Since night fighters in a sense are specialists they are allowed a number of special privileges. For instance they may sleep as long as they wish during the day; meals are for them at all hours: they are urged to frequent leave; they are not given long ini rogations at the end of their flights, and they are encouraged to suggest improvements to their commanding officers.
The nerve centre of the night-fighter station is the control tower which functions much like the control T at a commercial airport. It directs all the aerodrome traffic. signals planes when to land. when to cruise round until Jerry has passed over and when to use another aerodrome in case the weather has closed in. doors. this time in hopes of seeing a Hun come crashing down in flames. After a while a gunner said, "Which of our boys are up there?" A cockney member of the ground crew piped, "Sir. I think the winko (wing commander) is after the Hun. I'm sure he'll bring him down." Suddenly we could clearly hear the roar of the Beaufighter battling off to the north in the same direction as the Hun. All of us strained ears and eyes for cannon fire and flame but nothing happened. All we saw was a skyful of tracer bullets. which looked like skyrockets at a fireworks' display. shot up by batteries of anti-airerafe guns to the nor Twenty minutes later the wing commander was back. He strolled into the hut as nonchalantly as if he had just returned from a ride in a motorcar. "Did you get one?" I asked. "Yes." he replied, whereupon I asked him what it was like. "It was too easy" he said, "I simply looked round for a few seconds, spotted him and let him have it, When I pressed the button I could see chunks of metal rip off. It was a Heinkel. And then be started falling. A few seconds later I saw him crash in flames in a field a couple of miles below."
The next morning the wing commander watched the ground sixth Swastika in gray on th Beaufighter:
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.