"We administered morphine to our pilot, and began the ordeal of carrying him back to the escape hatch at the rear of the aircraft, where we attached a static line to the aircraft…"
My name is Gordon Ritchie and I was born in Montreal, though I now live in British Columbia. I was in World War II in Bomber Command. I was a tail gunner on 429 Bison Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
We were flying Halifax bombers. And I completed a tour of operations of thirty-four missions. We did most of the deep penetration targets into Germany. For example, Leipzig, we lost seventy-eight aircraft that night - that was my first trip. And we did Berlin - another seventy-three aircraft lost. I went twice to Stuttgart, and Frankfurt, Essen, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, etcetera. These were all the deep penetration trips into Germany, and with the coming of D-Day, our bombing operations were switched to railway yards and marshalling yards. And on the night of June 7th/8th, we were briefed to attack a marshalling yard at Acheres in France. As we crossed the coast of France at Dieppe, we were hit by anti-aircraft fire. Our pilot, Squadron Leader W. B. Anderson, DFC, from Winnipeg, was mortally wounded and gave our crew the order to bail out, as our aircraft went into a dive.
The navigator, bomb aimer and wireless operator bailed out over France. The flight engineer, Sergeant Gilbert Steer, managed to remove our pilot from his position and straighten the aircraft. The mid-upper gunner and myself - I was a tail gunner - we came forward to lend whatever help we could. We administered morphine to our pilot, and began the ordeal of carrying him back to the escape hatch at the rear of the aircraft, where we attached his parachute D ring to the static line - that's a length of strapping approximately thirty or forty feet long - to the aircraft. And then we attached the other end to his D-ring, as he was not able to pull his own ripcord on the parachute. And we slid him out the end... out of the rear exit. When the static line reached its length, it deployed his parachute. He subsequently died from his wounds.
Following the exiting of our pilot, the remainder of our crew parachuted to safety. I landed in a minefield in Oxfordshire. Just incidentally, the three chaps that bailed out over France, two were Prisoners of War from June 7th/8th, '44, until the end of the war in May, '45. Our navigator, the third member, walked back with the help of the French underground, and was back in England within six weeks of his bailout.
A few weeks following this operation, we were informed that the flight engineer, Sergeant Gilbert Steer, was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry medal, and the mid-upper gunner, John Mangione from Ottawa, and myself, were awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal.