Lucky

James Flint won the George Medal when on a cold night in 1941 he swam back into a sinking Handley Page Hampden bomber off the Norfolk coast to save his badly wounded navigator.  Sergeant Pilot Flint from 49 Squadron, was flying at 5,000ft with the the British coast in sight when two German night fighters caught his aircraft P-Peter unawares over the North Sea.  The bomber was raked from nose to tail with 20mm cannon, wounding the navigator and air gunner, causing flares to explode inside the aircraft and knocking out the intercom.

Flint put the Hampden into a steep dive, turning sharp right as he did so and, plunging almost to sea level, shook the fighters off.   But the damage had been done.  Ominous wisps of smoke began to trail from his port engine, and although the coast was not far away, Flint realised that they were not going to make it back to base.  With the beaches heavily mined and bristling with antitank obstacles, he was obliged to attempt to ditch a few hundred metres from the foreshore off Cromer, luckily extinguishing the engine fire as the aircraft hit the water.  As he and his crew crawled from the aircraft they found their dinghy had been riddled with enemy fire and they would have to swim for the shore.

But as they set off Flint realised that Sergeant Fitch, his navigator, was not with them.  Assuming that he must be unable to extricate himself, Flint went back into the Hampden.  In the cramped interior of the bomber he eventually located the man in the dark.  The citation for his medal recorded that despite the inrushing water he hauled the badly wounded and unconscious airman through an escape hatch and, as the aircraft tail tipped skyward and disappeared, he swam for shore dragging his crewman behind him.  He was, he said decades later, exhausted by the effort and had to be carried up the beach.

At the inauguration in 2012 of the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park, London, he insisted on standing to attention as the memorial was opened by the Queen in memory of the 55,500 bomber crewmen who never came home.  "You just had to get on with it," he said of those distant days.  "Some made it, other didn't.  I was one of the lucky ones."

Obituary Wing Commander James Flint, DFC, GM, DFM, AE, 1913 - 2013, The Times, 20th December, 2013.