A bit disconcerting for a start and he asked a lot of questions but I feigned loss of memory, pointing to the cuts on my head.Īfter interrogation, we were put back into our cells for a day and another interrogation and after that taken to the transit camp proper. My interrogator spoke perfect English and began (when he saw my plasters) “Oh! Bad luck! Well how are things at Spilsby”…my home base. Before each operation we’d been reminded at briefing that, if captured, we would give only rank and name. The Germans did not heat our cells and a damp plaster on one arm and one leg in the middle of a German winter doesn’t induce much sleep. My leg and arm were plastered and 2 days later we were taken by train to Frankfurt-am-Rhein to Dulag Luft, a holding camp, where we were put in solitary confinement. Then we were taken to part of a German maternity hospital under guard in Berlin. I came to in a German doctor’s surgery being stitched up with our pilot and bombardier present too. Anyway, I didn’t see the church steeple that snagged my parachute and I hit a wall, causing a fracture of the right epicondyle and a Potts fracture of the right ankle. The ground came closer and I could see snow around but I was probably dazed by a blow I had received in the aircraft when a cannon shell hit my instrument panel and glass and metal went everywhere. Out into the cold night air (it was about 2020 hours) count 5, pull the rip cord, a jagging thrust In the thighs and back and… utter silence. We did this through the forward escape hatch and used parachutes. Several hundred gallons of petrol burning less than 20 feet from you is an occasion for rapid action in the way of evacuation of the area, which five of us did before the plane blew up or crashed.
CONTRABAND DEFINITION WW1 PLUS
We had just dropped 13,000 pounds of bombs… a 4,000 pound “cookie” plus incendiaries and we were stooging along at 163 mph (280 km/hr) taking infra-red photographs for the first time in WW2, when we were attacked from below by a German night fighter which hit the port wing and fuselage, setting the wing on fire and wrecking my instrument panel. On 16 December 1943, I was sitting at the Navigator’s seat in a very noisy Lancaster bomber over Berlin when something occurred that changed the pattern of my life.
0 kommentar(er)
