Transcript
We used to go to briefing before we set off and they'd unveil a map, a huge map the size of the wall here and the flight lieutenant who was in charge would then tell us where we were going and we'd never flew straight at to the target, we'd always zigzag to try and fool them to where we were going so that was our, and of course, toward the end we were going to Berlin often and that's when our hearts would sink because as soon as you saw Berlin because we knew that the losses were so heavy that your, the cards were on the table that we wouldn't get through.
Those days you just accepted it. You didn't query it. You thought, well this could be my last trip because you were losing friends all the time and you knew that the cards were there, especially going to Berlin.
Berlin was about thirty miles across with searchlights, just like daylight and you used to see aircraft going down all the time. We'd lose forty a night, forty crews a night and you'd see the plane going down and then a huge explosion. So we knew the odds were, we'd been shot up before but we'd always managed to get away and came back but we knew the odds were bad.
We were senior crew of the squadron and this was my fifteenth operation so you could see we had, nobody got through a tour in those years. A tour could be 28 or 30. Depends on how difficult the targets were.
The casualties in 460 were shocking and good men and when I was there, you see, my navigator became a doctor and a lot of them were far better educated than me and they were valuable people lost. See I wasn't very valuable because I was only just a labourer but they were valuable. We lost some marvellous men there and to me it was a shame.
Two of my friends asked me to get in touch with their families if they were shot down but I was shot down the same time as them so I never, it wasn't until I got back to Australia that I could do that. But they, like me, they knew it was on for any one of us.
