Bob Jubb - Shot down

Transcript

On the third trip, which was to Dusseldorf, we had just bombed, and we'd just turned off the target, and the next thing, the starboard inner engine just erupted in flames. The fuel lines were severed and the fuel caught fire, and the whole wing was on fire.

So, I bailed out the crew, I said "Bail out". We all bailed out. I went down the hatch, to the front hatch and luckily the bomb aimer and the flight engineer had done the right thing. They had pulled out the hatch and put it up in the nose. In our drills we always stressed, I always said to them "When you pull up that hatch, if you've ever got to, put it in the nose. Don't try to put it out the hull", because quite a number of fellas would pull up the hatch and then try to put it through, and the airstream would grab it and lock it into the hatchway, and they were trapped. They couldn't get out. There was no time to run back and get out the rear hatch.

I was very lucky again that my crew had done the right thing. They'd remembered their training, and I noticed the hatch up in the nose. So I went up into the nose and faced aft and drop your legs through and drop down. Then I remember pulling the rip cord, and I looked at the bit of wire at the end of this ring, and I was sort of over and over, and then finally drifting down. For a while the moon was shining on the Rhine, and I thought "Jesus", the Rhine is about a mile wide, I thought I'm gonna land in the Rhine, but anyway I landed on the west bank. I drifted in under, you know those big pylons with power lines? I drifted in, how lucky can you be?

Instead of landing on them, I drifted in underneath, and it was in a field of mangels, big turnip things, so I pulled the chute off, and I bundled it up, and I pulled up one of these big mangels and put the chute in and put the mangels back on top again, and then I got there and I cut off my insignia, and I started running to the west. So, the first thing, in a backyard of a house there was some clothes hanging out to dry, so I borrowed a jacket. It was a brown jacket, and I put that on over my navy blue battle dress jacket. So now I have navy blue trousers and a brown jacket, and I was a foreign worker. I was immediately disguised so that was a bit of luck that I came upon that.