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Show THRILLING RAID OVER HUN TOWN London. American bombing squadrons squad-rons are now bombing the Rhine valley val-ley along with the British. The Yank-pilots Yank-pilots and observers, like their brethren breth-ren of the royal air force, enter into this "sport" with the same spirit that has made them famous on the baseball diamond or football gridiron of their own American colleges. A young American aviator has just told of a trip over the German lines and back behind Into German territory. The formation in which the American airmen flew consisted of 11 big bombing bomb-ing machines, each of which carried 1,000 pounds of high explosives, three machine guns and three men. This was the boy's story : "After I had tried the guns on my machine, checked the bombs, made sure everything was ship-shape, and put a couple of little bombs into a small bag beside me, I started my engine. en-gine. The big motors growled away, waiting for the. starting flash. Soon the signal came and we were off. "For twenty minutes we climbed, tin- til the earth was just a black blot. Another An-other twenty-five minutes and we were over the trenches, with the searchers groping about in the mists below us. The big guns crashed away cont nu-ously, nu-ously, and we could see the explosions-from explosions-from where we soared high above them. No sooner had we crossed the lilies than the Germans started tiring at us with their anti-aircraft guns. Once a German searchlight got right on us with its beam of light. We fired a couple of rounds of machine-gun fire at the Germans who were manning the searchlight, nnd It went out. "Far below us we could see the lights of a locomotive. Finally we reached our objective. According to plan, we throttled our motors, and glided toward the earth to get nearer our target. It seencd curj.isly quiel. Then suddenly the earlh seemed to open below us. Seventeen searctilighls were turned on us by the Germans, and their shafts of light swept all about us. The anti-aircraft guns made a wall ahead of us. The high-explosive high-explosive shells burst on every side of us, and the green-fire balls swayed and splraled as they tried to set us o.-; (ire. The American machines went, straight on, with never a waver or a turn. There were so many crashes that I thought more than once that we were hit. We kept straight on. Amid Blinding Rays. "Suddenly one of the German searchlights got us nnd the rest of the seventeen threw around us with a suddenness sud-denness that made their concentration concentra-tion feel like a blow. We fired our machine guns until the tips of the weapons got red and the glow began be-gan to creep up the barrels. The whole seventeen beams were on us, although al-though we plunged and side-slipped about in a desperate way. We let go the bombs when we were right over the mark. The antiaircraft shells were getting even closer than ever and the machine was hit time and again, though not in a vital spot. Why we were not literally blown out of the air I do not know. After we wore well over the mark and had dropped all our bombs we discovered one 250-pound 250-pound bomb which had caught fast in the rack and failed to drop when released. Consequently we swung back on a second run and when we were over the place which we had bombed we let go the last bomb and scored a direct hit far below. "We went home at a high speed. We crossed our own trench lines at about 3,000 feet up, saw some familiar famil-iar landmarks, headed for our own airdrome, fired our signal and got the answer. A few minutes Inter we had landed. A glance over the machine ma-chine saw two big tears in the side of the fuselage and many holes in the wings. "But we had done a splendid bit of bombing, and such damage as our machine ma-chine had suffered was by no means difficult to repair." |