Transcript
I was shot down on December the second 1943. That was the big blitz on Berlin at that stage. Churchill was hoping to bomb them into submission, you know, that was the idea.
Night after night aircraft attacked Berlin. This was our fourth attempt on that trip to go to Berlin.
Well we were over the target and we'd just dropped the bombs and the bomb doors are huge, of course, and they take quite a while to open and we dropped our bombs then straight away we were attacked by a Focke-Wulf and a Messerschmitt and we couldn't manoeuvre because you must stay dead level while you're bombing and, of course, the bomb doors take a fair while to close.
They're huge doors. The pilot's got to fly steady because the wind resistance with those was…That was our fate. If we'd got further away we might have had a chance but we had no chance we were sitting ducks and they just came at us and they shot the two engines out.
The mid upper gunner who was just above me, they copped him and the two engines had caught fire badly and the flames and then the pilot gave the order to bail out. Of course we all bailed out, all but him unfortunately. He never got out.
Well the pilot held the plane. He tried to weave because the fighters were still coming at us and I was directing the operations from up above because the mid upper gunner who usually does that he was killed and he kept weaving and weaving backwards and forwards and we got rid of the fighters because they must have thought we were gone anyway and then he gave the order to bail out because he couldn't hold the plane much longer because we were burning so fiercely, of course, it didn't take us much longer to decide to get out because we knew it was going to blow up if we didn't and the pilot, the navigator, bomb aimer all go out the front.
Myself and the rear gunner and the mid upper gunner, we go out the back and when I got down to the back by then the rear gunner had opened the door and the flames were so bad he didn't want to jump but I didn't hesitate, I jumped through the flames and he must have followed but we did get burnt a bit, across the face, but it saved our lives.
