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Aviation History
1940
1940 - 1161.PDF
APRIL 18, 1940 365 When the serious nature of the attacks became known, the Commanding Officer of one fighter squadron, which was having a day off, decided to call his scattered pilots back to duty. He expected to have to collect them from golf links and other places in the neighbourhood. Instead, he found them sitting, waiting near their Hurricanes for fear of missing some of the war. This squadron, which has already destroyed five enemy raiders since the war began, went up and shot down another Heinkel. Three Hurricane pilots who brought down a raider off the Moray Firth intercepted their enemy when he was flying about a mile high. They immediately attacked. After each had fired a number of bursts the Heinkel crashed into the sea. A fighter pilot of another squadron saw one of the German airmen jump by parachute. He was picked up by a British destroyer. An hour later, three Hurricane pilots engaged a Heinkel bomber, which was flying more than two miles high, off the Banffshire coast. The fighters attacked im- mediately. The German pilot dived 13,500 feet with the Hurricanes on his tail, but eight good bursts of machine gun fire from the Hurricanes during their two-mile dive brought him crashing into the sea. Torpedo-bombers at Work ALTOGETHER in the days April 8, 9, 10 and ir, at **• least twenty German aircraft were shot down, while the R.A.F. had lost two flying boats, one reconnaissance machine, and three bombers in the same operations, and the Fleet Air Arm lost one Skua at Bergen. Hitherto in this war torpedo-carrying aircraft had had no chance of proving their worth, for the lairs where the German warships were wont to lie up were outside the range of the torpedo-bomber squadrons of the Royal Air Force. But aircraft carriers can extend the range of an aircraft, and so the Fleet Air Arm decided to experiment with this form of attack. A standard class of carrier air- craft is the T.S.R., which stands for " torpedo-spotter- reconnaissance." The Fairey Swordfish is the usual T.S.R. A German cruiser of the Hipper class had been reported to be lying in the harbour of Trondhjem. At daybreak on Thursday, April 11, eighteen T.S.R. machines set off with torpedoes and high hopes. They found, how- ever, that the cruiser had vanished in the night, but a destroyer was there and was duly torpedoed. A Dornier flying boat was brought down in 35 seconds in the North Sea on Wednesday, April 10, by a Hudson reconnaissance aircraft belonging to the R.A.F. Coastal Command. The pilot of the Hudson made only one attack. He fired four bursts from his front gun while diving towards the Dornier, and one of its engines was immediately put out of commission. The Dornier plunged towards the sea, landed heavily, and began to sink. Only 35 seconds elapsed between the firing of the first shot and the time the Dormer struck the water. "A mighty quick piece of work'' was how the navigator, a young Canadian from London, Ontario, described the incident. " We found the Domier crossing our patrol and waited for him," he said. His rear engine packed up straight away and down to the sea he went. He hit the water with a bump and went flopping and bumping along with one engine still running, like a wounded duck ; then that engine stopped and we saw the flying boat sinking. The water was lapping over the gunner's cockpit. We watched the four men in the crew clamber into their orange-coloured dinghy and row away. We wirelessed their position to our base and pushed on with our patrol." An R.A.F. high-speed launch was sent out to try to find the survivors. In an audacious bombing raid on Thursday night con- siderable damage was done to the air fields at Stavanger,m Norway. Numerous German fighter and bomber aero- planes were wrecked by machine gun fire, and many of the -tan and aircraft personnel were killed. The raid was earned out by Wellington bombers of the Coastal Com- ^a»d, accompanied by long-range fighters. The fighters, in"?/"8 at Stavanger first, dived upon the aerodrome, tak- b tne enemy by surprise. They sprayed the aerodrome, rcrait and hangars with bullets before the anti-aircraft Knees could be brought into action. Between them they °usly .damaged three Junkers bombers and, it is esti-r ' kllled or injured twenty of the personnel. Half an hour later the Wellington bombers arrived. Approaching from the east they swept down on Stavanger in another surprise attack, dropping heavy bombs. Imme- diately, the bombers were met by intense, but inaccurate, anti-aircraft fire. Despite this they returned to the attack, machine-gunning enemy machine-gun posts, anti-aircraft batteries, hangars, and aircraft on the ground. Consider- able damage was done and a great fire started. By this time many German fighter aircraft had reached the scenu from neighbouring aerodromes and they attacked the raiders as they were about to return, their task completed. A fierce battle was waged, but only one of the British aircraft failed to return to its base. Bomber Command aircraft were in action over the Baltic the same night a id attacks were made on enemy ships over a wide area extending from Oslo Fjord in the north to the Baltic coast of Germany. One large vessel, appar- ently an ammunition ship, was hit by a heavy bomb and blown up; a line of eight to ten vessels was attacked in the narrow waters of the Great Belt; a 5,000-ton supply ship is believed to have been damaged, and bombing attacks were also made on a German seaplane base on the Baltic coast. The ammunition ship was one of a formation of eight grey-painted vessels which were seen steaming at high speed through the Greal Belt, heading north. "The night was pitch dark," said the captain of one of the British aircraft, '' and at first there appeared to be very little traffic in the target area. Then we spotted a faint, small light bobbing on the dark surface of the water. It seemed worth investigation ; so coming down low, we turned sharply towards it and released a parachute flare. The dazzling light made the sea almost as bright as day, and below us we saw about ten grey-coloured ships steam- ing north in company at about ten knots. Flaming onions and anti-aircraft file came sailing up at us as we manoeuvred into position and, with our target clearly illuminated by the slowly descending flares, we launched our attack. We dropped several bombs in quick succes- sion, and it was the last to go that found the target. There was an almighty explosion, as if an ammunition store had been blown up or a boiler exploded. We were jerked about thirty feet upwards by the force of the explosion, and our tail gunner, when he had recovered his balance, reported that sparks of fire could be Seen shooting out from the ship." '-"::- • - Surveying the Fjords "C^IRED on incessantly by anti-aircraft batteries and re- •*• peatedly attacked, a Coastal Command aircraft carried out a lone and long survey of many miles of fjords and harbours in south-west Norway on Friday, April r2. The pilot set off from a Scottish base and, reaching the Nor- wegian coast, worked southwards, flying up and down every fjord he came to. Ships can only be seen from directly overhead in these fjords, so steep are the cliffs. The pilot, therefore, went up and down both sides of each fjord, travelling more than 300 miles to survey 50 miles of coastline. All the time, his crew were noting the ship- ping in the fjords, troop and transport disposition inland, and the tonnage and activities of every German merchant vessel and warship in the fjords. From the moment the Coastal Command aircraft reached the Norwegian coast it had to run a gauntlet of heavy fire for more than two hours. Without deviating from course or compass, the aircraft pursued its patrol to the limit. The pilot had just com- pleted his beat and was about to return to his base with valuable information when hidden machine-gun posts opened tremendous fire from one side of the last fjord, but only a few bullets struck. One came up through the floor near the navigator and another wounded the pilot in the head. He disregarded the wound and climbed into cloud to escape the torrent of bullets. Then the rear gunner shouted a warning that his starboard engine was losing oil. Realising that the engine might seize at any moment, the pilot decided to make the fullest use of his rapidly diminishing oil supply and only levelled out at 4,000ft. Then the damaged engine failed. The wounded pilot made for his base, and successfully completed a 350 miles sea crossing with one engine.
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