Getting Coned

At night it was very difficult to determine but there was one night when we felt we were coned and we could see the bursts of flak coming closer and closer. Just before the last two bursts, Vic threw it on its’ side and we dropped out and got out of the search light but we felt that we were coned and then that would be attached to the battery of guns. The guns in other words were firing as long as he could keep the aircraft in the cone, that’s what they were firing. It had a big hole in the tail plane where something took a one foot chunk out of the airplane while all of this was going on so it was very close. When we got down we never talked about anything like that. The only thing we talked about was how did everybody react, what worked and what didn’t work and did all the bombs release on time and if they didn’t release, why didn’t they release on time so we talked about the technical parts of it but we never talked about the personal feelings.