The Eyes of the Aircraft

As a mid upper gunner, the gunners are the eyes of the aircraft. Sure, everybody has their own responsibilities but the gunners, they look out for enemy aircraft but also for our own aircraft because everybody is travelling on dead reckoning and so the gunners can’t stop from looking, searching and you have to keep your eyes moving or as I said earlier the sky, if you stare at the stars, they will start moving with you. But it’s amazing. It was unbelievable how much you can see once you’re in the air and once your eyes become accustomed to the darkness and as I say you’re on the lookout all the time. It’s constant and that it our responsibility was to be on the lookout at all times. And hopefully he’d be looking on one side and I’d be looking on the other side and every so often we would tie, we couldn’t see down so we would have to do a roll over and put her up on the wing tip and look underneath just to see. That was a favourite of the fighters, they would come up underneath you so we had to keep a sharp eye for that. That was our main responsibility and to stay awake and for doing that we had the “wakey-wakey’s” - benzedrine, we’d take that. That was another thing that you had to be very careful of, not to take it too soon and not to wait too long - too soon if the operation was cancelled, you were awake for the night so that was our main responsibility and also if we did see something we would just order port or starboard and that’s all we had to yell was port and the pilot would dive for the left and we would go in to what we called a corkscrew but once we went into that corkscrew, the fighters, the night fighters would choose to just break off. They wanted to surprise us in the bomber but they didn’t want to go into a battle because we had the advantage because the pilot would pull up and we would go around the clock. As soon as we dove to the left, our sights went to two o’clock and then the pilot would say, “Climbing!” and we would go to four o’clock. And so it was just going around the clock and the fighter would fly into them. We only had .303’s and the range wasn’t all that great like the Americans had .5’s and higher so they had light cannons compared to what we had but we had the density of the .303 and we were quite comfortable with that.