When Dad was posted to the squadron, the new crews were assigned the less than new aircraft-the old warhorses as he called them. While the ground crews did an exceptional job, often in poor weather, it still didnčt alter the fact that some of the airframes were tired and patched. He said a lot of them just wouldn,t climb, often getting up to only 15,000 or at best 15,500 feet, as he put it, it put them uncomfortably close to Hallybag territory. However, the squadron logs show them as having bombed from 19,000 to 21,000 feet, I have no explanation for the difference.
This tested the pilot,s skill, and the Skipper was up to it. About 3 weeks into their ops, while taking off for Berlin, the starboard outer caught fire. They were still on the ground, but going too fast to be able to stop on the remaining runway, so they continued the take off. At about 300 feet, once cleaned up, they secured the engine and extinguished the fire. The procedure then was to go to a bomb jettison site, some 60 miles offshore out of shipping lanes.
They had climbed to about 5,000 feet, and had just crossed the shoreline, when the starboard inner broke it,s crankshaft and also caught fire; in addition due to the broken crank the engine initially would not feather. With the windmilling engine and full load the aircraft could not maintain height, and the Skipper warned the crew they may have to abandon the aircraft. Eventually the engine was brought under control but still loosing height, so Skipper told Dad to start jettisioning the bombs. The incendiaries when out first but was not enough, the cookie had to be jettisoned. Amazingly, that bomb could not be dropped safe; as Dad put it, once you dropped the thing, it WAS going to go bang. Even from close to 5,000 feet they felt the concussion from the bomb exploding. They made it back to base OK.
They wondered, being close to the shoreline if there were any sea traffic under them, but they never caught any h**l from the Royal Navy, so I guess not.