Crewing up / First action

I go back to Bournemouth, and I'm not there only a couple of weeks, and I'm gone. I, I've headed out. Most everybody, most, I say, I would say 99%, probably, out of the personnel go to what they call Operational Training Unit. I didn't. I was picked out of that bunch and I went straight to a, a Conversion Unit and onto Halifax's bombers. I never had an OTU or anything. I had no experience. There were six of us that went. I was one of the six, and that's where I met the crew that I'm with all the time, we linked up. That would be in December. So, this is why I zipped ahead so fast and never went through, because it always, well, three months at OTU. And I made my first trip with the wing commander of the, of the squadron, flying as a spare-gunner. The kid that wasn't... just turned 18 years old and going with the... well, the wing-commander of the squadron he would pick up a pick-up crew, because he didn't fly all the time. When you wanted to go on an OP, he'd just pick the navigator and a bomb-aimer, wireless OP, couple of gunners. So, I was picked on that one. I flew in the mid-upper that night, yeah. That was a 7 hour and 20 minute trip. Quite a baptism, eh? Why he would pick a guy like me, you know, that never been on an, on an OP or anything else? Went down towards the, put me down towards the Spanish border to a place called La Rochelle, so. It was submarines, pens, and things down there, we were bombing them. And, that's where the subs came from, out into the Bay of Biscay.