"On 1 May, 1943 a plane carrying a mostly Canadian crew went down in the Netherlands. Eighty years on, the BBC is retelling the events of that fateful day - and their far reaching consequences - as part of our ongoing project 'we were there", which features British veterans telling their own stories for future generations. For as long as Janet Reilley can remember, the first day of May has been one of remembrance for her family - of lives lost and saved in combat. Her father "Mac" Reilley would pick up the phone to his friend "Buddy" MacCallum, to remember the events of 1943 that shaped their young lives - and their futures... ...At 14:00 on 30 April 1943, alongside five other crews, they received a two-hour briefing of their operation for that night - Essen, described to them as one of the toughest targets in the Ruhr. Home to the Krupp steelworks, the city was vital to German military manufacturing. Delayed due to fog over England, they set out at midnight. Shortly after 03:00, Atkinson gave the order to open the bomb doors over the "huge furnace, with thousands of searchlights and heavy flak guns blasting away" in the defence of Essen. Suddenly Hardy, who was navigating, cried out, "I've been hit." An anti-aircraft shell had severed his right leg above the knee. MacCallum tried in vain to save him, wrapping him in his bomber jacket to keep him warm and giving him morphine in his agonising final moments. With their navigator dead, Atkinson told Reilley to release their bombs and then help him guide the aircraft clear of the target. Hardy's careful log and map table were unreadable with his blood, so Reilley plotted a course home to England from the flight plan and astral navigation. Their luck runs out "Fighter starboard!" shouted someone as the sound of cannon shells hitting the fuselage rang out. "Everywhere you looked was fire," recalled Weiler. "The skipper dived and then pulled up, and the flames did die down a little, but flared up and spread over the wing as we dived to hold flying speed," recalled MacCallum. Atkinson's decision to dive stopped the aircraft from stalling and rolling over, giving his crew the chance to follow his instruction to bail out. Reilley and O'Neill had bailed out before, the only survivors of a crash in October 1942. That event is traced in the Canadian landscape at Mount Hudema in British Columbia, which Reilley had named in honour of the pilot. It is one of more than 950 locations in the territory with a name connected to World War Two. The last to leave the plane was Callopy, with Atkinson remaining to fly it so his crew could safely bail out. He did not survive. But six members of the crew did - landing in fields and trees around Elst in the Netherlands, where they were captured as prisoners of war (POWs)." www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65410429
