner and then as a fully qualified pilot. He was shot down and, although partially blinded by his own blood, was able to land safely behind his own lines. After the war, Mr. Hatch emigrated to the United States, living in Virginia, then Montana. He and his wife were killed in a car accident on November 26, 1986.
Transcript
I was shot down myself. Got a bullet through the top of my head and I’m in a French hospital. When I got hit, I don’t know if it was a flying wire or whether it was a bullet, but the blood was pouring over my goggles and I couldn’t see a thing, up in a dogfight at 6000 feet. I lifted off my goggles and I had a job keeping my eyes clear and my head was throbbing so badly as if my head was going to leave my shoulders and I knew I was going to pass out and I wanted to get down badly. I put it into a dive and a tailspin to get down to the ground as fast as I could. That was the longest getting down to the ground you ever saw. It may have only been three or four minutes, but it seemed to me three or four hours. When I got where I felt I was close enough to the ground, I levelled off and I don’t remember any more. But they told me in the hospital, when I was brought in there, that I kept on reaching for something. They wanted to know what I was reaching for. And I was reaching for the joystick, to right the joystick so I could, to right the plane