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"This story was submitted to the site by the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Peoples War Team in the East Midlands with Raymond Gregorys permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."

I started in the home guard and every time that we had a new weapon I was there, whether it was throwing fire bottles of petrol or whatever. I used to go down on Sundays and the steps near the river gardens there used to be a square piece of concrete about he size of two tables. The idea was that they were going to send a Lysander plane past us over Darley Fields turn round and come back again. They were going to do that about a dozen times. I was number two on the gun and the sergeant was going to fire it. They weren’t trailing anything on the plane they were just going to shoot at the actual plane. We were told we had blank rounds in the guns, the planes came flying past and we decided to have a bang at it. About 20 minutes later we wondered where the plane had gone as he hadn’t come back. It turned out that he didn’t come back, he went straight to Burnaston and landed because the sergeant had hit him. The policeman came running across from the police station — saying that for god’s sake we should shut that gun off. It wasn’t blanks at all in the gun, it was live ammo and the sergeant had actually hit and damaged one of our own planes!

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