Splashdown!

So after I finished the bombing and gunnery school, we were shipped off, out to number 32 Operational training unit in Patricia Bay, British Columbia. And there we learned how to fly torpedo bombers, Hampden torpedo bombers. And if you talk to any airman and talk about a Hampden, you say, "Oh", take a big deep breath and say "and you're still with us eh". They could be a little bit on the lethal side at times, there were a few things you really had to know about them. And a rate two turn, they had a really bad habit of going into what they call a stabilized yawl and you couldn't pull the aircraft out of it and as a result it would go into a spin and crash, but you were well warned about it so that you knew that, that was something you had to avoid. But it was kind of exciting for us wireless operators because the Hampden is not enclosed for the gunners, they have open gun pits, upper and lower and you often see on a parachute harness, it has a metal ring, right at the back on the tail and everybody went, "you wonder why they put that metal ring on there". Well when you were an open gun turret, that was what you clipped to your safety harness so you couldn't fall out or get blown out. Cause there was a little bit of a slip stream back there and you had one of the old fashioned machine guns on a swing arm that you had to operate, pan fed, terrible things, I'd hate to get into a fight with one of those things. Well we graduated from that successfully, we, we, our crew, particular crew, were successful in destroying two of, two Hampdens, but... We hit the water once on low flying exercise and wrapped a propeller around an engine and the CO wasn't very enthused about that. We did get the plane back to ground which, to our airbase, which was fortunate for us. And the second case was just a (inaudible) engine failure and we landed in the water but we were very close to shore so we just crawled out.