Later, the night fighters had a method of mounting
the guns on top of the fighter at an angle.
He'd sneak up underneath and fire his guns and if he
was right underneath you, he'd hit your fuel tanks.
If that happened, then you'd just explode.
At the start of the war, the fuel tanks didn't
have protective sealing meaning if there was a
hole in the tank it would just leak out.
But later fuel tanks had the protective rubber
coating where it would seal but I know
we had damaged one fuel tank one time and
the flight engineer, now his duties were to see
that the systems in the Lancaster worked properly.
He kept an hourly log of the engine instruments
and he was responsible for the consumption of
the fuel. And he could cross-feed whereby he
could feed all four engines from one damaged
tank or each engine from each tank depending
so if you have damaged fuel tank that's leaking
you would cross-feed all your engines
from that fuel to use it up
before you lost too many.