'We went to 10,000 feet over England, and then headed for the first track over the Dutch coast. I was at 20,000 feet and then the gunner asked me to come down a bit because he was feeling cold. His heating was not working, and I turned up the oxygen a bit. Suddenly, just after we had crossed the coast, there was a great bang from underneath. I thought it was flak because there had been no warnings, but the gunner had actually tried to fire. It was a Focke-Wulf 190. I dropped 2,000 feet because the windscreen had been shattered and I had been hit in the shoulder. It felt just like a hammer, not a spear. I did not feel as if I was going to drop off, so I thought there was no point in talking much about it.
'I asked the navigator to set another course at about 19,000 feet. I kept looking at my watch. A quarter of an hour late we were attacked by a Messerschimtt, which knocked out the compases, and the intercom and hydraulics on the port side. We dropped another 2,000 feet. It had hit the port elevator, so it meant holding the stick back in your belly to keep the plane flying straight. The engineer was wounded in the forearm. The bomb-aimer was still down at the front. He did not realise until the bombing run that anyone was hurt, because we could not talk to each other. This was probably a good thing, because there may have been panic.
'I asked the engineer for another course because the compass was broken. He came back and indicated that the navigator had been knocked out. I had a feeling he would come to and take over again, but I looked round for the Pole Star and found it. That night we were heading for Cologne where we were dropping spoof flares to get their fighters away, and then turning and bombing Duesseldorf.
'Our timing was very accurate. If you had to bomb at half past ten, you had to bomb at half past ten. We saw the flares going down, and I pointed ahead to the target. I held it steady and felt the bombs going off and headed back home. That was the difficult part, but I thought as long as I hit the English coast someone will find me a landing. The other thing on my mind at the time was to get back because we had wounded on board. There was no way we could bale out with all the wounded. On the way back we went up and down, up and down. Because we had no oxygen in the system, the engineer gave me the little bottles we carried, like small fire extinguishers, that you can clip on to your mask. Eventually we ran out. I wanted to get down below oxygen height, which is 10,000 feet, but I didn't want to come down too soon in case there was a big flak area that would shoot us down.
'When I saw the sea - it might have been the Zuider Zee - I came down to 7,000 feet. We were flying on and suddenly the four engines cut, and I thought "Well, here it comes". The engineer remembered then that he had not switched the petrol tanks over. There are three petrol tanks on each wing and you normally try and keep them level in case you get hit, so that you don't lose all your petrol. He had left the main tanks the whole time as we had been so busy doing other things. He switched over to the other tanks and it started up. We flew on and saw a coast coming up. He kept telling me to get down, get down, because there was not much petrol left.
'I saw this canopy of searchlights, so we headed for that. It was a fairly big aerodrome, so I just circled round and flashed my landing light on and off as a distress signal, because I could not talk to them. We had no hydraulics, so we needed to pull a bottle of compressed air to flood the system, so that I could put the wheels and flaps down. I had been hit in the head and it had frozen up, but it came alive again when we were lower and warmer and it began to bleed. I told them to stand by for crash landing. They stood behind me in case I passed out, and put out flares because there had been a touch of fog.
'We came in and just touched down at the end of the runway, and as we did the undercarriage collapsed. It had been shot through. The plane was on her belly for about 50 yards, and it was only then that I realised that the navigator was dead, because he slipped forward from his cabin. It was an American aerodrome I had landed at, Shipton in Norfolk.
'They scrambled on to the plane and opened up the dinghy escape and got us all out through the top. The wireless operator walked out even though he was wounded. They whipped us on to stretchers and into an ambulance and away. They had had a crash on the aerodrome 2 hours earlier that night with a Lancaster. The rear gunner was all but saved but then burned as it caught fire. We were sent to the air force hospital about three days later. The next day the wireless operator died. He must have been shot through the chest.
'The CO came down to see me in hospital. He asked me why I didn't turn back. I said that I thought it was safer to go on because we were still all flying in this big box of planes 10 miles wide and ten miles deep, and it would have meant flying back through these and probably prang one. It was not a case of going on regardless. It was the safest thing to do.'
-- Bill Reid VC, Bomber Command pilot
