For anyone walking along the fuselage, there was a reinforced area, virtually a plank of wood, that they had to walk along, as the fabric was not intended to take the weight of a human body. Before one flight, as navigator, I went, as usual, along the reinforced area, in the blackness of the night, to check the working of the master compass.
Anyway, it was sackcloth and ashes for me. Flight Lieutenant Clifford Storr was the navigator in a Lancaster. The pilot carried out some urgent evasive manoeuvres but then proposed that everyone should bail out as the situation looked hopeless. He would not be able to bail out, whatever happened. But, in fact, no crew member did bail out. Icicles sprouted quickly on my oxygen mask, and a sheet of hard ice formed on my Mercator chart. My fingers were numb, which made it rather difficult to capture a chosen star in the bubble of my sextant, and carry out the other activities required for accurate astro-navigation, that mode of navigation being essential on long flights.
But my main problem was how to plot courses, wind velocities, etc. Finally, a 4H pencil was found hard enough to penetrate the ice, and draw lines on my chart. We carried on. Peter Kenworthy and Squadrons looked up during a bombing raid and watched nine lb bombs come tumbling out of another aircraft. I can drop the bombs and miss them! George was the navigator of a 2-crew Mosquito, on its way to bomb some marshalling yards just outside Berlin.
When night fighters attacked, several shells smashed into the aircraft. The main petrol tank exploded and in a matter of seconds, the whole aircraft, built almost entirely of wood, caught fire.
The pilot escaped through the roof exit but was cut by the tail- plane as he fell. George, surrounded by flames, smoke and choking fumes, found that the, safer, floor exit was blocked by flaming debris and he had no choice but to follow his skipper through the roof exit. But in a few calm moments, he decided on a plan. Although, once outside the fuselage, he faced an icy, hurricane-like slipstream, he somehow managed to wriggle on to the wing and then roll two or three times along it so that he could fall clear of the tail-plane, from 28, feet and parachute to safety.
