On this raid our squadron went down and we dove shooting at some large boats on the Danube River. Every tenth bullet was a tracer that made a white trail in the sky allowing you to track them. It seemed strange to set your bullets going down and those from the ships coming up. I watched my bullets hitting the decks. We flew all the way back to England Just above the tree tops but never saw a train or airfield to shoot at. There were flak towers, but they were too dangerous and we all flew around them. They were concrete towers with many guns that could shoot in all directions. It did no good to shoot at them.
By now I had flown ten missions and was entitled to receive the Air Medal. At a ceremony at the base, we were presented with the medal by General Whelan. For each additional five missions we got an Oak Leaf cluster which we fastened to our theatre ribbon. I received two of these before being shot down.
On occasion we had the job of censoring outgoing mail from the enlisted personnel. No one liked doing this as it was a tedious Job. We had to read all their letters and cross out any military info that the enemy might pick up. Our mail was censored by the squadron commander then sealed and sent out. After reading letters for a couple of hours, I don't believe we bothered to cross out much.
Some of the English women living near the air base were selling chances on a fruit cake for a shilling a ticket. I had the winning ticket and when they delivered the fruit cake we could hardly believe it. It was in a washtub three feet across and over a foot high. We Put it on the table in our Ready Room where we spent our time relaxing. We had to cut it with one of our Jungle knives, a machete (another one of the Army's questionable issues: a Jungle kit for each of us in England). The bottom six inches of the fruit cake was solid fruit so you know it was rich. We cut off two sections for the other two squadrons and some for the enlisted men and still had enough to last a week. I don't know how they baked anything that big, but it tasted very good.
One other of our missions somewhere over Germany we lost several more of our pilots. We ran into a lot of German fighter planes and were soon scattered all over the sky. I was so busy trying to keep from being shot down that I didn't get an opportunity to shoot an enemy plane. When things calmed down I found myself alone so headed back to England. When I gained enough altitude I heard the relay plane calling a new compass heading as the wind had changed to about 50 mph from the north. I corrected to the new heading but there was no way of knowing if everyone had picked up the message. It was uncanny, the sense of direction I had. I believe I could have crossed at the narrowest part of the Channel even without a compass heading! It must have been a sense of direction I was born with because it made no difference what my location was over Germany, I knew exactly where England was all the time.