Buck arrived at RAF Feltwell on 11 June 1942, a newly trained sergeant with two operations behind him but much still to learn.  Feltwell was a pre-war airfield, with brick accommodation and better amenities than the improvised wartime stations he would know later, although his welcome gave him other things to think about.

The other bed in his room was occupied by Bob Briscoe, a former musterer from the Wairarapa, who looked up from his novel and asked, “How long are you going to last?”  Eight men, he said, had already gone missing from that bunk during the two and a half months he had been there.  Buck answered that he was not going to be the ninth.

New arrivals heard that a rear gunner lasted four operations on average and might have to be washed out of his turret with a hose.  Such stories owed something to the rumour mill that flourished at every station, but the losses were real: within weeks Briscoe himself was missing.  Buck later recalled that the squadron lost thirty-two men, mostly New Zealanders, in the same period, and felt that 75 Squadron was never quite the same afterwards.

For all their bravado, Buck and the men around him did not expect to survive.  The prospect of becoming a grandfather seemed so remote that “What did you do in World War II, Grandad?” became a recurring joke, assuming as it did a future they scarcely believed they would have.  Yet however bad the next target looked, they had agreed to have a go, and the expectation of death did not excuse them from it.

Before his own regular crew began operating, Buck volunteered to replace a sick rear gunner on a trip to Emden in Wellington BJ584, piloted by Sergeant McPherson, on 22 June.  The crew was in trouble from the outset, with a sick navigator lying in his own vomit, groaning and unable to operate the bomb release.  They made three runs over the target while McPherson screamed abuse over the intercom, until the wireless operator finally crawled into position and released the bombs.

Buck returned profoundly grateful for Kearns and the men he knew.  His memoir later compressed the fate of McPherson’s crew, suggesting that they soon “got the chop”, although the operational record shows that, with some changes in personnel, they flew several more sorties before being lost on the Hamburg operation of 26 July.  Their loss came a little later than Buck remembered, but the trip had left him with a lasting impression of the danger of flying with a crew that could not work together.

He particularly remembered McPherson’s screaming, which had made a bad situation worse without helping the sick man or getting the bombs away.  With Kearns, Buck could argue, demand a quicker turn or insist on an apology and still trust the man at the controls.  That trust would matter repeatedly, because the rear gunner could see dangers hidden from the pilot, who had to believe him and act in time.

The target on the night of 28–29 June was the dock area, where the submarine pens serviced the wolfpacks hunting in the Atlantic.  Carrying armour-piercing bombs, their Wellington crossed the target at about 10,000 feet through flak and the slow-rising clusters of fire that aircrew called “flaming onions”.  Kearns held the bomber steady on its run while they released their payload.  The worst trouble came on the way home.  By the time they were leaving the Cherbourg Peninsula they had lost so much height that the Wellington was down at sea level.  Moller suddenly called a line of fast-moving boats to starboard and opened fire from the front turret.  Buck felt the guns vibrating through the aircraft as they approached what could only be German patrol craft or E-boats.  They were too low for Kearns to turn away without first climbing enough to bank safely, and tracer fire passed above and below them.  The last boat in the line was still firing as it came into Buck’s ring sight; given another moment, he believed, his four Brownings would have torn its wooden hull apart.  Instead, a shell exploded immediately behind the rear turret, severing the hydraulic lines and spraying oil across the turret so that he could no longer see.  Shell fragments struck down his left side and lodged in his hip and leg, and his Mae West was punctured repeatedly.  The Wellington nevertheless remained in the air and crossed the Channel for home while Moller tended to Buck’s wounds.  In their logbooks both Kearns and Moller called it a very "sticky trip".

