Stan Stanley

My name is Stan Stanley and I joined up in 1943. I left on my birthday in 1944, which is the 31st of March. I was over there and I teamed up with a crew and a pilot. He was about ten years older than us. His name was Ted Meeks. Our navigator was even older than him. He was a principal at a high school in Winnipeg. These were more father figures for us because we were really young. When I think of it, I can't believe how young we were and some of the stupid things we did. Our pilot had problems seeing at night so he was always getting new glasses so that always delayed us getting into action, not that we were that anxious. We were flying every day. We were always on what were called 'cross countries,' flying over England at about eight to ten thousand feet. We'd seen all the islands outside of England, the Orkneys. It was good for us. Finally, we went into operations after he got the glasses. That was some time at the end of '44, I guess. My first trip was to Duisburg. I was a mid-upper gunner, by the way. The solenoid switch wires got caught in the mechanism up there over Duisburg. We were just getting caught in the searchlights, and my guns started going off. Didn't see much, being dark and everything, but most of them were tracers and incendiary bullets coming out of the guns. Anyway, nothing happened and we got away from the searchlights. It was a little bit of action and we were all excited about that. That was our first trip. One thing that really stuck out in my mind was when we were on a daylight to Hanover. We didn't fly in formations. We used to just fly what's called a gaggle [a group of aircraft in formation]. Every airplane in the gaggle had a navigator, so we were all independent. All flew at different heights, fifty feet between each airplane. The first half of the gaggle turned north and east and started bombing the city of Frankfurt. "Beautiful sunny day, no clouds," it said over the intercom. People would pay a million dollars to see this. The bombing of a huge city is something… terrifying. Something you don't see while you're doing it because you're over the city, and you're not under the airplane looking down. Even the rear gunner sees all these things as we're passing over. We don't see the actual things going on, like the incendiaries dropping like a dark cloud. But we survived…