Caught in the Search Lights

I flew 22 missions. I didn't finish a tour because the war finished first. Thank God. Often wondered what would have happened if the war hadn't have finished. I got 22 in, and we were losing planes, we were still losing planes. Think of it this way, when, when we first started attacking, and that was before my time in flying, when we first started attacking Europe, we were looking at a big area right. And it was well-manned with guns and defence, and as, after the D-Day, things began to shrink, right. What happened to those guns? They were condensing them. And then all around Berlin and some of these big cities, like the Ruhr they had gun towers and they'd have as many as eight and ten guns on one tower. And they were operated by radar and they had the blue search light. I don't know whether anybody mentioned the blue search light to you, but the blue search light would be sitting upright and then suddenly it would go round and hit right on a plane. And once it hit it would stay like glue. And then all the other search lights that were combined with it, would also come on, so you'd be actually coned, right, and then they'd start firing at you. And that was a rough time. That's... And to get out you were lucky. We did once, we got out. But we were way down low when we got out, we just simply... he put the plane up and we went down and he just kept her going down and finally when he pulled out, we had broken loose. We broke loose so low that I started firing at the search light. You know, that was, that was a weird experience to, to be coned. You can't see a thing. Hit your hat off real quick, knock your black glasses down otherwise you're blind completely. And as soon as you're out and then you lift your glasses up again and you can see again. But you carried your black glasses up here in the aviator thing and just wore ordinary glasses, ordinary aviator glasses normal times. But to get coned by a search light you're lucky if you get out. We were, we were really lucky.

Interviewer: So now, you would have seen black sky as he was going down and then as he pulled out you would've seen...

I didn't see anything because I just pulled the glasses down. As soon, as soon as that hit, search light hit I pulled the glasses down and these are black glass. And I just felt the plane go up, and you do down like a high-speed elevator. You going down and your stomach's coming up. And your belt's tight you know, you've got this great big strap across your middle, whew, you, you can't breathe, and you know you're going to go up in the air, if that strap goes. Yeah, it's a weird experience to go down like that.