![]() But in a few calm moments, he decided on a plan. George, surrounded by flames, smoke and choking fumes, found that the, safer, floor exit was blocked by flaming debris and he had no choice but to follow his skipper through the roof exit. The pilot escaped through the roof exit but was cut by the tail- plane as he fell. The main petrol tank exploded and in a matter of seconds, the whole aircraft, built almost entirely of wood, caught fire. When night fighters attacked, several shells smashed into the aircraft. George was the navigator of a 2-crew Mosquito, on its way to bomb some marshalling yards just outside Berlin. I can drop the bombs and miss them!”’įlight Lieutenant George Cash, DFC, rolled off the wing of his Mosquito I thought I would have to go round again, but my bomb-aimer said, “ It’s OK skipper. He said afterwards, ‘They passed between our starboard wing and the tail plane.’īack home he said to the captain of that aircraft, ‘Your bombs dropped a bit too near to us, Joe.’ Peter Kenworthy (102and 216 Squadrons) looked up during a bombing raid and watched nine 1000lb bombs come tumbling out of another aircraft. One of our aircraft is above and bombing us! Finally, a 4H pencil was found hard enough to penetrate the ice, and draw lines on my chart. ![]() But my main problem was how to plot courses, wind velocities, etc. My fingers were numb, which made it rather difficult to capture a chosen star in the bubble of my sextant, and carry out the other activities required for accurate astro-navigation, that mode of navigation being essential on long flights. Icicles sprouted quickly on my oxygen mask, and a sheet of hard ice formed on my Mercator chart. It didn’t take long for the temperature to drop dramatically when the heating system in our Lancaster ceased to function. The night the heating system failed in our Lancaster They refused and told him that they would all stay together and ‘take their chance.’ They crash landed and all survived except for the rear gunner, who was killed. But, in fact, no crew member did bail out.īack over England, their badly-damaged aircraft was in no condition for a safe landing, so the skipper suggested that while he and Cliff would ‘take their chance’ everyone else should bail out this time. He would not be able to bail out, whatever happened. Cliff reached for his parachute while the aircraft was in a dive and accidently operated the parachute’s release, so that it billowed out in the aircraft, to his utter dismay. The pilot carried out some urgent evasive manoeuvres but then proposed that everyone should bail out as the situation looked hopeless. After a successful operation they were on the way back when their aircraft was attacked by some Junkers 88’s. The Parachute that billowed out in a Lancaster in flightįlight Lieutenant Clifford Storr was the navigator in a Lancaster. It was fortunate that we weren’t in the air at the time! Anyway, it was sackcloth and ashes for me. I was nearly there when my foot slipped and crashed through the aircraft’s fabric. The Wellington’s master compass had to be kept as far as possible from magnetic influences so it was towards the rear of the aircraft, the pilot using a slave compass.īefore one flight, as navigator, I went, as usual, along the reinforced area, in the blackness of the night, to check the working of the master compass. For anyone walking along the fuselage, there was a reinforced area, virtually a plank of wood, that they had to walk along, as the fabric was not intended to take the weight of a human body. The Wellington had a unique ‘geodetic’ construction - a trellis-like duralumin framework, covered by Irish linen, which was then given several coats of dope, a type of varnish. Putting my foot through the floor of a Wellington bomber
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