"The closest I got to being killed in combat was not from the occasional Japanese fighter or the flak holes we got from time to time, but the night raid on Tokyo when we came so close to another B-29 flying over Mount Fujithat we could see the pilots' and bombardier's faces in the dark!

And - we all, as near as I could tell, were amateur soldiers, amateur pilots. An awful lot of bombs were dropped on a tiny fishing village on the southern coast of Honshu when we and other crews somehow missed the target - or like one time when our bombardier forgot to arm the bombs - Jack made him get into the bomb bays and do whatever it was that he had failed to do, so we could dump the bombs before we went home to Saipan.

We all carried Colt 45 pistols, though my shoulder holster got in the way of seat belts and parachute straps (chest chutes for the pilots), so I had to strap my shoulder holster around my waste. Anyhow, we all used to say that if we got shot down, we would pull our pistol out of its holster and THROW it at our would-be captors, believing that the Colt 45 wasn't very accurate.

My memory of take-offs from Saipan was the huge amount of rattling noise, as if the plane was about to fall apart - perhaps it was! . . . And the sadness of lining up for take-off, and watching our colleagues on Tinian, a mile across the water, crashing on take-off. They took off at ground level and had no place to go but up. We on the other hand had a lovely 50-foot cliff at the end of the runway, so we could, and did, dive down almost to sea level until we gained a bit more speed. We always believed that the decision makers loaded us with bombs in excess of the manufacturer's limits, though we never knew if that was true or not.

And I guess everybody will have told you how much the several thousand of us lusted after the two or three Red Cross girls who used to give us brandy and a doughnuts when we came back from a mission.

Life on Saipan was pretty quiet between missions, which were only a couple of times a week as I recall. I did a lot of bridge playing, sometimes 10 hours a day. And we built our own officers club on a lovely location, looking out over the rocks and the sea below. (When I say "we", I should really say "they" - I think the volunteer builders had just completed the officers club before we arrived in early April.)

After the Japanese surrender, we spent several weeks making "mercy missions" to drop supplies on prisoner-of-war camps in Japan, flying over the camps at about 500 feet, dumping our quarter-ton loads of food and medicine as near as possible to the camps. I felt so good about that, really wonderful taking food and medicines to the guys who had been shot down and captured. But 4 years later, living in Shanghai, I met a guy who had been a p.o.w. I told him about being one of the B-29 people who had delivered life saving food and stuff to the camps. But instead of thanking me, he snarled at me, "So YOU'RE one of those bastards! You come flying over us at rooftop level, you push a half ton of canned fruit salad out of your bomb bays - and either your aim is so bad that it drops half a mile away and we're all too weak to get out there and carry it back - or, worse, your aim is so good that the load of fruit salad goes right through our roof and we've got fruit salad all over everything."

Flying home to an air base just outside of San Francisco at the end of October, two months after the war was over, we flew all night, arrived at the California coast just after sunrise. Jack and I seriously considered flying our B-29 under the Golden Gate bridge. I think all that stopped us was not the danger, but the fear of being delayed in getting out of the service! I never flew again, as a pilot, until my wife bought me a "flying lesson" here on the south coast of England for a seventy-fifth birthday present.

I discovered Jack (Capt. Jackson Schultz) on the internet several years ago, found him in Florida, and my wife and I went to visit him and his lovely wife, Margaret, in October of 1995 - 50 years almost to the day since Jack and I had said goodbye at that California air base. Over dinner, my wife asked Jack if he had ever been scared in combat. "Hell, yes" he said, "but I never would have dared to tell anybody!" As for me, I was too young (20) and innocent to have the sense to be scared, plus I had a 20-year-old's confidence that nothing was going to happen to me. Wonderful when it turns out to be right.