I stayed in the Bristol Royal Infirmary for a few days after the crash in St Andrews Park. My injuries were fairly slight, namely, a hairline fracture to my left leg caused by whiplash from the rudder and cuts to my knees from the control column and various bruises. The navigator, Sergeant Jones was quite badly burnt on his hands and no doubt stayed in rather longer.
After about a week two RAF Medical Orderlies came into my ward with a stretcher and wheeled me out to their ambulance and took me to the RAF Hospital at Locking, not far from Bristol. I remained there for about three weeks whilst my leg healed. While there we were greatly honoured by a Royal visitor, namely the Princess Royal. She was very gracious and came to each bed and wished us well, mine included and we all felt better for it. In the bed next to mine was a young man who had suffered a crash whilst on coast patrol and he was not too badly injured and we enjoyed comparing notes with each other. I was soon well enough to get out of bed and soon able to visit Weston-Super-Mare and I began to feel more myself again.
Then came the inevitable order to return to Bassingbourn to resume my training. I remember my first flight up to test my nerves and I think my instructor was keeping his fingers crossed when it came to landing the plane, but all was well and I felt completely at home with flying again. I really enjoyed flying.
After further training, the time came to start the real work and I was posted to 142 Squadron in No 1 Group of Bomber Command. When i arrived at Binbrook Aerodrome I wondered what sort of place I was going to live in. It was a large place with many great hangers and a large airfield. The accommodation was good and there was a Sergeants Mess where one could relax with a glass of beer when off duty. We were in the County of Lincolnshire which is generally flat and subject to fog, which meant that operations were often interrupted. I was crewed up with a Sergeant Pilot who was a member of the Regular arm of the Royal Air Force and we found that he was very polite to us volunteers but also rather remote. But he was a very good pilot.
I did 14 operational trips in all, the last being directed against the medieval town of Lubeck on the Baltic coast, a long way from our home. Lubeck was the home of the famous organist Buxtehude, a contemporary of J. S. Bach and I felt a pang of that we were destroying a beautiful old town and, as it turned out, his cathedral as well. As I was wondering about this and contemplating the sight of a whole town in flames our port engine suddenly stopped from lack of fuel and that meant that we could not return home. It was March and too cold for us to land in the sea as the weather was bitterly cold. In fact several crews did risk this and were picked up by German Air Sea Rescue seaplanes suffering from frost bite. We decided to fly down to Holland, as they were our allies, and bail out there, but we were captured by the Germans and became prisoners of war for three years. I myself was sent to Stalag 8b (near to modern day Łambinowice in Poland).
Looking back over my relatively few operations there is one that stands out as being quite exciting. On this occasion we were required to bomb an important railway junction in the town of Hamm. After a fairly long trip we arrived at our target and did our thing of dropping some heavy bombs (probably of about 500 lbs in weight). We were turning to go home when our rear gunner, Dickie Wish – one of the men from the Bristol crash, reported that a German fighter was diving down from above to engage us. Our skipper immediately went into a steep dive down to a cloud level that luckily for us was not too far below us. As soon as the fighter saw this he swooped up again to his station and let us go. We had an uneventful return trip in which I and the skipper took turns at the controls and we finally saw the welcome coast of England looming up before us. Then we went through the usual routine for landing procedure and were given permission to land, with the skipper once more in control. I was casually leaning against the side of the plane when I suddenly heard a deafening sound resembling a lot of dustbin lids all rattling together. At the same time I saw coloured cannon shells sweeping just over the top of our wings, about a foot above and I suddenly realised that we were being attacked by a German fighter, probably a Junkers 88 which carries an impressive arsenal of fire power. At the same time bullets were sweeping around the top of the plane just above our heads and we were lit up like a fairy on top of a Christmas tree with our navigation lights on. Dicky Wish was sending off some shots in the German’s direction and I immediately turned off our navigation lights. All the while we were steadily descending and the German came around for another shot at us, but this time he couldn’t see us since we were invisible against the dark runway. The German plane let off another blast of fire and departed, no doubt feeling that he had outstayed his welcome. Finally we landed safely with no casualties, which was a miracle, but the plane swerved off the runway in a graceful arc and we found afterwards that the German fighter had done extensive damage to the plane itself. Just as we were walking back to be debriefed a British fighter plane roared over us and did a victory roll, from which I deduced that perhaps the German did not after all get home.
There were other scary moments, for example, when we got caught up in the infamous Berlin Box Barrage on a visit to that city and we had to execute a complicated cork-screw dive of 4000 ft to escape. I have never seen such intense anti-aircraft fire, it was awesome!