Describe the airplane and your role in it.

I was a radio operator, machine gunner, and navigator. Also, on the floor of the airplane, between my legs, there was the heavy machine gun system, which, if it did not reload automatically, I had to do it by hand. That gun [fired from] the nose of the airplane. They also had four small machine guns aimed forward. I had a twin [rearward facing, defensive] machine gun, the MG15.

The 110 was a safe, easy plane to fly, but it was slow like molasses

I think it had about 50 [rounds] in the MG15. You had to look through it and aim like a regular gun, but it was a twin gun. You couldn’t do a long string of shots. You were limited to very short bursts. The magazine was a container over the gun, and then there was another container next to that to catch the empty shells. They would usually give you a few [magazines] and you would change them yourself in flight. The cannon in the nose was fed by a belt of [rounds], and the spent shells would fall out the bottom of the plane. In all of our guns, even my gun, every seventh or tenth bullet was a lightning [tracer] round – the same with the big gun.

Sitting in the back, I never shot another airplane down. I may have clipped the tip off someone’s wing, but that’s about it. When firing the MG15 you always had to be careful not to shoot your own tail off. The plane had a twin tail that was always in your way. It was a very good piece of the flying system, but you also had to be careful of it if you had to bail out. You had to make sure that you didn’t get hit by it.

This airplane had two engines, which was something new for military flying – that a fighter plane had two engines. The head of the German air force had a lot of hopes and expectations for that particular plane.

The 110 was a safe, easy plane to fly, but it was slow like molasses, and it could not stay more than an hour and a half in the air before we had to be back. If we used the spare fuel tanks [drop tanks], we could probably spend another half hour in the air, but the plane was even slower than molasses during that time – and very hard to maneuver.

Our plane was very good in the campaign against France. The 110 was very active there. The French air force was nothing at that time. They had bombers that were still from World War I. …

During the Blitz – which we were involved with very heavily, being based on the French coast near Calais – we had to fly three or four times every day to escort bombers to and from their targets. When the British came up with the Spitfire, we had little ability to escape from them.

The 110 was very capable for ground strafing

Later, the Bf 110 did well against the Russians. When the war started with Russia, all but one of our units were moved there. We were very capable against their airplanes. Their planes weren’t as fast or as good as the Western airplanes.

Was the Bf 110 a competitive airplane in the beginning of the war?

Absolutely. The 110 was very capable for ground strafing – to attack ground troops and columns and trains and all those things. That’s what we did, very successfully. We did that in Belgium, in France. In England we were guiding bombers and on the way back we were still guiding bombers. Or we were taking off and looking for trains down on the ground, but most of the time we were flying back.

But our 110 was very good when our troops advanced to raid roads, and trains, and cars, and all those things – with everything we had.

What kind of airplanes did the Bf 110 fly against in the beginning of the war?

There was in France… there was a plane they called a Bloch, and the Polish they had some other things.

The British were better than the Bloch.

The French did not have very much in their air force. They had some bombers, very old-time bombers – like the First World War-type bombers.