Willi and I may be sitting here now, just the two of us, in the hospital in Zwolle with our heads in bandages, but we can both still recount it and pick up the fight again, while Kurt, our friend and good radio operator, has been killed.

Although... it remains to be seen whether we will be able to fly again after our crash last night. And how long would the war go on, with Antwerp already lost, and how long would it take for us to rejoin the troops? Would new aircraft still be delivered despite all the bombing of our factories? 

When we took off from Leeuwarden just after midnight in pitch darkness - having heard that English bombers had been spotted over the North Sea - Kurt still had the highest say   

He would use his technical knowledge to put the giant feelers on the nose of our Messerschmitt to work... Thanks to our new radar system, he would surely guide us quickly to the bombers, so that Willi could fire his shells at the Dickys without any problems. 

Well, that turned out to be quite different... Of course we kept an eye out for the gunners and were also on the lookout for English night fighters. 

But while we were concentrating on one of the guys above us, after an hour or so, we ourselves unexpectedly came under fire out of nowhere - there was no stopping us.   

Luckily we managed to bail out in time and landed on the ground next to each other. I heard Willi moaning and managed to help him with an emergency bandage. I didn't hear anything from Kurt, but when I went to check on him, I heard very softly "Scheisse holz ... holz....". After that it was quiet. So could we have been attacked by one of those wooden mosquitoes and the new radar would not have picked it up properly?

Pilot Heinz Wagner, together with air gunner Willi Winkler, survived the attack by the British Mosquito - it is unknown whether they participated again in the fight against the Allies. Kurt Kudritzki was buried at the Noorderbegraafplaats in Leeuwarden and later transferred to the German war cemetery in Ysselsteyn (L).

text Hugo van den Ende 
research Stefan Hendriks