A quiet trip until about 100 miles from the target when a fighter tried to sneak up on us. We lost him in the clouds. On the run up to the target another fighter put a few holes in us without doing any serious damage, followed closely by a single engined fighter,which hit the port inner engine and put a hole through the windscreen before it was hit and driven off by the mid-upper gunner.
We dropped the bombs on the glow of what seemed to be some fairly big fires below the cloud, but as we left the target,the flight engineer reported that we were losing fuel at a rather alarming rate, probably as a result of the fighter attack over the target. We were able to get somewhere north of the Frisian Islands when it became clear that we were not going much further, so after a brief discussion, we decided to ditch and hope our Mayday signal was picked up. The landing was surprisingly soft and the whole crew was able to get out into the dinghy before the aircraft sank. It was only a matter of four hours before we were spotted by an aircraft and picked up by a launch.
Signed F/S Metcalfe, pilot 314 Squadron.