Andy Anderson - Evasive tactics

Transcript

It was a very maneuverable airplane. What we used, the normal tactics to get out of aircraft attack, by waiting until they were almost on top of you and that we could keel it over and pull it back and the aircraft would just spin on itself, almost. It was so maneuverable and these other aircraft would just shoot past because you were doing about 120, 130 and they were doing 300.

So what they did, in the end, was these JU 88's, they were equipped with cannon and they used to sit well back because the range of the cannon was much better than our 303 machine guns. So to avoid that we would increase speed as much as we could and then when they started a fire we'd pulled right back and slow down and of course they would overtake us and then they'd be within range of our 303's.

At our tail-gunner's, like his Lordship there, were pretty accurate. And they didn't like it. I've never heard of them approaching one of our aircraft with less than four of theirs. And one of our skippers, Stan Chilcott escaped from sixteen of them. Sixteen! They had one patrol of eight and when they found Stan they called on another squadron of eight and he escaped. Now, that is incredible.