Education
Two of the three bombs dropped failed to explode and, despite having no previous experience of bomb disposal, Patton soon attended the scene.
Two of the three bombs dropped failed to explode and, despite having no previous experience of bomb disposal, Patton soon attended the scene.
He was raised in Burlington and Hamilton, Ontario. At the height of the Battle of Britain when the Hurricane was the principal British fighter aircraft, Lieutenant Patton was a chemical engineering officer in the 1st Battalion, Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers, recently arrived in Britain and based at Boxhill, near Dorking, Surrey. On 21 September, at 8.30am when he was leading a team clearing debris at the bomb-damaged Vickers-Armstrongs aircraft factory at Brooklands near Weybridge, a lone Luftwaffe Junkers Ju88 attacked the Hawker Hurricane factory on the South-West side of Brooklands.
One unexploded bomb was buried under part of the factory floor but another had passed through the main building and ended up on an adjacent hardstanding.
Patten decided that the unexploded bomb had to be removed as soon as possible before it damaged the vital factory, so with the help of four others (including his adjutant Captain Douglas West C Cunningham and Vickers Home Guard Section Leader A H Tilyard-Burrows ), he rolled it onto a sheet of corrugated iron and secured it to the back of a 15cwt truck. While Patton sat on the tailgate of the lorry to watch over the bomb, the driver towed the bomb out onto the aerodrome where it was then rolled very carefully into an existing bomb crater where it subsequently exploded harmlessly the next morning. he received Canadian citizenship as a result of his participation with the Royal Canadian Engineers.
He was also made an Honorary Member of the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Association.