First Destroyed Enemy

Interviewer: Tell me, Mr. Sager, can you also describe the first time that you shot down an enemy aircraft?

Clearly, definitely, yes, yes. Again it was my eyesight that enabled me to see aircraft taking off, this was again with Chad. Taking off from an aerodrome and we were protecting bombers, Mitchell's I think, and on the way back I saw these, these flashes of light, like light, white, of aircraft taking off, there was some cloud, and I reported, I reported this to the CO and he told me to take my flight down and, and investigate, and the CO came with me so we had the two, one squadron stay above, and my CO followed but he didn't know where we were going, I was leading and I was going very fast because I knew we'd have to go fast to catch up to them. And so when I got down to the ground where I'd seen, I went streaming across, screaming across tree-top level and I saw aircraft two ahead of me, and my number two was with me and we went fast as we could and I got up, this time I realized, as I said, I had to get up the aircraft's bottom. So I got about 50 feet, and shot my cannons and it, the aircraft blew up. Unfortunately I lost my number two because he was too close to me and parts of the German aircraft flew into his radiator and he had to crash land and he was killed in crash landing. The, the, I remember very clearly because the flaming mass of aircraft in front of me went over on it's side and went screaming across, into a railway bank and along the railway, and the streams of, of flames behind it, it's sort of shaking when you realize there is a human being on the, in what you've just done.