There were two strange things that when I'm talking to you I remember. The one was when you were flying, attacking in formation, and one of your friends was hit and the aircraft maybe burst into flames or whatever it was, your immediate reaction was, 'Thank God it isn't me!' But after you landed, then the other reaction came in, and you know... it was not a nice reaction, obviously. In some cases, one had also to inform the family, and so on – it was awful. But the strange thing is that the first reaction was one of self-preservation, really.

And the other thing was that we had invented a system which was called Cab Rank, which I think he was writing about, too. When you had a section of four Typhoons sitting at the end of the airstrip, and I had a sort of map over my knees of the local area – you know, a grid map, and the ACP or whatever he was called used to fire a red thing up and we used to take off. But remember, the Germans were not more than six or seven miles away from us, so you had to circle to your operational height, which I think was 8000 ft or something, above the airstrip, and I had a map on my knees, a sort of grid map, and then a voice came over – it used to be either a controller in a forward tank who used to say, 'In 10 seconds there will be yellow or red or blue smoke' – whatever it was – 'go down and attack'. And you had your grid reference and you just flew to that... but you couldn't even... normally those tanks were hiding in trees or… so you didn't really see them until you went right down and then you attacked them. And you know, sometimes we had to fly two or three times a day doing that, and the German anti-aircraft became… and their 88mm guns became more and more... better even though they were, I think, pretty scared of the Typhoons, and... we had big losses.