Bruce Batchelor
I Could Be Wrong
by RAY WOLBRECHT
British naval commander Lord Louis Mountbatten was an integral force in the Far East during WWII. His naval career blossomed between the two world wars and in June 1939 he was made commander of a flotilla of destroyers in the Mediterranean.
But his long prestigious military career might have come to a screeching halt, without the quick thinking of a Kyle man.
Mountbatten’s career took him all over the continent. In May 1941 his flagship, the HMS Kelly, was beset by German torpedo bombers; the ship and half the crew were lost. In October 1943, he was appointed Supreme Allied Commander of the Southeast Asia Command and worked with Gen. William Slim to defeat the Japanese offensive against India and the re-conquest of Burma. In 1947 he reluctantly oversaw the division of India into Pakistan (East and West, the former now called Bangladesh) and India. In 1979 Mountbatten was on his boat off the coast of Ireland when it was blown up by IRA terrorists.
His long career could have ended long before 1979, if it hadn’t been for the quick thinking of one of our own Kyle heroes who saved Mountbatten from a fiery plane crash in China in the early summer of 1945.
Bruce Batchelor lives with his wife Wanda in Mountain City and will soon be 92 years old. He was part of the ATC (Air Transport Command) in China and flew a mule – a C-47, which was the backbone of getting supplies to an army that marched on its stomach. Their responsibilities included transporting troops and bringing back the wounded.
Batchelor’s saving of Mountbatten occurred in 1945 at the Kunming Air Base. Being given clearance to proceed to the base’s runway #1, Batchelor was stopped by the control tower, which radioed, “Daisy on the field.” Not knowing what that meant he asked the control tower to explain. After a few moments the tower said it was the Viceroy of India. “Just great,” Batchelor thought, “Either Lord Mountbatten was coming or leaving and that meant we could be delayed for minutes or hours due to the security of the situation.”
He and the crew sat on the tarmac in the sweltering heat, succumbing to a sour disposition that the climate so often instigated. Suddenly he heard a roar that started with a rumbling and then ended with an ear-piercing scream. A huge, jet black, four- engine AVRO “Lancaster” passed him on the left not 30 feet away, going at least 60 mph.
“It rocked my C-47 so violently that I thought it had hit us. His wingtip passed right over ours with no contact. The 15-foot yellow orange fire plumes from his Merlin engines seemed to come right in my window. I know the dirt, stones and dust did. He even smelled bad.”
Batchelor remembered that RAF pilots loved to scare the pants off the Yanks whenever they got the opportunity. For pure maximum pucker power the pilot knew exactly how close he could get. Lord Mountbatten’s personal pilot was a highly accomplished aerial prankster.
As soon as the Lancaster landed, the pilot began to turn around. He spent just enough time on the tarmac to “load the lord.” Batchelor was told to hold his position while the tower gave permission for the Lancaster to begin an immediate takeoff. After a few moments of radio silence, another voice broke in, “We have a fully loaded C-46 with a single engine emergency for a straight in run for landing.” The tower’s first instinct was to wave the C-46 off and protect the important official. But the plane was coming in hard and refused to wave off while the Lancaster was headed directly into the C-46’s landing path.
Batchelor saw the C-46 coming in with its right prop feathered and an engine cylinder poking out of the cowling. It was falling like a rock. He was going down and in. Batchelor was the only one on the field who had a clear view of the situation. He and the Lancaster were the only planes on the field and he saw immediately what was about to happen. On the radio Batchelor yelled, “Lancaster, hold your position. That C-46 is right on your back!”
The pilot of the Lancaster locked his main gear wheels immediately and skidded 15 feet before stopping. His momentum raised the fuselage to almost a horizontal position and the tail wheel left the ground more than a foot. It then came down with a resounding thump and a cloud of dust. The fully loaded C-46 came in hard and Batchelor recalls he never understood how the landing gear survived the hit. “His main gear vibrated fore and aft two feet. He bounced four or five feet only once and taxied down the runway like nothing happened,” Batchelor recalled.
Lord Mountbatten was not destined to die that day thanks to the instincts of one of our own. Mountbatten’s career did not end in a fiery crash in the summer of 1945 at the age of 45. The fiery death was delayed until the IRA bomb did its work in 1979.
Part of this Memorial Day holiday is to honor the fallen. But I like to give credit to the living who are part of the “Greatest Generation.”
