Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
3:09 | Forty years after the war, when reminiscing with the waist gunner, Jonathan Swift recounts his first mission in which his squad flew to Berlin and experienced early anti-aircraft fire over Heligoland.
Keywords : anti-aircraft Heligoland Berlin first mission
Jonathan Swift describes the different kinds of parachutes men used when bailing out of planes. He describes multiple events that occurred at Biggs Field at El Paso, Texas, in which certain chutes either saved or doomed the men in crashing planes.
Jonathan Swift describes the numerous layers of clothing he and his squad wore when up in the air. The freezing temperatures at that altitude made using the relief tube nearly impossible. Swift's comrade Bill Bason (a navigator in a different squad) was confronted with a frozen escape hatch when his plane was coming down.
One weekend when looking for an open pub in London, Jonathan Swift encountered a man named Ferguson who had been shot down earlier that week. Swift and Ferguson went to a hotel bar together, and Ferguson told him the story of his survival and how he got to London in only a week's time.
