At 14.00 hrs, the formation went back from Rennes in our direction with the german fighters in their six hours. We heard clairly the tac-tac-tac of the machine guns. Tracer bullets were senn in the sky as fireworks sometimes near us.
The death of a schoolboy.
The master was with his deputy Miss Chatton and the schoolboys of two classrooms, near the " Butte aux Moulins " (Windmill Hill) to catch some Colorado beetle ; He remembered :
The schoolboys were affrayed and they were lying under an apple tree at the top of bank. The dog fight was terrefic ; eight or ten german fighters twirled around the bombers which flew in a perfect box formation and fired the attackers.
A lot a peasants were at work. All over the sky, the bulletswhistled. At Pleugueneuc school, a nearby village, the young Jean Briot was sitting in the classroom with the others boys. This very day, he didn’t want to go to school, may be a premonition ? A stary bullet rebounded off the window and killed the young boy. He prepared his communion for the next week.
The crash of the B.17.
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François Labbé, 19, was ready to go at work in the fields. A field near the crash site, some minutes late and François would be killed. The school master remembered :
Sundenly, we saw a bomber in trouble just over " La Poterie ", apart from the formation, flying in a steep nose-down with a plume of black smoke. Immediately, the bomber explosed in two : wings-engines, fuselage. The part wings-engines were in flammes, whirlling ; a lot of debris went down too. Some airmen were seen going down without parachute as arrow. Only one parachuted properly.
The cockpit and a piece of fuselage crashed at 300 meters from north-east of the village Maupertuis, in a field of the Rouvraie farm named as " Les Grands Béziers ". A fire blazed brightly and a dark column of smoke rose up. The rest of the fuselage crashed 500 meters more east, in front of the farm of " Les Frais ".
Four german fighters flew around the crash site. They didn’t fire the only one american parachute who landed west of " Le Perroquet Vert " (The Green Parrot). He was amazed and lightly wounded in the head.
Miss Yvette Bouret, 17, witness of the dog-fight from her village of Evran approched quickly with her bicycle. She had only one whish in her mind ; arrived first and help the survivors with her english knowledge. But, faced the crash site, she was completely depressed. Denise Bouret lay some flowers near the fuselage. A german officer came and sayed to keep this flowers for the dead of Rennes !
Others french tryed to help the parachutist but the germans of the Dinan arrived first to PoWed the only one survivors of this B.17
