Crew Remain Faithful

Interviewer: And during this raid that you were involved with, on your way back home did at any point you feel that your crew should abandon the aircraft?

Well, I told them, I said, “Boys,” I said, “I can’t see us really getting back under the circumstances and we’ll probably run out of gas.” The engineer said, “Yeah, we’re getting pretty low, you know.” So I said, “If you want to jump, go ahead jump.” You know, so they, everyone of them said to me, “What are you going to do skip? ” I said, “I’m staying right at this thing until it goes down on me. I’m going to try to make it back and that’s what I am going to try to do.” So they all said they’d stay. A very faithful crew, you know, and they stayed with me and we got back okay and the engineer kept warning me about not much petrol left. They never called it gas like we did, the Englishmen called it petrol and he kept saying, “You’re liable to run out any time!” you know, it was getting so low. I said, “Well, we’ll just have to take a chance!” There’s no use trying to land it when I couldn’t keep it on the beam because we’d probably hit other airplanes or one of the hangers or something like that, you were just coming in blind, you know.