Harry Andy"" Anderson

Most trips later on were, to us [No. 420 (Snowy Owl) Squadron, RCAF], were pretty good because we were never attacked by night fighters, we were never hit and it wasn’t until Stuttgart [Germany] which is the, almost the last trip we did, we overran the target a little, I had to come back through Stuttgart and on the way towards the coast, we saw a lot of aircraft go down. And we almost ran out of gas. But we got as far as the coast and came across an aerodrome, I guess it must have been on the Dutch side where we could land, so we did that. And we took off from the landing on the Dutch side. Went over to England and got some more gas and then eventually went home. We reported to a new squadron called 427 [Lion] Squadron and we were sent on a practice flight one night and we never did get off because we lost speed and we hit some trees on the edge of the runway. And the plane caught fire and there was only three of us got out. We lost the pilot, the wireless operator. Two were killed and the other three of us got out, myself, the bomb aimer and the rear gunner got out of there. Rear gunner at the back, so there was three of us. So out of the five of us, three got out. And I was in hospital for about five months before I went back flying again. [D-Day - the Allied Normandy landings of June 6, 1944], it was fine. Fine towards [D-Day]. Dropping bombs before the army come in. Yeah, I remember that alright, yeah. What struck us is we were going towards the beach, was all the boats and things coming towards the beach: seemed to be miles and miles of boats. And you could see ships shooting, coming from the ships, battleships and things like that, they were shooting onto the beaches. And we went over and dropped our bombs and then we’d come back.