The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

Initially, he panicked, and although he managed to undo his radio leads
and harness and got himself into position to bale out, he had completely
forgotten to open the canopy. ‘By now,’ he noted, ‘I was covered in petrol
and glycol and there were flames everywhere.’ He began trying to pull back
the sliding canopy but whilst doing so, the Hurricane obligingly turned over
on its back and at that moment all the flames, which had been billowing
upwards, were now drawn away from him. With the canopy at last open, he
fell out of the plane, and pulled the ripcord on his parachute. ‘Still the 110
was shooting at me,’ he wrote, ‘and then he was past and gone.’
Floating down gently, he now became aware that he had been wounded
in the back and also the leg. In fact, he had had a miraculous escape and not
just from the flames. Only a short time before, the CO, Squadron Leader
‘Bull’ Hallahan, had decided that all the squadron’s Hurricanes should be
fitted with armour plating behind the pilot’s seat. This had duly been done
despite the risk to the aircraft’s balance and performance. A bullet had
passed underneath this plating and, having hit his harness, wounded Billy in
the back. But another bullet had struck the plating directly behind his head.
Without it, he would have been dead.
Drifting down into a field, Billy soon discovered that his wounds were
not his only problem. With blond hair and blue eyes and wearing peacetime
overalls, he looked decidedly teutonic. Frenchmen arrived on the scene
armed with scythes and pitchforks, convinced they had captured a Boche.
‘With a little difficulty,’ noted Billy, ‘I was able to persuade them that I was
indeed a “pilote anglais”, whereupon they all embraced me.’
Taken to some French medics, he was patched up, put in a schoolroom
with a number of wounded Frenchmen, and then finally rescued by his
fellow 1 Squadron pilot Paul Richey, who arranged for him to be taken to
hospital in Chartres. Billy had been lucky. He would fly again.
As at Dinant, it was the infantry within the panzer divisions that actually
made it across the Meuse, destroyed the mass of French bunkers, and
established a tentative bridgehead. Reaching the bank of the river at the
Draperie Sedannaise, Guderian was delighted to see that a number of men
had already safely made it to the other bank. Quickly jumping in a dinghy
himself, he followed, and clambering up the other bank was met by
Oberstleutnant Balck, commander of the 1st Rifle Regiment.