When Buck removed his flying overalls in sick bay, metal fragments scattered onto the floor.  Small pieces were pulled from his skin with pliers, although one fragment remained deep in his left calf for the rest of his life.  He was taken to Ely Hospital in the early hours, more, he thought, because of the risk of infection from the makeshift treatment than because of the wounds themselves.  His service record marked him “slightly wounded” on 29 June 1942.  After a week in hospital he was granted a week’s leave and stayed with a doctor’s family in Somerset.  The doctor had a petrol ration for his rounds and sometimes took Buck along; on one of these journeys he saw a snowy owl lift from the edge of a wood, a sight he remembered with pleasure long afterwards.

Back at 75(NZ) Squadron, Buck discovered that his crew had flown six operations without him.  Since a standard first tour was thirty missions, he now seemed likely to have to finish with unfamiliar men after his own crew completed their tour, a prospect he did not welcome.  Getting to thirty operations became moot, however, with their subsequent transfer together to the Pathfinder Force, which came with a new target of at least 45 operations to complete their tours.

Buck resumed operations with attacks on Duisburg on 23 and 25 July, followed by one of the crew’s most memorable trips, to Hamburg on the 26th.  As they left the target area, a radar-controlled blue master searchlight caught them and white beams converged until the Wellington was coned and brilliantly illuminated.  The absence of gunfire was more alarming than flak, suggesting that fighters were being given time to gather around them.  Kearns tried to break free, but the lights held the aircraft.

Moller remembered encountering power cables during the descent, with too little room to pass above them.  As they went underneath, Kearns lifted the nose just enough to lower the Wellington’s tall tail clear of the wires.

The Wellington levelled at about fifty feet and for the next hour crossed northern Germany at hedge-top height.  A farmhouse appeared, with a two-storeyed barn whose upper doorway showed pale with hay.  Buck fired at the barn as they passed, hoping to start a fire.  In the next paddock he raked his guns across a herd of black-and-white Friesian cattle.

“What the hell are you shooting at?” Kearns demanded.

“Cows,” Buck replied.

“You’ll get plenty of shooting soon without shooting at bloody cows.”

Beside the church, coloured tracer and sheets of light flak erupted from the village street in what appeared to be a prepared ambush, but Kearns’s turn around the church carried them past it.  In the confusion Buck fired at what he thought was a fighter flying alongside, only to realise that he had machine-gunned the Wellington’s own shadow.  Until then he had not fully understood how low they were.

Moller called a river ahead, which Hone identified as the Maas.  Seeing a rolled barbed wire fenceline beneath them, Buck suspected a guarded crossing and placed the illuminated dot of his sight on the wire, firing before the sentry box came into view.  A German guard answered with a single machine gun, but as the Wellington crossed the river, Buck lifted his guns through the target and the four Brownings shredded the wooden structure.  As it disappeared behind them, enemy tracer fire rose vertically in a slow spiral, the guard having apparently died with his finger on the trigger.

Searchlights laid their beams almost along the ground to catch them, while light shells struck branches and burst in the hedges.  Kearns dived towards machine guns in a revetment beside a searchlight position and called for Moller to fire, sending the defenders scattering, apparently convinced that the bomber was about to crash into them.  The front guns vibrated through the fuselage before Kearns pulled up over the emplacement, giving Buck a fleeting view of searchlights, guns and men on the ground.  He swept his guns from side to side, firing at shapes in the half-light, as they were taking hits too: forty-four holes were later counted in the bomb-bay doors.

In Moller’s account, recorded in Max Lambert’s Night After Night, the two gunners used the searchlight beams to guide their aim, Jack firing from the front and Buck from the rear.  A hit produced a burst of coloured light followed by darkness, and Moller reckoned they destroyed seven between them.  They shouted as each light went out, caught up in the excitement of being able to hit back, which he remembered long afterwards.

When someone called a large fire ahead, it became clear that they had flown in a broad circle back to the farm they had attacked earlier.  The barn was burning fiercely, presumably ignited by Buck’s incendiary ammunition, and people had gathered to fight the fire.  Coming in from another angle, he fired again at the yard.

