The Wrong Signal

There was one time that I had to abort the trip, because the drop zone had been taken over by the Japanese. I was not to drop anyone or anything unless I had a coded signal from the people on the ground, and I got the wrong one. I couldn’t believe it. And so I yelled “Abort! Abort!” We closed the bomb bays. We burst the engines and took off, and then they started shooting at us, so we knew then that the Japanese had taken over, had probably captured the people. So we had to come back, and I think we had three British officers then. We threw everything out of the plane that we could, even parachutes, harnesses, everything we could, all the supplies that we had. We ditched just off the Penang Island. I’ll always remember that. I thought maybe I’d come back and find it later. Anyway, I dropped that off, but we couldn’t drop the British officers off. Unfortunately we had to bring them back and that extra weight, we just barely made it to Minneriya. In fact, we landed and halfway down the runway all four engines quit - out of fuel.We had a flight engineer, Jack Thrush. He was screaming that these gauges were reading empty and we were contemplating ditching in the ocean. You have to have power to ditch properly, otherwise you just nose in. And they said, “Oh no, no, wait, wait, wait, we’re close, we’re close.” And eventually, we saw the runway. Just went right in and then the four engines quit. So that was the closest one we ever had, and it’s probably because of the actual weight, you know. We flew, all these trips were between 500 to 1,000 feet high, so it was quite turbulent. The people that we brought back, they swore they’d never go again. They’re not used to turbulence like we were. They were sick, they were - they felt terrible, but we got ‘em back anyway.