22755 Edward Gurmin RAF 78 Sqd From Dishforth I went up to Middleton St. George which was a brand new drome, now Teeside airport, they were just building it then. We went up there on Whitleys and I was flying with Chris Cheshire, who was the brother of Leonard Cheshire VC…he was my skipper. I did 23 trips on Whitleys and then they were bringing out the first of Halifaxs and they were forming a second Halifax squadron at Middleton St. George. It was similar to the Lancaster… we went on to the Halifaxs…in those days you had to do 30 trips over Germany and then you were taken off. We were briefed on 12th August, for Berlin. When we got to the outer defences of Berlin we found the petrol consumption had gone for a real burton. We didn’t have enough petrol left to get back to England…we thought wed try to get into the North Sea somewhere. We hadn’t dropped a bomb then, so we decided to drop the bombs on the secondary target which was Hamburg. So we did a deviation …dropped the bombs on Hamburg.I was on the wireless that night. The observer dropped the bombs. He gave me the thumbs up the bombs had gone. I sent a message back to Middleton St. George saying “operation completed” I got a message back from them saying “message received and understood” and just then there was one Hell of a bang. So I was on the wireless and had two switches, one for the wireless and one for the intercom. I was still on the wireless and I thought I’d better find out what’s happening here. So I pulled my plug out of the wireless, pushed it into the intercom just in time to hear Cheshire saying “Jump for it boys” and I couldnt believe my ears. I said “What do you mean…bale out?” and he said “Yes, and bloody quick”. We’d had this bump - he had the stick and moved the stick and just had nothing at all there. When we baled out we realised wed had a direct hit with an ack ack shell in the fuselage. The whole of the fuselage had gone. All that was left was two wings and four engines. The rear gunner, of course, hed fallen 15000 feet, he was dead. At the same time we were attacked by a night fighter and he killed the front gunner, as I say luckily I was on the wireless that night. Five of us managed to bale out…and of the five who managed to bale out four have since died, including Chris Cheshire ..so I m the only one left. We jumped out at 15000 feet – of course when I hit the deck it was one oclock in the morning and I didnt know where the rest of the crew were…they could have been ten feet away or ten miles away. I was hanging up there and the plane crashed below me. So I got out of my parachute. I actually fell into a bog and I couldnt get out of this bog. Everytime I tried to move out of it I was sinking in the bog. And that night another plane from our squadron was shot down and the whole seven of the crew baled out safely and five of them dropped into these bogs and drowned…so there was only two survived. Five of them drowned in the bogs that I was actually in. Anyway in the moonlight I thought I could see a bit of a path so I took a deep breath and ran like hell towards this path… I managed to get onto this little path and get out of these bogs. I was walking down the road and I was whistling “There ll Always be an England” thinking there may be some of my mates around…so Im whistling this and suddenly a Luftwaffe officer and ten squaddies came round the corner and grabbed me and took me to this ack ack post, that had actually shot us down.
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