I had decided it was a pretty day we were coming out of the sun.
Well, the sun was in the south, so we were flying up the river, and we were maybe 10,000
feet, 15 at the most.
You had to roll the Spitfire over to go down that way, because we didn't have a negative
carburetor.
So I did that, but I hadn't gone down maybe a thousand feet or more that I got hit in
the nose with a shell.
All the oil came over the windshield, couldn't see a thing, dropped the bombs, decided to
get out of there, but then I got hit probably with a 20 millimeter, I don't know.
The hole was at least this big in the way, didn't affect the flying, but then I got
hit in the half of the tail got shot out, and then that does affect the flying.
So I decided I'd better bail out, and that's when I panicked and didn't.
I should have, I tried to open the canopy, but you can't do that when you're flying
at 200 miles an hour.
You have a little ball that hangs here, all you have to do is pull that, and the canopy
flies open.
Well, I'd forgotten that at that time, I was too busy, I guess thinking of something
else.
Well, what I did, I pushed everything forward, engine, full power, everything full power,
and up.
At that time, the engine was still working.
This was maybe less than a minute after it had happened.
And so I put everything forward, I climbed out to 8,000 feet, going, of course, towards
our lines, and the engine quit just as I was seeing the Ainthoven base in front of me.
So I left the wheels down and made a death-stick landing, because the plane was a total loss.
When I was on the runway, of course, everything was dead.
So I had a guy in a Jeep come over and said, get that goddamn airplane off the runway, and
I told him, I said, I'd be very happy to do that, if you'll go get a rope, and we'll
pull it.
Oh, he said, sir, I'm sorry.
You just won yourself a DFC, which I never got.
That night or the next night, see, Bob, for the stock, was a squadron leader, and yet
you had a wing commander.
The wing commander was an Englishman, and we all knew he hated the Dutch.
He thought that we were a bunch of, whatever he thought, I don't know.
But I remember Bob saying to me, when I told the story to him, he said, you're out of
luck.
That son of a bitch isn't going to do it, which he didn't.
He got me a green endorsement.
