We were posted to Fairlop which was a satellite of Hornchurch and was just about the nearest operational airfield to the centre of London. Our mess was big old house which had been a private school and I arrived there on June 21^st 1943 and  had 10 days leave … and returned to find we had been given a bunch of ops, what used to happen was that the CO would go off to various meetings and would belly ache that we hadn’t been given much to do lately and they’d find something for us to do but there was one little bunch (of ops) that included photographing some lock gates well inland.

Apparently the typhoons had had a go at them with their cannon and thought they had destroyed some lock gates on the canal and they decided they wanted some photographs of two batches of them. One was near Courtrais and the other lock was fairly near Abbeville and I was to lead the four of us on this op and directly we go to coast at Nieuwport I and my No. 2 would go off to my job at Courtrais and the other pair would do their job.

Just behind Nieuwport there was a bend in the railway and we hit our target at very low level and that was super but we hit a lot of low cloud and mist immediately and we didn’t find our target and was map reading like billyoh I couldn’t find the canal at Courtrais and decided to  do a big circle and come out and take  a strip on spec of the coast on the way out. That was  rather  a stupid decision really and I didn’t get as far as that – we’d gone into Nieuwport in a completely undefended piece of coast which was our plan (we had the operational plans for Group showing where the major defences were).

Going out,  we were blind from this point of view so, coming to the coast at pretty low level I came up a 100 feet and dropped the nose and fired a good old round at what ever might be  behind the beaches to make them duck if necessary but we went out at very low level and Tony Damsell who was my No. 2 – he’d been my Sergeant colleague, and was now a flying office along with me – and we got out and we went through a pretty desperate hail of flak and we’d heard the stories about the defenders ‘ heavy guns, banging them into the sea with high explosive in the course of low flying aircraft.

 I suppose when we were about half a mile out I called him, the first radio call of the operation, “Come on up Tony” and I shot up into the cloud and so did he – the cloud base was only about a 1000 feet – very murky, and  he was on his way up with me and I got into the cloud and levelled off , set a course and had a look around the instruments and realised the engine was getting very hot. One of the faults of the mustang was that it a great big circular radiator under the fuselage making a belly but it was like an archery target 3 feet in diameter. It was likely to pick up flak and leak very readily and I thought that this is what had happened so I tried to open up the cowls to introduce more air into the radiator, throttled back a bit and I called on the radio “Tony come on out and watch me”,  and I came out and started tp cool things down.

 I looked back at one stage and a quarter of a mile behind and to the right was an aircraft. It could have been my No.2 or the next chap because the next thing I knew, a few seconds later a terrific rat-a-tat and banging noise and my first though was that guns had short circuited and I flicked the gun switch off then I looked out and I saw that the wings were absolutely peppered and on the left hand end there was a faring that runs along the end of the aileron and that was sticking straight up in the air – thought that was a bit odd. Directly I saw this I was back up into the cloud going u very fast and looked for instruments, artificial horizons and so on and there was just nothing there – everything registered zero.

There was the realisation that I was really nearly upside down in cloud with nothing on the clock so  I dropped out of the cloud on one wing somehow or another and got another little bellyful and I managed to get in a tight turn with them and they both stayed in the turn. These were two Focke-Wulf 190s and I was out-turning them. I managed to get the second one in my sights and fire but I knew that there was no chance because I needed to be firing about 3 or 4 airplane lengths in front of him.

I flicked over to a distress channel on the radio and sent out a mayday and I knew that the correct procedure was to speak for a quarter of a minute and by the time I had given my height, what had happened and speed and rough position – from there on it was just swear words – and meanwhile trying to dodge these two guys. Then the engine was getting extremely rough , the temperature gauges were off the clock and I thought that this thing is going to blow up any minute and the only thing t do was to bail out so I released the cockpit canopy which went off very nicely and immediately undid my harness and safety straps and tried to turn the aircraft upside down. I pushed the stick over to one side and  the wings came so slowly up I decided to get out over the side and so I bailed out.