You searched for: “petrenko”
# | Pilot (↑) | Rank | Born | Place | Score (↑) | Units | Aircraft | Awards | *************Notes************* | Photo (Click to Expand) | Links | AuthorComments |
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1 | Petrenko, Bruno | Lt | 1917 | 1/JG-77 (Channel) | Bf 109E-1 Werk # 4448? "White 4" (lost 8/31/40) | Fighter Operational Clasp | POW 31 August, 1940 after aerial combat, crashing at Brook House Farm, Navestock. When the bullets began to fly, there was usually some confusion among pilots without combat training. Here is Petrenko's first-hand account of the incident: he was being hit by the small caliber British bullets, but Petrenko's aircraft’s armour plating saved him. 'It was the first time I had experienced this. . . it was a kind of ticky, ticky, tick. . but it made me feel good that it had protected me. Anyway, what I did was evade whoever was firing at me by nose-diving. Now, I thought, I've got rid of it, so I climbed up again trying to catch up with the unit. I remember thinking, Well, this isn't so bad . . . The protection had held . . . but I was still climbing and suddenly there was a second attack from behind. It was so fast that I couldn't evade before it came . . . at least, I as a beginner couldn't. Suddenly he was there and immediately I went down again. While I was diving I thought, Well, what do I do now? Some pilots said that in such a case you just go down to tree-top level and go home . . . but I thought, Well, that sounds too easy, so I decided to climb up again.., which was a big mistake that an experienced man would not have made. Then as I was climbing again suddenly I was attacked from below to the right-hand side. Someone who was more at home playing these games had come from below from the right-hand side. In this area there was no protective armour so it was a real problem. The glass from the cockpit was splintering, the instrument panel splattered and now I was really hit. . . or many hits. Somehow at that point I blacked out. When I came to I found myself in a vertical dive and what I noticed was lots of noise, a kind of fluid coming from the side of the plane and what struck me was that the ground was approaching very fast. I realized that I had to catch the plane immediately and get it out of the dive. I did and in doing so my blood rushed from my head and I blacked out again. When I came to I found I was at tree-top level with little power left in the machine. It could still fly but with no power. I was now very, very low and had to look for somewhere to land. At this stage I looked around and found that there were two Spitfires behind me and they were shooting occasionally, but I guess it was difficult to shoot at me because I was going so slow and was not flying in a straight line. I don’t know whether they didn’t shoot me because they saw I was in a difficult situation....anyway, I just saw an English park-like landscape, some bushes and trees. There was a group of trees ahead of me and I said to myself, Well, gee, what I have to do is to try to get enough speed by flying directly at the trees and then hope that I have enough speed to jump over them and then go down. I did this and then blacked out once more." Extract from 'Waiting For The All Clear' Ben Hicks, Bloomsbury Publishing 1990 | Memoir |
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Wer vor der Vergangenheit die Augen verschließt, wird blind für die Gegenwart. Richard von Weizsäcker
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