It was a dark summers night, in 1944 (of the date I am not sure as I am writing from memory). My squadron was flying deep into the heart of Germany to bomb away the industrial core of our adversary. We were eleven strong having lost two Lancasters the previous week and only finding a suitable replacement for one. We felt adequately prepared for anything we might encounter considering we were only moving towards a small village with two large factories.

However no matter how confident we, The green squadron were it was no match for what we encountered that fateful night. As the order was given to plot bomb course and release my pilot noticed something. It was what turned out to be four dozen night fighters! Knowing we could not survive we radioed and asked if we were to disengage. The intercom remained silent for a few moments until a sombre voice replied, no. The order given we tried our hardest to deliver our load to escape the deadly wrath of these killers of the night, but it was not enough. Having released nearly half our bombload our plan started to jig to avoid the nightfighters machine guns. Our pilot attempted in vain to keep us in line, the second half of our load landed uselessly in an adjacent field. Directly afterwards two Lancasters went down, one in flame the other in tiny pieces having been obliterated by a direct hit to it’s load before it was released. The squadron leader quickly called an evasive maneuver that would carry us safely away. Halfway through his plan, the intercom when hush. We all knew what happened of course but we waited for confirmation.

When we received none we looked down and sure enough, he was gone. Now leaderless and short a total of 3 aircraft with all forty-eight nightfighters buzzing around us we had no choice left but to fight as we ran. Having come to a consensus all eight remaining bombers headed away on their own, The last we saw five more were sent down and at least one other crippled. For all this we saw only 2 nightfighters go down for sure. We were so far majorly unscathed, but we assumed that would soon change when we saw at least ten night fighters coming out on top of us. The odds against us we mounted our guns and started firing, at what didn’t seem to matter much to us as long as it moved. The first kill our tail gunner scored was a brilliant ball of burning fuel, this spectacular show of lights led the way for an unprecedented slaughter. The top guns, the tail guns, the side guns and even the belly guns had clearly lit up targets now, a shame and awful fright for the night-fighter pilots. We downed five in rapid succession, the rest seemed hesitant to come within range until after the initial fire and brightness had passed. This gave us renewed courage, but also the enemy pilots assumed they were safe as long as we could not see them.