Description
Mr. Power describes a mission to bomb a railway bridge.
Robert Power
Robert Power was born in 1920, in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. He grew up in a small fishing village with a one-room schoolhouse. Before enlisting in 1942, Mr. Power studied biochemistry. He served as a pilot in the RAF and spent 26 years in the military. After the war, Mr. Power returned to medicine and became a doctor.
Transcript
For most of the, most of the ... I think there’s one thing that stands in our mind. There was one railroad bridge that we were trying to get with bombs. A lot of American bombs didn’t work that well. It went right through the bridge, and it exploded at the bottom of the deep ravine, but it didn’t explode on the railways, so the railroad’s intact. And that time, along comes a train, and it stops just before it crosses the bridge. And all the passengers get out, and that’s fine. And for some unknown reason, the engineer, a very brave soul - a little silly, but brave - tried to take the train across the bridge. And of course, that’s basically all we needed, something to hit. And we hit the, we hit the train of course and blew up, blew up the bridge. And the poor engineer went with it. But I always thought of the fellow that did that, you know. Should have got some kind of an award.