LEST WE FORGET 55 He got blown up in the air and he was injured, but he survived. The rest of them were little bits of skin and hair; and windows blown, broken in the hangars half a mile away on the other side of the field. And it dug a hole the size of a farm dugout, if you know what that was like. So I was at the starting end of the runway that night. There was an officer, he was there and he shouted to everybody, get down, get down, so I laid on the ground and I could, there were about two or three waves of warm air flack go over us. So that was …Well, it was certainly an experience I never want to see again. But it gave me some indication of what a bomb was like when it went off. We started work about 8:00 and very shortly after that, they saw a little vehicle drive along beside the runway. And he was trailing an oily cloth, a rag behind him that had fire on it. And every time he went by a nozzle along the runway, it would ignite a gas flame. And they did that on both sides of the runway and then they turned on the fuel and flames shot up about 28 feet in the air and pretty soon, a rectangle opened in the clouds and there was blue sky and sunshine up above. And the next thing we saw was a squadron of American bombers come in for a landing in close succession, one after the other. And that was called FIDO [Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation], that’s the acronym for fog inversion dispersal operation. That was so secret, I had never heard of it before.
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