By the time I was eighteen I had done five trips already. We only flew when the moon was up because we had a map ref. towards our target,

which was dropping some supplies to the Resistance. The only problem was as far as the aircraft was concerned to increase payload, we had no mid-upper gun.

So all we had were four guns in the rear which was not a happy situation. We come to December 7th 1943 and this is what happened - we made our stooge over southern France.

After we dropped our stuff, which was fine, we started back and after four hours we were hit by a 110 Messerschmitt night fighter,

 knocking out our starboard engine and causing the loss of a lot of fuel. Being the flight engineer I had to organise the engines and propellers to get an economical flight home.

We were fortunate in finding cloud cover and we soon lost contact with the enemy fighter. When we got within sound of our Squadron they said

"The whole of southern England is covered in fog so you can’t land here – go to Woodbridge in Suffolk." Whoever designed the airfield there was mad.

Any planes coming in to land would go all round the woods, you only need one mistake and you are in trouble. We got there - couldn’t find where we were to land because the fog was too thick so Skipper said

"How much flying time have we got left?" I said "About twenty-five minutes "Right" he said, "I’ll tell you what we’ll do – we’ll all bail out. If you haven’t practised it before it’s quite easy

. By the way, Michael, you go first." It was my nineteenth birthday. If I was writing anything, it would be unprintable what I said. So anyway, I put on the parachute and sat on the floor, on the edge of the open floor hatch, clipped on my chute to my front, held the release handle and pushed off. As you go your arms automatically go out pulling the release handle I could feel nothing – the parachute would not open fully, only the flaps. I dropped a few hundred feet, just pulling like mad and all of a sudden it came up. I was very lucky. I landed in a field – this was 5.30 in the morning; still a lot of fog about and drizzle. I climbed over the fence, there was barbed wire etc., By 6 o’clock, in the gloom I saw a farmhouse so I thought this would be O.K. I walked towards it and as I did, the dogs started, the turkeys started, the moo-cows started, absolute havoc with the noise.

I knocked on the door and waited for a few minutes, and all of a sudden the shutters opened. There was the farmer with a nightcap on, a nightshirt on and pointing a 12 bore shotgun at me. A 12-bore is not a nice thing to be faced with. So he said to me "Be you one of them or one of us?" "I’m one of us! I’m one of us" I shouted. So he said "O.K. I’ll come down". He came down and his wife gave me some breakfast. I slept for a couple of hours after that and the farmer contacted the local Constabulary. Later on in the morning I was collected by an American officer who picked us up in a truck, seven of us. Reunited with my crew, they wondered how I was alive as they didn’t see a parachute open. Anyway, the Yanks feasted us well and took us back to our Squadron and when we got there, the C.O. said "We’ve lost every plane. You are the only crew alive." Our Halifax went to the bottom of the North Sea and we lost nine planes that night. No aircraft were able to fly until we had reinforcements by the end of December. The C.O. said go off on leave for two or three days. When we came back he said "Sorry there’s no planes; no air crew; you’ll have to wait until about the 3rd.January." We restarted our operations on the 4th.January 1944, when the moon was full and I carried on well after the D-Day landings to complete forty operational flights. But there we are.

That’s about my story but I would like to make this point, we lost 55,000 airmen during the war. I would like to make this tribute to the boys who never came back.