While he flew Spitfires, Hurricanes and P-40s, the facial injury seems to have been in a Hurricane while flying out of Singapore
Slight thread drift from the OP which I am sure you will understand why.
On 3 September 1968, I flew the then PM John Gorton and entourage including Minister David Fairbairn, from Brisbane to Gladstone -Emerald -and overnighted at Mount Isa. Several journalists were aboard. The aircraft was HS 748 A10-595. Crew self as captain, P/O Jim Smith and P/O Barry Ney as copilots, F/L Ron Aitken navigator, Cpl's Tony Muspratt and Roy Philips as maintenance personnel and LACW Joan grant as stewardess.
During cruise between Gladstone and Emerald the aircraft had a duct pressure failure causing the aircraft to slowly depressurise. We made a gradual descent to below 10,000 ft for the remainder of the flight to Emerald and Mount Isa. The PM was advised that it may be bumpy below 10,000 ft and he understood.
At Mount Isa our two engineers fixed the broken duct. In the early hours of the following morning I received a phone call from a senior officer at RAAF HQ demanding to know WTF was going on as he had received intelligence that the morning newspapers would be publishing a story filed by one of the journalists aboard our aircraft. That story stated that when all pressurisation was lost en route Gladstone to Emerald, the pilot was forced to make an emergency power dive to enable the PM to breathe oxygen.
Today that would earn the title of Fake News. I explained to the senior officer that was all BS and there was no emergency and the descent had only required 500 feet per minute.
Next day was Mount Isa-Weipa -Groote Eylandt. Then the following day (5 September) GTE -Gove -Snake Bay -Darwin. Snake Bay is on Melville Island. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Bay_Airport
Shortly after take off from Snake Bay and heading to Darwin, Tony Eggleton, the press secretary to the PM came up front and asked if the PM could visit the cockpit as he wanted to see the spot where he had forced landed his Kittyhawk, 25 years earlier. I sat the PM in the co-pilot's seat and he flew the HS 748 very smoothly as we circled the remote beach at 500 feet. That done, he returned to his VIP chair in the cabin and we flew to Darwin.
After the engines were shut down, Tony Eggleton asked if it was OK for the press to publish that the PM had personally flown the 748 as it circled the place he had forced landed. I could see no problem with that but told Eggleton that the journalists should emphasise the fact that we never came below 500 ft, which was true.
The next day, the following story appeared in one of the southern newspapers.
GORTON SEES WHERE CRASHED
The Prime Minister, Mr Gorton, yesterday flew his Hawker Siddeley aircraft over the beach on which he crashed-landed as a wartime pilot 25 years ago. He took the controls of the 12-passenger plane for a few minutes over Melville Island, a few miles off the coast of Arnhem Land in north Australia.
The pilot had brought the aircraft down to 500 feet and then handed over to the Prime Minister. With the pilot alongside of him, Mr Gorton flew the aircraft along the Melville Island coastline until he spotted the beach.
“I just wanted to have a look at it again,” he said later in Darwin. “It is almost 25 years to the day since I put a Kittyhawk down on the beach during the war as a World War 2 pilot.”
In September, 1943, Mr Gorton made a crash landing on the beach with engine trouble. “It wasn’t really a crash landing. I landed on the sand with wheels down,” he said. The wheels caught and the small fighter plane tipped on its nose. He was stranded for six days and lived on turtle eggs until rescued.
Mr Gorton arrived in Darwin late yesterday at the half-way point of his six-day, three-State tour of major developmental projects in the north.
At least the journalist who filed that report wrote the truth. Not so, a journalist from a rival newspaper who said “The aircraft gave a sickening lurch as the Prime Minister took control.” I understood later it was that same journalist who described earlier pressurisation events as “an emergency power dive to enable the PM to breathe oxygen.” Drama sells newspapers so I am told.
The term “Fake News” wasn’t invented then but these were two examples where the term was warranted.