Killing ME-109's at Nijmegen

The squadrons had to take turns, you see, patrolling over the bridge at Nijmegen, that was a key part because we had got that bridge but we hadn’t got the bridge over Arnhem, there was still fighting, actually we didn’t know it but it was really all over by this time. We thought it was still going on. Anyway, my squadron, I was leading, our CO was on leave in London and we got into 109's that were coming out of this bridge, I don’t know why. They didn’t seem to be bombing, I’ll never know why they were there, just hoards, must have been 40 of them, normally were (inaudible) and here they were, well you, first time I ever shot down two. It was just easy to go up behind them. They were hopeless, you know, they didn’t know what to do. Most of them, the odd one might but we were getting a couple and then the next day.. and our squadron was lucky because when we got our turn over the bridge, unlike Normandy, we seemed to run into them. And then we got another couple of the, they weren’t very spectacular because they were low down. You’d hit them and they would just go down a short distance and that was it. We had gone up to Nijmegen Bridge and we didn’t have any luck for a while and we sat there for about an hour or so and just as we were starting to go, I saw a bunch of dots going over towards the White Squall forest to the east, not far from Nijmegen and so I took the squadron over there, looked kind of odd, and sure enough there was some 109’s chasing some Typhoons. You see a Typhoon was a big heavy brute of a thing and the 109 was pretty much a threat even though it was not a threat to us. A Typhoon was not a marvellous dog fighter, to put it bluntly, and we got into these guys and I saw them going down, you know. We were not high, two or three thousand feet and they looked like the railing on a picket fence, we got nine of them. And you could just see them driving into the ground everywhere, just west of the forest.