Attributed to possible engine failure , an RAAF Wirraway of No 12 Squadron, which had taken off from Batchelor on an anti-submarine sortie , crashed about 12 miles west of Anson Bay , near Mt Litchfield, October 3, 1942. The pilot, Flying Officer Peter Roger Forrest Hughes, 25, and observer, Sergeant S. V. Corcoran, were killed . Hughes , from a prominent Sydney Catholic family, was buried in the Adelaide River War Cemetery as was Corcoran. Soon after, Peter's grieving , widowed mother, Eileen Hughes, came north from Bowral , NSW, to see her son’s grave. In Darwin , she got a lift in a truck which crashed on the way to the cemetery and both she and driver were killed.
The pilot’s father, Roger , a classical scholar , had taken up medicine ,and enlisted in the 1st Field Ambulance of the Australian Army Medical Corps in WW1. Posted to the front in France, he had only been there less than a week when he was fatally wounded due to a direct hit by a shell on a dressing station in which he was attending a wounded soldier . The patient was killed instantly ; Hughes received terrible leg injuries.
His brother, Geoffrey , a pilot of No 10 Squadron, searching for him, found him near death , and was there when he received the Last Sacraments. Offspring of Geoffrey Hughes , an Australian flying hero, include Tom Hughes , who piloted Sunderland flying boats over the North Sea in WW11 , a former Federal politician who took a cricket bat to Vietnam War protestors who invaded the grounds of his home , now a prominent QC ; the renowned Time magazine art critic and author,Robert Hughes ,whose books include The Fatal Shore , Barcelona, Nothing If Not Critical, Heaven and Hell In Western Art ,Goya and an excellent memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, Knopf , 2006.
NOTE: In the Australian War Memorial(AWM) collection is a gold St Jean D’Acre Medal, awarded by the Sultan of Turkey to members of the British , Austrian and Turkish army and navy forces under the command of Sir George Napier, who took part in the 1840 liberation of the City of Acre , on the Syrian coast, after eight years of Egyptian occupation. The medal was part of a collection assembled by the Hon. Sir Thomas Hughes, Sydney’s first Lord Mayor and Member of the Legislative Council of NSW, presented to the AWM in memory of his son , Captain Roger Forrest Hughes who died of wounds in WW1, detailed above, and his grandson, Peter Roger Forrest Hughes , killed in the NT aircrash .
