In 1978 Mr A.O. MORLEY (Bush) and I were sent to audit Walvis Bay branch. Janna van Wyk, the manager knew the area well and took us to a number of places of interest. One Sunday saw us picking up garnets some distance from the town with Janna, on a relative flat, pebbly stretch of Namib Desert, with hardly any sand. I noticed he was deep in thought and staring off into the distance and wondered what he was looking at or for. Standing out there in the Namib, he told me this story. I’m sorry if technical details are sketchy but he gave me few.
During the War, Bush was a tail gunner on a coastal patrol aircraft (I surmise it may have been SAAF 27 Squadron and the aircraft, possibly a Vickers Wellington or a Lockheed Ventura) which flew night patrols up the West Coast, to the Rooikop base near Walvis Bay, from Cape Town. After taking off from Cape Town, they struck an unexpected headwind on their way up to Rooikop and before long it became obvious that they were using fuel at an unprecedented rate and that it would not see them through to their destination.
The pilot came on the intercom, informed the crew of the situation and told them to do whatever they could to face setting down blind in the dark desert somewhere. Bush said he was sure his day had come because the chances of landing without crashing were virtually nil. One can hardly imagine the tension in the plane when one by one, the engines sputtered to a standstill. There was no moon that night and while they knew the Namib awaited them, they could not see what that brave pilot was gliding down to. The wheels were down and the pilot simply did his best not to stall the gliding aircraft.
One can just imagine the prayers that went out that night and totally miraculously, the wheels touched ground and simply kept on rolling as if on a runway. Against all odds, they had come down on a flat, featureless stretch of desert, with no dunes or anything else to trip them up and wipe out the plane. When the sun rose, they could hardly believe their eyes. Landing almost anywhere else would have been disastrous. They could not have done better in broad daylight.
It must have been a very shaky, overjoyed bunch of fellows who were able to radio ahead to Rooikop, from where fuel was brought out to them. Amazingly, the plane was able to safely take off from where it had landed and finally reach its destination. Bush said that he was sure he would die that day and he regarded every day after that as a bonus.
Like so many men who served, Bush never spoke about the War, so I count myself very privileged to have been told this story. I often wonder about the other fellows on that plane and whether the story has not been written down somewhere in the war literature before. Whatever the case may be, I offer the story to you folks who worked with Bush and hope you’ll also wonder at the miracle which happened that dark night.
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