George Brewster

What, did I ever meet the enemy? Oh yes, oh yes, right away. It was fierce, like every day. I lost my roommate, I lost my [flight] leader in the flight when we did an attack on a train. He was blown right out of the sky right alongside of me. It was pretty rough. And I was often rocked even by flack [German anti-aircraft fire], you know. It would, pieces would tear through and then somebody’d go down. The firepower was fierce and the Germans fought harder in the last few months of the war than they had ever fought because they were in their own homeland and they were determined to turn us back. The casualties were quite high at that time and a lot of the people who had been through the Battle of Britain [1940] or North Africa and Malta [1941-1943] said this is the worst time they ever had, it was way worse. I was wishing I could get into aerial combat but most of my targets were like blowing up trains and there was always a lot of flack guns on them and blowing up tanks, which is a very hard job because the Spitfire [the Supermarine Spitfire, a British single-seat fighter aircraft] wasn’t built for that. So I had to go down pretty close and yes, and sometimes it was, yeah, we lost a lot of people. We would go up two or three times a day too. So in the end, even though I was only there that short period [by the end of the war in spring 1945], I had in quite a bit of combat time, you know, considering how little time I’d been there, it was amazing. Yeah, because I was flying so much. The weather was fairly good most of the time and that meant we flew a lot. So we’d get up, we’d come down and refuel and we were back up again. And we just, we pursued them. Yes, we were with the Second Tactical Air Force [one of the three tactical air forces within the Royal Air Force]. The strategic was a longer, they’re the bombers and the more far reaching targets and the tactical was more doing the cleanup and getting, you know, when they’d hold out in pockets and stuff, we’d go after them [the German targets on the ground]. And get right down low, right at treetop and try to blast them out, drop bombs on them. We carried a 500 pound bomb or two 250s. Then we had the machine guns as well and the cannon, we had two cannon. And I got a [German] tank, I remember my first tank, I knocked the track off and then I went back and finished it off. But it was not an easy job. Well, we didn’t have the wide vision like the strategic people. We had a close in vision of a very focused target and like for example, the train in which my flight leader died, we turned and broke to go in and I slipped underneath him to be on the other side and to avoid being hit by the flack that missed him. He got hit and he’s blown bits right beside me and I went down and it made me very, I lost my cool and I went frustrated on, I was going to crash right into the engine but almost. In the last pictures on the cine-gun [a combat camera installed on an aircraft that was turn on, most of the time when the trigger was pulled], I think I still have them, the smokestack takes the whole screen and you could see the smoke and steam and everything coming out of it. And then I went back because there’s like every third car was a flat deck car and it had a battery of guns at each end of the flat car and then there’d be two other coaches with. And they were loaded it turned out with troops who got out and started shooting with machine guns and then there’d be another flat car and I think there was three flat cars with these guns. And that’s six batteries all firing and they’d be mostly about I’d say around 40 millimetre [caliber] but still a lot more power than I had, a lot more. But so I went down and I did knock out the guns on that. I remember after, I hardly remember doing it because I was, it was a mixture of being angry. It’s sort of like when the guys attacked, I just, I suppose it was a replay in a way, that I didn’t see how I could possibly come out of it so I waded right into it. And that’s all that happened. And anyway, we knocked out the train and that was the end of it. Well, it was very sad sometimes because the guys, I, some of the guys were killed. And sometimes like once it was my roommate and I had to write a letter to his wife and that was breaking my heart because he was the nicest guy, I’d known him for a long time. And sometimes I got out and I literally felt sick at my stomach from it and I’d get out of the cockpit and go and vomit by the tail. So I wasn’t really built for combat I don’t think. I don’t think I was. I don’t know if anybody really is but maybe I was too tender hearted.