‘What happens if your engine fails? You die like an officer and a gentleman’: One of last surviving Bomber Command pilots reveals heroic WWII service for first time aged 104
At the age of 104, one of the last surviving members of Bomber Command has told the extraordinary story of his heroic wartime service for the first time.
Former pilot Colin Bell recalls in a new memoir how the station commander refused to ground his fleet of Mosquito fighter-bombers despite warnings that the manufacturer needed to fix a potential engine failure.
When asked what would happen if the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines failed on takeoff, the commander replied sternly: ‘You will die like an officer and a gentleman.’
Mr Bell also revealed that instead of carrying a teddy bear as a mascot during death-defying bombing raids on Nazi Germany, he took a Smith & Wesson pistol with 20 rounds of ammunition with him in case he got shot.
In his memoirs, serialized in the Daily Mail today, he writes: ‘At the time Hitler and Goebbels were encouraging the German people to lynch downed airmen. If I was caught it was my intention to shoot at least half a dozen members of the approaching gang before blowing my brains out.’
The humble war hero reflects the incredible courage of aircrews who face unimaginable dangers every time they go on a mission.
Of the 30 or so pilots and navigators he had problems with during his time at 608 Squadron at RAF Downham Market in Norfolk, 13 were dead by the time he left six months later.
His last raid on Berlin took place in March 1945, just before his 24th birthday. Two days later the Mosquito he was flying was shot down and both crew members were killed.
Former Mosquito pilot Colin Bell (104) has written a memoir about his time leading daring raids on Nazi Germany for Bomber Command during the Second World War
Mr Bell, who turns 105 next week, also addresses recent criticism of Bomber Command’s devastating attacks on German cities such as Dresden, which hit civilians as well as military targets.
He writes: ‘There is certainly a debate on this issue, but I often wonder how that debate would have played out if we had lost the war.
‘People may be expressing reservations about living as slave labor under the Nazi regime, where concentration camps were set up in every city for their opponents.
‘So people say, “What about Dresden?” I say Dresden was truly terrible. But so were the attacks on London, Coventry, Plymouth, Exeter, Liverpool and Southampton, to name a few.’
Bloody Dangerous by Colin Bell was published by Abacus on March 5th. You can read an excerpt here.
