We went down to the briefing room.
We were all ready to go on our first trip and
when we went down to the briefing room,
of course the target was covered and
as soon as they opened up the curtains and
all the red lines were pointing to our
most feared target which was Berlin, Aw!!
Our hearts sank because we heard
so much about Berlin and we thought, wow,
our baptism of fire is going to be Berlin.
Anyway, we did that trip but the fact on
that trip I would open up my little window
beside me, pull the blind up to look out and,
yah. I was scared because you would see
a line of tracer going out from somewhere,
then you would see an explosion,
you would know, wow, somebody got hit
or all of a sudden out of the clear blue,
out of the clear dark sky, an
explosion from a ground anti aircraft
so very quickly you realized that people
were dying, planes were getting hit,
people were dying, were suffering
on this trip and so I kind of closed
my curtain because yah,
I was scared and so but I had a job to do.
I had to listen to the radio.
I had to make sure that I did not miss
any communication from base because
sometimes they would have a
diversionary target.
If the cloud formation was too heavy over the
target or conditions were not right,
they would have a diversionary target
so instead of going to initial target,
you would go to the secondary target
but if you missed that signal,
then your crew is going to the initial
target and you were dead ducks.
The other job was I dropped tinsel
which was bundles of aluminum foil.
Every aircraft, every wireless operator on
every aircraft dropped these little bundles
of aluminum foil.
And what happened, and what this did,
as it left the chute, and
got caught in the slip stream,
it would explode and it created a whole
cloud of aluminum so the aircraft were flying
along had this cloud of aluminum drifting
down below them and the purpose of that
was to jam the German radar on their
anti aircraft guns so that they wouldn't
be able to pinpoint the exact altitude you
were at and that's why they threw up
a barrage so the shells would explode
between 15,000 feet and 18,000 feet and
so you just had to fly through this barrage
and tha''s how they beat the tinsel.
It must have helped some,
I am sure it did.
But then the other thing I had to do was
jam the German radio communications
between the fighters and base
because the fighters used to come
on the outside of you and so
they knew what altitude you were and
they'd radio that back to the base and
so my other job was to try and jam those
communications between a fighter and
base so I had a lot of jobs to do and
so that kind of kept me busy.
I didn't want to look out anymore.