A FORMER Luftwaffe pilot talks publicly for the first time on Thursday night about his role in York's infamous "Baedeker" raid.

Dr Karl-Heinz Meuhlen, a bomber pilot who was shot down over Malton after the raid, speaks out on a TV documentary programme about the attack.

Seventy-nine people, including five nuns at the Bar Convent, were killed, and another 250 were injured in the raid, which happened 60 years ago next month.

Dr Meuhlen tells BBC Close Up North: "The lookout told me when to drop the bombs. He shouted "Now!" and I pressed the button. They were released and they just dropped - like sack of potatoes."

The pilot, who remained a prisoner of war until 1945 following his capture at Malton, says he didn't think at the time about the York women and children who would be killed by his bombs.

"What did I feel when I was dropping the bombs? I knew that women and children and men would die, but we were soldiers, we didn't think about that," he says.

"It wasn't until I was in the prison camp that I began to realise what I had done with my bombs - how I had killed people who I didn't know, and whom I had nothing against."

The programme looks at why the city was so taken by surprise by the raid in the early hours of April 29, 1942, in which 250 tonnes of bombs was dropped by a wave of bombers.

"Even the air raid sirens were not sounded until after the bombs had started falling," said a programme spokesman.

There were no barrage balloons or anti-aircraft guns to defend York. But RAF night fighters shot down four enemy planes that night and their pilots are interviewed as well.

"The raid on York has long been thought to be part of the German 'Baedeker' raids - a series of retaliatory strikes on Britain's beautiful cathedral cities ordered by Hitler after the British began area-bombing cities in Germany," said a programme spokesman.

On the programme, some of the survivors recount their experiences.

"I was fast asleep when the first bombs dropped," remembers pensioner Edna Blakeborough.

"It was a terrific sound. The planes were just hovering over the houses and over the buildings. There was nothing to stop them and we must have been up at least ten minutes before the sirens went."

She said she ran for shelter to the house next door. "As I went round, an aircraft flew low down above me. He was so low I could see the rear gunner's face. He was in his leather uniform, only a young man, maybe 19 to 21, and he was machine gunning me as I ran."

Edna was buried in the rubble with her three-year-old daughter after the house she was sheltering in received a direct hit from a high-explosive bomb.

The Bar Convent's archivist and historian, Sister Gregory, describes how some good did emerge from the terrible events of that night.

"It engendered such charity among people," she remembers. "That feeling of everybody being together and suffering together - all those were positive things, which the war produced everywhere."

- Close Up North's The Longest Night' will be shown on Thursday at 7.30pm on BBC 2 in the Yorkshire area.

Updated: 16:20 Thursday, March 28, 2002