"I suddenly saw this lone Dornier, how he was on his own I'll never know, but he was off home. So I went after him. Now the drill against the Dornier was that he had a dustbin rear gunner, a dustbin hanging down below the fuselage and you had to fix him first and then close in for the aircraft. This I did cleverly of course, I could see him shooting at me and I closed in and gave him a burst and shut him up, I least I thought I had. I never know though to this day whether I did or I didn't or whether someone took his place. 

As I closed right in on him and started shooting I suddenly saw his rear gunner shooting back at me with little red sparks you can see. I didn't pay much attention to it, I just thought a quick spray of the spread of my guns he would stop another one and carried on firing for quite a while, quite a long burst, when suddenly I was covered in smoke. To my horror a hole appeared, I was leaning forward of course as one did to the gun-sight which was fortunately in the middle of piece of bullet resistant glass, about an inch and a half thick, a little piece only about six inches across and a hole appeared in this thing in front of my face. I thought good god I must be dead or something, no blood, no nothing but I'm covered in smoke, I thought I was on fire. So I whipped the hood back undid my straps and started to get out. 

By this time I'd broken away and was going down hill and I was halfway out of the cockpit when I suddenly saw that smoke was coming from the top of the engine, through the engine cowling which is where the glycol pipe is, the coolant pipe. It was a really browny colour, it wasn't black smoke and I could smell it to, it was glycol. So I got back strapped myself in again, left the hood open and still went rapidly down hill in case someone was following me and just started looking for a field and I found a field to land in. In those days you were not to, not ordered to land with your undercarriage up as you were supposed to - any forced landing in the old days - you were supposed to get it down without hurting the aircraft. 

So I waited until I'd found my field and got down to about 1000 feet, dropped the undercarriage and did forced landing in this field which had a few cows in it. Quite a big field and with no trouble at all. I hadn't even got out of the cockpit before an army jeep with a young subaltern and two soldiers with fixed bayonets came roaring through the gate in a jeep and as soon as they saw it was one of ours they changed their attitude. I got a screwdriver from one of the soldiers and we took the top off and there it was a bullet had gone through the glycol pipe."

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