Aircraft Down! German on the Run.

I joined the RAF in 1942, and when I was completely operational I was stationed in Newport.

Barrage balloons
They kept the aircraft too high to find their aim and that was how he’d come down because he’d run into the set of barrage balloons and it’d brought him down in a field, two fields away from where we were. He was on the wrong side of the aerodrome so he couldn’t have done any damage to the drome because he was on the other side but if he’d been on the other side of us he’d have been on the flight path of the Weston light aircraft field. That was an experience I didn’t want to have very often.
There was always two on duty all the time so that if you did have to fetch the balloon down or put it up or whatever during the planes during the night, we could. Mostly we had it flying between 500ft up to 3000 feet.

One night we was on duty 10-2pm and about 11.30 the phone rang and answering it the man said,
“Be careful, keep watch out we’ve brought an aircraft down two fields away and the pilot seems to have got out. What shall you do?”
And I says “We’ll lock ourselves in the hut.”
What could we do with a whistle and a truncheon? If we’d been a man we’d have had a gun but he’d got a gun and we’d only got a whistle. So we decided to stop inside and view from the windows and the phone rang again to say, “Don’t worry we’ve caught the man and you’re OK” so we went back outside on duty.

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