Interviews

"There was no secondary target in briefing. Something that I have never told anyone – we were up there in a damn hurricane, 75 mph winds! We were creeping along against the wind when this happened."

"Having had to jump out of the plane one time before as I said, I wanted to make sure I didn't open the chute quickly. In turn, I could roll over on my back and fall and mtch what ms happening. The noise at high altitude is almost unbelievable because there's no sound barrier. There's nothing there to muffle the sound, so everything is loud."

"When the boys out back said "We've got a lot of fighters up here!" You know. Because they came from the back, and that's the first alert we had, this swarm of German fighters. And they came zipping through us, and, you know, we didn't have any, because we were so far out of the bomber stream that we had no fighter escort either."

"After the all-clear we would close the bomb bay doors and come back and monitor the radio for any messages that might come in. I had done all that after we dropped our bombs, and the first indication that we were being hit by fighters was from the waist gunners on the intercom, and you could feel the bullets whizzing through the fuselage."

"We didn't know that anything was out of the ordinary. We didn't know that we were going astray. But there were people who did, and didn't do anything about it."

"The plane next to me, to my right, was on fire. And then I felt my plane being hit. Then I saw parachutes all around the place, and then I knew that something serious was happening."

"Almost immediately - all of us were connected on the crew by interphone, and I can hear the navigator, the radar navigator, all of them, 'Hey! We're drifting away from the main stream!"

"The German fighters came up wingtip to wingtip, 30 abreast, from below, like a cavalry charge, and then split up concentrating on one or two planes. At one time we had five fighters on our plane, and then it cut down to three, and finally, they exhausted all their ammunition on our plane."