Crash Over Berlin

The second trip was to Berlin and just the engineer and I went from our crew. We were dumped in with this other crew. And their tail gunner was very nervous, very nervous. Anyway we got boxed in over Berlin with search lights and I ordered corkscrew port immediately. And a Me 109 just came through the lights, he got caught in the lights as he came through. And I opened fire and I still think I got him. We took a bit of flak, we took a bit of shot too, and the pilot when he finally did get the aircraft down the dive, we must have lost about two or three miles which was a lot of area to lose. The pilot didn’t think he was going to be able to maintain the aircraft so he said, “Standby to bail out!” So I got out of my turret and I had no chute and I said, “Skipper, I got no chute!” I won’t repeat the language but more like you dumb Canadian. Anyway I said, “I’ll take the tail gunners!” That shut him up! So he said, “Okay, we’re going to try and make it back but we only got three engines.” So we flew all the way back and we lost another engine before we hit England. And we never made the squadron. We crashed in a big field that was just there for crashing. I can remember that night too because there was a mosquito bomber squadron and this Canadian pilot had shot down a Junkers 88 Bomber in (inaudible) and had gone through the wreckage and he caught fire. He was still burning when he crashed where we were. It seems to me that there were 167 holes in the aircraft, some of them quite large. I think we still have under carriage I think, (inaudible) I can’t even remember how I got back to the squadron. I know it was about five days.