BILL Pearce remembers the exact moment his friend Walter Telsnig tried to kill him.
It was 1.20am, February 22, 1945, and they were both 6km above Dusseldorf in Germany. Walter's Messerschmitt had sneaked under Bill's Lancaster bomber and sent a spurt of 20mm cannon fire into the fuselage.
Bill, flying with 174 other aircraft on his 41st mission with Bomber Command, knew immediately the shot was lethal.
His rear gunner lay dead and the starboard engine had exploded in a ball of fire about 2m from him as he hunched over his wireless operator desk in the main cabin.
The skipper gave the order to bail out, so he ripped off his oxygen mask, pulled on a parachute and peered out the rear starboard door at a black German night lit by the blazing wing of the doomed Lancaster.
"I knew there was no welcoming committee waiting for me on the ground," he said. "It wasn't a good time to be in Germany."
World War II has provided some extraordinary stories of derring-do but few have such amiable endings as the tale of Walter and Bill.
More than 60 years after the two desperately tried to destroy one another in the skies over Europe, they now chat on the phone. "We're mates," Bill says. "It's silly, 60-odd years ago we were trying to kill each other."
The chance encounter has been documented by Royal Air Force records which collaborate Bill and Walter's recollections.
The two were put in touch by a third party in Britain several years ago. Speaking at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra this week , Bill, 85, said while he knew the gravity of his situation, the lack of oxygen made him strangely optimistic or "happy drunk".
He landed safely, one of four out of the crew of seven who survived.
Eventually captured by a civilian in a paddock near Cologne, he was handed over to the Luftwaffe before one of the tanks of flamboyant US General George S. Patton crashed through his prison gates and liberated him a few months later.
source: Daily Telegraph
It was 1.20am, February 22, 1945, and they were both 6km above Dusseldorf in Germany. Walter's Messerschmitt had sneaked under Bill's Lancaster bomber and sent a spurt of 20mm cannon fire into the fuselage.
Bill, flying with 174 other aircraft on his 41st mission with Bomber Command, knew immediately the shot was lethal.
His rear gunner lay dead and the starboard engine had exploded in a ball of fire about 2m from him as he hunched over his wireless operator desk in the main cabin.
The skipper gave the order to bail out, so he ripped off his oxygen mask, pulled on a parachute and peered out the rear starboard door at a black German night lit by the blazing wing of the doomed Lancaster.
"I knew there was no welcoming committee waiting for me on the ground," he said. "It wasn't a good time to be in Germany."
World War II has provided some extraordinary stories of derring-do but few have such amiable endings as the tale of Walter and Bill.
More than 60 years after the two desperately tried to destroy one another in the skies over Europe, they now chat on the phone. "We're mates," Bill says. "It's silly, 60-odd years ago we were trying to kill each other."
The chance encounter has been documented by Royal Air Force records which collaborate Bill and Walter's recollections.
The two were put in touch by a third party in Britain several years ago. Speaking at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra this week , Bill, 85, said while he knew the gravity of his situation, the lack of oxygen made him strangely optimistic or "happy drunk".
He landed safely, one of four out of the crew of seven who survived.
Eventually captured by a civilian in a paddock near Cologne, he was handed over to the Luftwaffe before one of the tanks of flamboyant US General George S. Patton crashed through his prison gates and liberated him a few months later.
source: Daily Telegraph
