'The great thing about low flying was that it was always the aim to be as low as you could with safety, because it protected you from the guns, and from radar. It was exciting to be down among the trees, but the pilot had to be looking a long way ahead to see what he had to do next. Over Holland and the North German plain you could get very low indeed. Further inland, with the hills, not quite so low. You did see everything that was going on. We were navigating then with a map. Church steeples were great navigation aids at low level. If you had a map with churches on, the easiest way to navigate was by steeple.
'You could also see people - you could see cars, trucks, horses and carts. In hilly country we literally flew past someone's front door, and as we flew past I looked across over the wing tip and a man opened the door. I was looking him straight in the eye at about 40 feet. On one occasion in the flat country of Northern Germany we were flying very low across some open fields with very few trees, and there was a farmer with his horse and cart coming towards us. We were down deliberately low; I doubt if 10 or 20 feet would be an exaggeration. As we got close the horse reared up and threw the man off the cart before we went over. We were that close to people.
'Low flying in itself was not dangerous. We were flying in a Blenheim, cruising at 180mph. That's slow - you've got time to see trees, even high-tension cables. I've known people clip the target by being a few feet too low, but that was unusual. Occasionally somebody came back with a piece of tree.
'Now night low level was different. That really was dangerous if you got a bit too low, and people sometimes did. We had one night when we were attacking shipping in the Channel at full moon. One Blenheim came back and landed and the pilot asked us to come and look at it.
'"What happened?" we said.
'"Well, I saw a ship so I bombed it and hit it," he said, "I pulled up over the mast and I dropped down the other side. There was another ship there I hadn't seen, so I went through his mast."
'When we got out to the aeroplane we found that the propeller hadn't hit the mast, but the engine had collected a piece of wood that was burning gently against the cylinders.'
-- Ted Sismore, Bomber Command pilot
