That was our own stupidity. That wasn't the fault of the Command. The fact was that we discovered only after the war that the Germans had upward firing guns in their fighter planes, that the German fighters were equipped with these vertically firing guns so the fighter pilot just had to fly directly underneath the bomber, push the button and the bomber would never see the fighter at all.

[Q] But that you were not aware of...

And we weren't aware of this. That was our fault; we should have understood that. It was an obvious idea. And the Japanese had them too in fact; the Japanese shot down quite a lot of B29s that way, and the Americans never discovered that either. So that was a failure of the Operational Research Section, that we didn't discover this. In fact these attacks from below were so lethal that the bombers never knew what hit them.