Ivan Charles Smith

I was with Royal Air Force, [Squadron] Number 268, is where I did my tour but times before that I had took training on different types of aircraft, you see, to learn more about them. Mustang [North American P-51 Mustang, long-range single-seat bomber] mostly, when I was training. Yeah. That was a single engine airplane. And you wouldn’t be able to fly that Mustang until you had advanced training. They might say you might have to have a couple hundred hours of flying training before you could. The pilots have to do the same thing today now. I want to mention, this fellow now is a brigadier general in the air force, he went into training command and got all the breaks and got all the postings and whatnot. And his first aircraft, when they came into land, he landed too high, it was 20 or 30 feet off the ground, so it stalled. It was like that, it was right down like that, and that’s what his did. The struts on the wing of the plane, that fastened the top to the bottom, they all broke and he floated down and hit the ground. But no damage because it was only 30 feet off the ground. Suppose you to make a bad landing or something like that and damaged an aircraft, that’s very probable. But we went on operations. We flew from somewhere in France, we flew to say northern France or something like that. And we had to pick out a target, which meant we had a preliminary look of what the target looked like and whatnot, so that we could find it, locate it, and say where they want pictures of it, of all the barracks and whatnot. Well, we’d circle around and if we could get anywhere near, why, we’d try to keep ... Anything they wanted to do, we tried. If it was even possible, we tried to do it. Take the pictures, fly the aircraft and yourself and the cameras and everything back to the airdrome where the field officers would check it over and record it and whatnot. There might be something on there that they want, like who knows, a hidden bomb or something like that. Could be anything. Yeah.