Details
Flight Lieutenant Hornell was flying as aircraft captain on Consolidated Canso amphibians with 162 (Bomber Reconnaissance Squadron), RCAF from RAF Wick in Northern Scotland, when the following deed took place for which he was awarded the VC.
On 24 June 1944 on sea patrol near the Faroes in the North Atlantic, Flight Lieutenant Hornell's twin-engined Catalina amphibian aircraft was attacked and badly damaged by the German U-boat U-1225; nevertheless he succeeded in sinking the U-1225 and then with superhuman effort managed to bring his aircraft down on the heavy swell, the plane blazing furiously. There was only one serviceable dinghy which could not hold all the crew so they took it in turns in the water. By the time the survivors were rescued after 21 hours, Flight Lieutenant Hornell was blinded and weak from exposure and cold. He died shortly after being picked up.
He is buried in Lerwick Cemetery, Shetland Islands. His medal is on loan to the Air Command Headquarters in Winnipeg.
Read more about this topic: David Ernest Hornell
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)