John MacMillan Stevenson Patton, GC, CBE (29 August 1915 – 13 May 1996) was a Canadian Army officer, and the only Bermuda-born British person to be awarded the George Cross.
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 Box Hill, near Dorking, Surrey.
On 21 September, at 8.30 am when he was leading a team clearing debris at the bomb-damaged Vickers-Armstrongs aircraft factory at Brooklands near Weybridge, a lone Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88 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.
Patton 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 W C Cunnington 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.