Bombing Hamburg

Got crewed up in a bomber squadron with a Halifax aircraft. They were, I think, the best bomber aircraft there was. I had a good crew. My navigator was the top of his class in Canada when he was learning to be a navigator, and the rest of them were young and fancy free. But we got settled down pretty well and after a few operations over Germany, I was getting settled in pretty well, I thought. And one of our systems of taking care of ourselves, when there was enemy fighters about at night, we’d do what we call a corkscrew. We’d fly 45 degrees to the left and lose 2,000 feet and then do sort of a circle or corkscrew which usually shook away any fighters that were chasing us if we knew about them. And we had a small radar on the tail which gave us some knowledge of enemy fighters about. I think that that night there was about 300 of us on the bombing raid of Hamburg. We were hitting our chemical factory near Hamburg, Peenemunde, and I had aircraft tucked right in beside me, so I couldn’t really move. So I couldn’t do much to defend myself and we got hit from underneath. And the starboard engines were on fire, so the rear gunners called up and said that the tail was on fire. Well, this is no good. So, we had better get out. So I told everybody to bail out. I was the last one, except for the engineer who stayed and never did get out. I don’t know why, ‘cause there was nothing wrong with him. He gave me my parachute pack. But after, I suppose, I bailed out at about 12,000 feet. We got hit when it was 21,000 feet. Didn’t see anything very much. You could see the battle going on over Hamburg but not very much of it. You could hear the guns going off and the bombs dropping. When I was captured, I was taken through the city of Hamburg and I think every building had been hit by a bomb of some kind even if it was only incendiaries.