"I always carried a fresh parachute with me... used to drop a lot of food into the area and there was always, you'd pick up these parachutes and as one would get dirty I'd pick up another clean one and this was fairly white and I waved it to him and stood in the middle of the beach and he saw it and he went out to sea and came back, circled came back ... he sort of looked down at me and as he sort of you know tilted his wing and looked down out of his cockpit and had a good look at me went out to sea again and while he was gone I scratched SOS in the sand with my foot in fairly big about 12 foot letters and he came back and he obviously read that and he waggled his wings and he circled about three or four times."

"... the next day... I was picked up by a PT boat... he told me in the mess a couple of days later that he still thought I was a Japanese even though I was standing there and he said he came in on his run and he had his finger on the cannon and he was just about to press the cannon to really let me have the works and he suddenly realised that if I didn't break away and run away I must be in real trouble... and he didn't press the button... otherwise I would have copped the lot."

FLIGHT LIEUTENANT RAYMOND 'RAY' GRAETZ