Caught By A Night Fighter

We were bombing — it turns out — was what they call a buzz bomb sight in Northern France. They didn’t know what it was, they they didn’t know. They say there’s a massive pile of stuff that’s going into these sights along the coast and we don’t know what it is and these are your targets. And of course they were bunkers where they shot the flying bombs and of course this was before they started to hit England with them. So anyway, these were our targets and the night fighter caught us, that was all. The engineer was wounded and the motors were shot up. Two of the four motors were messed up and the pilot said, “Oh we’d better bail out,” he said, “We’re down to 1000 feet.” And I looked at my altimeter and I said, “We’re at 11,000 feet is what mine reads.” “Oh.” he said, “Oh, oh, oh okay.” So he panicked a bit and so we said ok we’ll see ... the bomb aimer went back and the mid-upper gunner got together to help the engineer and we decided well we’ll try and get home. We’re fairly close but we threw everything out that we could as far as weight went and we were losing petrol you see. So wireless op sent out a Mayday and Friston in Southern England answered the call. I had to look up and see where Friston was and say ok this is where we have to fly to get there. So we got there and the white cliffs of Dover, you, you’ve seen them, well there are rivers that come down to the sea periodically. So there’s a dip in the ... and well would you believe we were flying in one of those? Up one of those rivers. The Downs, of course, were behind the cliffs. We were flying around (along this river) looking for this airdrome and then finally the mid-upper gunner said, “It’s up there!” Here we were flying below the airdrome. So we had to fly uphill to land. We woke up the next morning after we got out of there ... and the pilot had said at the time, “Get ready were going to, we’ve lost hydraulics. We’ll ground loop it to port, to left.” Well it turned out that the right tire had been blown all to hell so when we touched down of course, we ground looped to the right instead. Well we all scrambled the hell out of there. So when we got up the next morning and looked at it we saw if we’d gone over the way we wanted to go we’d have gone over a 200 foot cliff into the English Channel.

Mr. Wickens describes a nearly tragic bombing run over Germany’s V2 rocket sites

Donald Wickens

Mr. Wickens was born in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan. Despite the scarcity of jobs during the depression, he took employment with the Bank of Montreal, where he worked for two years prior to enlisting. Although not initially eager to do so, Mr. Wickens decided to join his friends who had preceded him into the service. Unlike many of his friends, however, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force with the intention of becoming a navigator, and completed his training in Portage La Prairie. Once overseas, Mr. Wickens became a member of 434 Blue-Nose squadron and took part in 37 bombing and mine laying missions over Northern Europe. He and the rest of his aircrew were decorated after surviving two air attacks in which their aircraft was disabled. After leaving the service, Mr. Wickens returned to the Bank of Montreal. He currently resides in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.