I can't help feeling that the jokers who ordered a daylight raid should have been up in the nose of Strawberry Girl II with me as we led the formation over France. I've never seen so many single engine fighters in the same place at one time. Sadly none of them seemed to be ours.
We were still well short of the target when it all kicked off. Three FW190s and a Me109 all came at us at once. Lord knows how many hits they scored on us but the whole fuselage from front to back was raked with fire. Both myself in the nose and Billy Pounds in the rear turret suffered minor wounds. That seemed to stiffen our resolve because after Sgt Penley in the mid upper shot down a 190 the rest of the fighters dispersed.
Less than ten minutes later more German fighters showed up. I lost count of the numbers and the distinction between waves became blurred as one after another piled into us. At one stage it was clear from the intercom exchanges that the mid upper and rear guns had been rendered useless. The navigator went aft to check out any other damage and found Sgt Penley dead. Worse still he called back to say there was a massive fuel fed fire on the port wing. The skipper turned Strawberry Girl II south to make sure we were over land and called for the bailout.
I clearly saw all six chutes in the air but after hitting the ground everyone disappeared. German troops were virtually waiting for us, but I found a drainage ditch and followed it away from the scene. I hid up in some dense woods but was discovered just before nightfall by a bedraggled looking rear gunner, Sgt Billy Pounds.
The coastal area was crawling with Germans so we headed inland by night towards Rennes. Both of us had been wounded to some extent so on the outskirts of the town we took a gamble and stopped and asked for help when we saw a doctor's sign. Luck was with us, doctor Lesage not only patched us up but also hid us for two days before passing us onto his friends who took us south to Spain.
Sgt Albert Boatman
(Bomb Aimer: Strawberry Girl II)