Aircraft gunner's life `always on line'.

As the war started Fred Whitfield was a van driver for Crofton's department store in South Shields.

That's where he met his wife, Betty, then a shop girl at the same store and still in her teens.

As Fred, of Walworth Avenue, Marsden, South Tyneside, was busy taking out German targets from his post as rear gunner in his crew's Lancaster, Betty had moved jobs. Crofton's had been bombed and she ended up making Lancaster engines in the converted Rover factory in Birmingham.

"He was flying them and I was making them," says Betty.

By D-Day Fred, now 83, was a rear gunner flying mostly in Lancasters with No.9 Squadron of Bomber Command. On the day itself they were flying up and down the English Channel "distracting Jerry, to give the impression that the real target was Pas de Calais.

"We never knew our target until we went into the briefing about six hours before the raid. We were told it would be one of the biggest of the war," explains Fred, or Sgt Whitfield as he was.

A couple of days after D-Day their target was Caen.

"The British troops had landed and were pushing the Germans back and back," says Fred. But they had reached an impasse at the River Orme, where strong resistance was preventing the Army from crossing.

"It was a dawn raid. Our job was to flatten the area. There were 942 aircraft on that raid and 6,800 tonnes of bombs was dropped."

"Your life was on the line during every raid you went on. I flew 48 missions." Fred was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for shooting down three planes in the air battle over Pas de Calais later that year in November 1944, in an aircraft that never flew again. "Once the Second Front had taken place there was a lot of hope."