"Be wary then, best safety lies in fear" (Hamlet)

.....One day  we were on submarine patrol in the English Channel.  Our mission was to protect the convoys that were shipping armaments and supplies to England from the United States.  Subs had attacked and torpedoed and sank two ships to this time.  I was on the radio and navigating the flight for two hours before returning to the tail guns.  Suddenly, flack began to appear in our path.  Unfortunately, I had mistakenly navigated us over Guernsey and Jersey which we were told to avoid, and we were the target of the German guns on those islands.  The flack was all around us from Nazi guns, which were very accurate.  The flack tore a hole in the plane near the bomb bay doors and also wounded Norman England in his right leg as he manned the waist guns.  Blood was pouring out from this wound, and so immediately I tore my skivvy shirt and applied a tourniquet to England’s leg while he grit his teeth in pain Our plane was hit so hard by the flack that it rendered us unflyable; we had to ditch into the English Channel.  England did not know how to swim and his leg needed much more attention than I was able to give him, but at least the tourniquet stopped the bleeding.  We were going down into the dark water, but strangely I had no fear. When something like this misadventure occurs defenses come to the fore.  I was 17 and I would not, could not die.  The plane landed with a thump, thump, thump and when it came to a stop, and before it sank I grabbed England by his collar and swam out of the plane’s waist hatch.

…..Luckily, I was a very good swimmer having lived a block from the Atlantic Ocean in my younger years.  I knew I would  have to keep England afloat; and I was able to do that for a while,  and feared that I could not do it for much longer in the freezing water. But what I saw coming directly at us, made me hysterical with joy, tearful though it was.  An English rescue boat fished us out of the freezing water in a second or two and supplied us with warm blankets.  Norman was brought to the medical room where he was attended to by a couple of RNs.  I did not see any other members of my crew, but when we got to Plymouth I met them all in the hospital.  It was a fearsome thing to be shot out of the sky, but the skill of our pilot, Lt. Noehren, made our ditching easy enough for all of us to escape into the water and await rescue by the English, and so it came to pass.