大象传媒

(This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from Three Counties Action at The Taking It On Event in Luton on behalf of John Martin and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Martin fully understands the site's terms and conditions).

When I was born in 1931 so I must have been around 8 or 9 in this story.

We had a lot or American aerodromes in Essex where I lived in Coggeshall. On one day we were cycling along the road in Earls Colne when all of a sudden I could see a B26 Marauder coming towards us across the fields, as it over shot the run way of the aerodrome. It came across the road and we were lucky to get out of the way and it went over to the next field, it then stopped and toppled onto its nose. The yanks came out of the B26 saying 鈥済et the hell of out here鈥� and they fell out of the plane in all directions. It stayed there for a week or two.

On another occasion when we lived out in the country we heard some gun fire at night and the siren hadn鈥檛 gone off, but a mosquito had shot down a German plane and I found 20 millimetre cases in the next field. That why I knew it was a mosquito and this all happened before the air raid. We never went near to the plane as we weren鈥檛 allowed so we went as close as we dared and that was it.

Prior to the invasion of France they moved the Americans out of the aerodrome and put the English in and they used Abermiles. They used to practise with these and they dropped one of them next door to my house. They must have accidentally let it go. We were really chuffed to see that as a child of 8 as we hadn鈥檛 seen anything that close before. It was the first time I had seen a fluorescent instrument panel on the board and I had to ask what it was.

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