Only after this second passage did Kearns begin climbing for the coast.  Buck expected fighters to follow and remained intensely alert, but the flight home over the North Sea was uneventful.  After an hour of diving out of searchlights, barely clearing obstacles and exchanging fire with defences on the ground, they returned to the monotonous sound of the engines.

Buck did not soften the episode when he wrote about it decades later, nor did he pretend that every target had been military: his account included firing at a farm, civilians fighting a barn fire and cattle in a field.  Elsewhere in his memoir he reconsidered another crew’s story, the destruction of a small German village during a nuisance raid, which had seemed hilarious to airmen in 1942.  Forty years later, he wrote, it was not funny at all.  He recognised the relief that laughter had brought at the time, while seeing the events differently in peace.

The records place the Hamburg escape on 26–27 July 1942, the same raid on which McPherson’s crew went missing.

Two nights later the Kearns crew returned to Hamburg.  That afternoon at Feltwell, Bob Briscoe calmly told Buck what should be done with his belongings: Canadian cigarettes under the bed, a spare battledress in the wardrobe and a radio to be sent to his aunt in Surrey.  He spoke as though disposing of ordinary household business, but Buck believed he knew he would not return.  That night Briscoe was lost.  It was not the only time Buck saw men accurately predict their fate before a mission, nor would it be the last.

Operations continued with Düsseldorf on 31 July, when they were attacked by a Ju 88, then Essen on 4 August, Duisburg on the 6th, Osnabrück on the 9th and Mainz on the 11th and 12th.  They went back to Osnabrück on the 17th, followed by Frankfurt on the 24th, Kassel on the 27th, Nuremberg on the 28th and Saarbrücken on 1 September.  X3396, which had effectively become ‘their kite’, carried them on every one of those operations. 

Every six weeks the men were allowed six days’ leave, and Buck usually went to Scotland after spending some time in London.  Through the branch of Lady Ryder’s hospitality scheme at the New Zealand club in Tottenham Court Road, he found a welcome at Mrs Kennedy’s house, Townhead of Glencairn, near Moniaive.  It stood about half a mile north of the village, roughly fourteen miles from Dumfries.  Much of the surrounding property had been sold over the years, leaving about four acres around the house.  It became a place he returned to, usually letting Mrs Kennedy know when he intended to come.

On one visit he arrived to find the household away and only the gardener in residence.  He managed with tomatoes from the greenhouse and bread bought in the village, supplemented by one meal a day at the gardener’s house.  The meal cost one shilling and sixpence, an amount he still remembered when writing about it decades later.  He had a quiet time there, with the chance to shoot the odd pheasant or rabbit.  Pheasants soon learned to avoid a place where they had been ambushed, and watching their movements interested him as much as the prospect of a shot.  These visits gave him a few days away from the station and its routines, in country where he could occupy himself much as he had at home.

Most of the WAAFs ran out screaming, followed by the cooks, but one woman stayed and repeatedly asked Buck to hand over the gun.  He kept insisting that he first had to shoot the bastard until at last he surrendered it and slid to the ground, helpless with laughter.  Realising she’d been had, she sat on his chest and pounded his arms, calling him a bastard in return, while Jack laughed too. When the next crew arrived and heard what had happened, they joined in, and breakfast was eventually served.

Buck associated such episodes with their reputation as the mad Kiwis.  He later recognised how this reckless, frightening fun relieved the tension of men who had just returned from being shot at, knowing that another night over Germany still lay ahead.

In the rear turret, Buck concentrated on learning how to keep himself and the crew alive.  An attacking fighter preferred the blind area beneath the tail, where a gunner sitting comfortably in his seat could miss it entirely while watching directly astern.  Buck therefore stood, wedged against the turret doors, with his feet braced forward and his face forced between the barrels of the Brownings so that he could search below the tail.  He also had a section cut from the Perspex to give him a clear view, preferring a frozen face to a fogged turret.

During air tests he practised for attacks by suddenly calling “Emergency port” or “Emergency starboard” and judging Kearns’s response.  At first the turns were too slow, but Kearns, stung by the criticism, made them progressively more violent until Buck was satisfied that the Wellington could slip a fighter’s aim.  He explained that in combat there might be time only for the command, not an explanation, so the first movement had to be right.

