Geoff Fisken, 1916–2011

When the Japanese shot down Geoff Fisken’s fighter over Singapore in February 1942, the hardy New Zealander managed to crash-land his ruined plane. It was only once he’d clambered from the wreckage that he noticed a 4-inch piece of shrapnel protruding from his hip. Unfazed, he grabbed a pair of pliers and attempted to yank it out himself. The task was eventually done in the hospital. “[They] strapped it up,” he later recalled, “and I was able to fly again in three or four days.”

Fisken’s physical toughness befitted a man seemingly “hewn from the rugged Wairarapa coastline” of New Zealand, said the Rotorua Review. Born to a family of sheep farmers, Fisken began flying Gypsy Moths at the age of 14 and volunteered for the Royal New Zealand Air Force soon after war broke out. In 1940 he was assigned to a military base in Singapore to fly American-made Brewster Buffaloes alongside the British air forces.

In December 1941, the Japanese invaded Malaya, said The New York Times, and Fisken joined the “vastly outnumbered” British forces to take them on. By February 1942, he had shot down six Japanese fighters in highly dangerous conditions. At times there were 16 enemy aircraft for every Allied airplane, so Allied pilots had to dive from on high to attack rather than carry out risky short-range maneuvers. “Anybody in Malaya who tried to dogfight was just a bloody fool,” he said. “You were dead in five minutes.”

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Fisken later flew a P-40 Kittyhawk nicknamed the Wairarapa Wildcat alongside American pilots at Guadalcanal, said the London Telegraph. On July 4, 1943, he shot down three Japanese planes, prompting Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz to reward him personally with five cases of Canadian Club whiskey. He retired at the end of 1943 with 11 confirmed kills, making him the war’s “most successful British Commonwealth fighter pilot.”

After the war, Fisken returned to New Zealand and was a sheep farmer until his retirement, in 1976. His son, Michael, said that his father rarely spoke about the war. But when he did, Michael said, it was to “tell us how good he was.”