Rusty LeitH AM DFC
Rusty LeitH AM DFC
An Australian Spitfire Pilot’s wartime memorabilia and photos.
Clot! Now you've
really made Churchill angryIn 29 January 1989, Spitfire FU-P (in which Rusty had the most wartime hours), was being flown in New Zealand by its new owner Sir Tim Wallis. Wallis had purchased the restored plane in the UK and shipped it to NZ to be part of his growing 'warbird' collection.
During a long cross-country flight, he omitted to make a vital transfer of fuel from wing tanks to the main tank. On approach to the South Island town of Waikupurau, the inevitable happened. He crash-landed in a field, damaging the underside of the Spitfire but fortunately not himself.
Wallis's accident report reflects his embarrassment and sense of guilt.
"You can imaging how I felt," he wrote, "having just damaged a very rare original Spitfire through fuel starvation."
A New Zealand newspaper brilliantly captured the incident in a cartoon – the ghost of Winston Churchill calls down from a cloud "Clot! Don't you realise that's about the last of the few."
The unfortunate incident of the angle approach indicator
In December 1944, Rusty was bringing Spitfire FU/C in to land at Matlask in Norfolk with 11 others when he misjudged his approach.
The outcome was a tetchy series of reports all the way up the chain of command to the Officer Commanding the Matlask Wing.
These sequence of reports (left) tell the full story of how bureaucracy was waging its own war amidst the life-and-death fury of aerial combat.
