大象传媒

This story was submitted to the website by Karolina Kopiec from 大象传媒 GMR Action Desk on behalf of Mr Edward Caine and has been added to the site with his permission.

It was 1940 and I lived outside Barrow in Furness, Lancashire and I was a young boy. They were building in the ship yard an air craft carrier, we used to go up to the hillside outside the town to watch the activity in the sky, searchlights and gun fire and there was plenty of it as Borrow was a busy yard. We had watched all this going on at night, when they were trying to bomb the aircraft carrier, next morning we went up to our spot in the hill to see if there had been any damage they had done. When a German plane came over on a reconnaissance flight, to photograph what damage they had done, it was closely followed by two spitfires, one went in the clouds after the German plane, the other circled round and round and we watched eagerly. Then the pilot baled out and the plane came down in the next field to us, and then the other plane crashed, they collided and we heard later that one was a Czech pilot, the other a Polish pilot.
A few days later we went down to the shipyard to watch the launching of the aircraft carrier, it had not been damaged and stayed O.K. My father worked on the docks so we were able to go and watch it unscathed, it launched on time.
Another story was when I was at school a few years later in Fleetwood in Lancaster. Bomber was limping back to base, and it came down in the sea off Fleetwood, and next day the boys all went down to the share to German bit of the broken plane as souvenirs from the plane.

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