At 8.15am he was making his way towards the shipyard. "It was a flat, open spot with potato fields on either side," he said in an interview in 2005. "It was very clear, a really fine day, nothing unusual about it at all. I was in good spirits. As I was walking along I heard the sound of a plane, just one. I looked up into the sky and saw the B-29, and it dropped two parachutes. I was looking up at them, and suddenly it was like a flash of magnesium, a great flash in the sky, and I was blown over."