Tag #114100 - Interview #95052 (Alexander Grin)

I remember a funny incident. We were to know the wind direction over the target before we took off on our task, but there was no information except the intelligence data. If there were intelligence people in the vicinity of the target they provided the information about the weather conditions in the area to us, but if there were none of them, they provided the data from the area where they were located - that might be up to 300 kilometers away from the target. We once received a task and the discrepancy of the data about the wind direction we received and the actual situation was 180 degrees. They told us the wind was blowing from the north to the south in the area, while actually it was blowing from the south to the north.

We were flying over the Gulf of Finland to avoid German flaks. There was a lot of confusion and once one of our crews dropped bombs on Sweden, which was out of the war. We were to drop bombs on Finland. They returned and wrote a report: ‘These damned Finns don’t even care about black-out. Here is lighting everywhere and even trams commute. We gave them a sharp blow without seeing the target’.