Phil Elger/Bill Evans - Death of rear gunner

Transcript

Bill: On our twelfth trip, the first time I'd been to Germany, we went to a place called Gelsenkirchen, and very successfully, we thought, we dropped our bombs and coming home, two, no, one JU88s attacked us.

Our rear gunner carried out his job beautifully.

He told us to dive to port and to dive for starboard and corkscrew and doing all this and anyhow we got rid of this plane and it didn't get us and so we were all uptight, I suppose, the fact that it was the first time we'd seen an enemy aircraft so close and anyway we landed or we were about to land and we hit the ground with the two front wheels and the back one, I don't know what happened but the tail wheel came off or something and the plane just went, doing, in halves on the runway and of course the poor old rear gunner, I think he was so excited at having done so good a job, got out of his or was getting out of his turret as we landed and his head hit the handles and killed him.