Stan Frank Melloy

First I was on Bomber Command in the north of England. I was a navigator on heavy bombers, well, they’re [Vickers] Wellingtons [long-range medium bomber] first and then [Handley Page] Halifaxes [heavy bombers] and then [Avro] Lancasters [heavy bomber], but you know. After my tour of operations on these, I had a month’s rest in England and then I served on Fighter Command, which was [De Havilland DH-98] Mosquitoes [fighter aircraft]. They were dual aircraft, navigator and pilot. They were excellent fighter aircraft. We had machine guns and cannon; and, of course, most of the trips were to engage other German aircraft and laterally, to destroy anything that was on the ground, particularly in France then, because Germany had occupied France. But from our aerodrome [airfield] in England, we flew at low level, which means that we were about 100 to 200 feet above the ground. These missions were to destroy any German aircraft on the airfield or to attack them if they were in the air. I mean, that was the objective, and do the raid and get back as fast as you could. It was all low level. It was very, I suppose, surprising in a sense. We flew to Cologne [Germany] to destroy German aircraft because they were amassing German aircraft to bomb England. Our objective was to make sure that a lot of those bombers never got in the air. And that was the mission, the main mission and then we expected, of course, always, that we would be attacked by German aircraft, which was the case. But fortunately, we were able to destroy the German aircraft that we wanted to and also we shot down a couple of German aircraft in the air.