Robert E. Irion, Sandy, Utah: an interview by Benjamin Bahlmann, September 20, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 537, 538, and 539

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Robert . Irion eptemb r 20'h 2002 And of course the British were bombing at night and they were deliberately bombing cities. Not just industrial sites. And it was unbelievably bad when we got to see the damage of the bombing. I can remember Aachen, Germany was just a pile of rubble. I mean you flew over the city and you could not even make out the outlines of a building's shape. It was just rubble, rubble, rubble. And some of those places, boy, they were pretty bad. The Ruhr Valley - those industrial cities, they were just clobbered. You wondered how they held out as long as they did. Can't imagine the determination those people had to continue day after day in that. BEN: Did you ever - real quick - did you ever have any encounters with British flyers? ROB: Just very brief when we were up in the Northern part of England; we were up in Lincolnshire, I was telling you, when we first were checking out P-51 'sat Goxhill. I remember going over to a town called Scunthorpe south of there, and it was along the coast, and being in the bar there. And there were a couple of British pilots there. And I said, "You know, I see you guys at 5:00 every evening. You're heading out of here and there 's just nothing but airplanes filling the sky." And they all flew single missions and they're all going out, just airplanes all heading east, at dusk, you know. And watching this and thinking, "My lord! How many of them are there?" And they'd send two raids out there, eight or nine hundred bombers a night, going out there doing this. And I said, "Man, I look at you guys going out like that and I wonder how you keep separated and how you keep from running into each other." 124