Danny
What an incredible story. I read it twice, and will read it again. How it was the bombs didn't detonate, or the fuel go up, is beyond comprehension. Perhaps the designers at Vultee had a hand in it. You're incredibly modest too. In your Epilogue, you criticise your decision-making, effectively making-out that the whole thing would have run without incident had you only done this and that. Seems to me that your decision-making was entirely reasonable, given the paucity of accurate information: it was perfectly 'obvious' that the fuel gauge was faulty; and you had no clear reason to suspect a genuine oil supply failure. It is a miracle, of course, that you didn't join the ranks of other excellent young men, whose names (largely forgotten) are engraved on stone memorials.
When I was about eleven, in the 1960s, I was attending a Prep School in the south of England. Quite a few of the staff were ex-wartime servicemen. Two of these I remember well. Major Duffy and Brigadier MacKenzie. Both were very kind, unlike some of the stricter members of staff. Yet we were in respectful awe of them. Major Duffy had a deep red, jagged scar beneath his eye. As a Royal Marine, he had been hit by shrapnel as he prepared to descend the side of a ship and into a landing craft. Brigadier MacKenzie had lost his arm. His tank had been knocked-out in the Western Desert, when his unit was over-run. Later, lying in a hospital bed, a senior Afrika Korps officer stopped to talk to him and express regret that he had had to lose a limb. It was Field Marshall Rommel.
I think, Danny, with your battle scar, you stand among heroes.