Value of his Ground Crew

The fact I was flying over Dieppe was because there weres ten people back behind me looking after my airplane, you know. That’s the point I want to get over that the ground crew in the air force, you think of them as being out of the war, they’re not. Without them we’d be no air force at all. You have to have ground crew and my ground crew I’m convinced kept me alive. They are very important but a lot of people don’t think of that. It’s not quite the way... the same. You see, the army and the navy, the officers and men are all tied up together and the army officer sees the man he’s working with right beside him being shot at. Whereas our ground crew do a very valuable job under terrible conditions sometimes. And yet they say, “Okay, I’ll wait for you until you get back.” And they hope we get back. It’s a different sort of thing.