Our Guns Didn’t Work

So, you know, we moved to the Cocos Islands after about ten trips or so. The Japanese were so far down, we couldn’t reach them. So they moved us down to the Cocos Islands, straight from the lower part, up through Sumatra, up and so we get down there. It’s beautiful down there. Do you know where the Cocos Islands are? Interviewer: No.Who’s interviewing who here? They’re halfway between Ceylon and Australia, so we had to fly to Ceylon, take off there and we took off at dark. We flew all night, and took star shots. We crossed the equator at midnight and we got … hit the Cocos Islands in the morning. And I was only two minutes out in my ETA. Pretty good, eh? Anyway, after we were there for awhile, they decided there was an airfield up at Bankor, Sumatra, and we were supposed to, we had to, suppose to bomb it before they bombed us. So, there was supposed to be four Liberators go. But they only got three away, so three of us took off, and we skipped across there. We had to go in, the last little bit, at a hundred feet, to get under the radar. And so we get in there, and we found the airport. But anyway, they heard us coming, I guess. So, a Tony took off - a Jap fighter - and he came zooming in on us, like that, and I wrote in my diary that I saw him. I was in the astrodome and I ducked. But anyway, he shot at us, and his guns didn’t work. So, Charlie was a pretty good pilot, and he manoeuvred around behind him. And our front gunner had a shot at him, and our front and our guns didn’t work. So there we were. That’s the way to fight a war. So after that, we went in on the airstrip at a hundred feet. And down there, twelve bombs, bing-bang-bang. I watched the lights go out down there, and then we got to the end and I thought we were gonna crash. It went rolling around there, and Tal and I, the bomb aimer, thought sure we’re crashing into the woods there. But it was just Charlie doing evasive action, and we got home okay. But on one of the other planes, they got hit. They got hit and I always thought it was ground fire. But my pilot told me afterwards, it was aircraft fire. I’m not sure which it was, but he got, anyway, the navigator got hit. And we was a friend of mine and he got killed. And we buried him out on the ties, out on the water there, on the Cocos Islands. I remember the funeral very well to this day. Very well. We went down and took him, splish-splash there, and back home through the water. And he’s in my video. It’s about that funeral on that trip. That was the last trip of the war. That’s the last raid. I think it was the last raid the Canadians made, but maybe not. Pretty close to it. August the 7th, 1945.