Bailing Out Over Holland

After about 100 attempts I eventually got the ailerons free and we were able to control the direction of the plane. And we were inside of, well into Germany, so it was, be almost fatal to go back through the way we came because there was all kinds of defenses and the main force had gone home, we were lone survivors as it were, so we went north to go around the Ruhr Valley and into Holland and at that point we started to see flares so we thought that night fighters were being put on us and before we had time to do anything, we realized that, that was the case, we were being fired on by a night fighter. Our machine gunners shot it down but it knocked out both our port engines and a Halifax wouldn’t, couldn’t maintain its height for terribly long, on 2 engines on one side at that time. And it would almost certainly be fatal to try to fly across the North Sea to England and besides that our aircraft was shot up so that our emergency floats were probably punctured and would be no good to us to keep us if we landed in the water. So I decided that it was best for the crew to bail out, so when we lost height to about 1 000 feet I had my crew ordering them to bail out, which they did, and then being the captain of course I was the last to parachute. When I went to dive out, the hatch, of course the excitement of the situation, as soon as I let go of the controls the air plane started to roll over because there was 2 engines on one side and none on the other and so I had to go back in the seat and close the engines down and then jump out the hatch and I was very low at this point.