Over Belgium, the emergency evasion practice saved him.  With the sides of the turret fogged and the ground below black, he swept his clear panel astern and saw a Focke-Wulf 190 about one hundred yards away, already wagging its wings before firing.  He shouted, “Emergency port.” Kearns threw the Wellington into the rehearsed turn, and four lines of tracer passed within inches of the turret, centred on the place where Buck had just been.  Buck fired at the fighter as it turned away, leading it through his ring sight, and some seconds later saw an explosion and fire on the ground.  Although officially he claimed no confirmed victory, privately he was reasonably confident of the kill.  What he knew for certain was that Kearns’s immediate response had saved his life.

On another moonlit flight above a flat sheet of cloud, Buck watched a single-engined fighter climb through an opening in the murk beneath them.  When it began to rock its wings, he gave the order and Kearns dived and turned, losing a thousand feet.  The fighter came up through another opening for a second attempt, but after the Wellington repeated the manoeuvre, it disappeared below the clouds in search of less resistant targets.

Trust did not prevent arguments.  Returning over the North Sea, Moller fired at an aircraft off the port beam and said it had fired first, only to have Kearns doubt him.  Furious that a gunner’s warning had been dismissed, Buck hoped to find proof on the Wellington.  After landing, the “gunners’ union” searched backwards from the nose until they found a bullet hole in the tail, on a path that might, had it not struck the plane’s geodetic frame, have carried the round into Buck’s left hip.  They showed Kearns the evidence and demanded an apology, which he gave.

On another return from southern Germany, a skilled coastal flak battery began to bracket them.  Buck reported bursts fifty yards behind and told Kearns to weave, but received no response.  When the next rounds burst around the tail he repeated the warning more loudly, yet only after six bursts appeared around the cockpit did the Wellington manoeuvre violently.   On landing, Buck told Kearns to find another rear gunner if he would not act on warnings from the man best placed to see the danger.  Kearns again apologised.  Buck said he reported flak only when it came within fifty yards, and Kearns knew that, which made his failure to respond particularly galling.  

Buck was equally ready to give credit: after the Focke-Wulf attack, he thanked Terry on landing for the instant turn that had saved him.  Their exchanges could be fierce, but both men knew how much depended on the other acting without delay.  What separated them from the dysfunctional aircrew of Buck’s earlier experience is obvious in hindsight: their grievances and criticisms were voiced, always frankly and often forcefully,  to each other on the ground, never during an operation, and they were all willing to accept such criticism and learn from it. 

Buck also recalled an unexplained uneasiness during otherwise quiet periods, sometimes followed within seconds by the appearance of a fighter or some other danger.  He persuaded Kearns to take these feelings seriously, and one evening at Warboys, with the aircraft ready and its engines about to be run up, he said over the intercom that he felt “bloody uneasy”.  One by one the others admitted feeling the same, until Kearns ‘found’ an excessive magneto drop and rejected the aircraft.  The relieved crew danced around the red marker light while the ground staff watched.  They never again shared quite that feeling of a collective warning.

Some escapes owed nothing to preparation.  Once, while the aircraft stood wingtip to wingtip before an operation, a 4,000-pound bomb fell from the Wellington parked beside theirs. The crews scrambled clear, though far too late had the bomb actually detonated; fortunately, it had not fallen far enough to arm.  An armourer demonstrating the release switches to a new airman had finished by unthinkingly pressing the one that dropped the bomb.  Had it detonated, most of the squadron would have gone up with it.

As they gained experience, the crew developed a preference for lower operating heights, reasoning that fighters and much of the heavy flak would concentrate on the main body of bombers above them.  They knew this exposed them to other dangers, but believed they could manage those better.  Having survived the first part of their tour, they volunteered when the opportunity came to join the newly formed Pathfinder Force.