Clint McEvoy

The first trip I had that morning was out on, we’d had freezing rain, the freezing rain started sometime early in the morning, before daylight. And we had to go out in the freezing rain. And the roads were slippery as all get out. And so I remember cussing. We always used to cuss the RAF [Royal Air Force] guys because they couldn’t drive in icy conditions and of course, they’d had no experience on it but I came back from a trip, taking some of the pilots around to their aircraft but they weren’t able to take off because of the ice. And then all at once, there was these two aircraft came in, flying low. One was a Spitfire and one was a Mustang. It turned out they weren’t our aircraft, they were German aircraft. Then they were followed by piles of aircraft. They just came in in droves and they bombed the hell out of us for about 10, 15 minutes I guess it was. And when they left, we had nothing left. There wasn’t a mobile piece of equipment on the aerodrome [the German Air Force launched Operation Bodenplatte – a series of attacks on Allied air forces stationed in Belgium and the Netherlands - on January 1^st, 1945]. All the squadrons in that area were strafed and that but they said about 400 of our aircraft were destroyed. And the Germans say they lost 300 fighter pilots. One of the squadrons, one of the chaps, they had a pet dog and he was on one side of the runway and the Nissen hut was on the other side and the dog tried to make a trip across from where he was to his master in the Nissen hut and he was shot up by one of the German aircraft coming in. But one of our pilots in particular, he tried to take off and the first aircraft he got in, as soon as he applied pressure on it, he just nosed over and he got out of that one and went to another one and the same thing happened. So then he went and tried to get another one and he was shot before he could get to the other aircraft. But actually, none of our aircraft got off the ground. We had some aircraft from other squadrons that came in to sort of do some work but there was just no way we could get our aircraft off. So we were sitting ducks and lost everything we had. The airfield that we were on had been a night fighter squadron for the Germans. So they knew where everything was in there and of course, they, they got our bomb dump. And they set off the bomb dump so there was bombs and ammunition going off all afternoon. And it was rather scary.