Terry Delaney

Hello, I'm Terry Delaney. I'm eighty-five. I flew as a bomb aimer on Lancasters – a thirty-one mission tour, between January and July 1944. I was in the Air Force from May '42 to June of '45. I flew a variety of aircraft at a number of stations, both in Canada and in England. I eventually completed the tour and was posted to Dishforth Conversion Station, as a bombing instructor, until I came back to Canada in May of '45. I got a commission halfway through the tour, and I was discharged as a flying officer in July of '45. We were never hit, to my knowledge, but we did get credit for two fighters, which I don't recall, but that is in the Canada Gazette. There were a couple of scary moments. One of them was that we were at full height, maybe twenty-one thousand feet. We had a full bomb load, so the thing took off at 32 tons, and we lost one of the outer engines, and the pilot told the navigator to feather that engine – that is, shut it off – but he pushed the wrong button and he feathered the other side, so we started to spiral down a little bit. We fell down to around eight thousand feet before he got that engine started. Then we got back up and went on to bomb Germany. Then there was another night – I think they called it the 'Night of the Wind'. I think the target was Nuremberg. There were big winds everywhere, and a lot of aircraft and markers and whatever were blown all over the place. Fortunately, we had a top navigator. He guided us through the dark sky in the middle of the night over Germany, with the pilot's help, of course, and we came out of that.