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Aviation History
1944
1944 - 1183.PDF
JUXE 8TH, 1944 FLIGHT 617 - ^ %. #'»-— rw A Beaufighter X rocket attack against an enemy convoy. The Youngman-type bellows-flaps on the Beaufighter are fully down, but the air brake flaps are not extended. Coastal Command's Share* ^ Enemy Shipping Pounded by Bombs, Torpedoes and Rockets ; Attacks Complementary to Work of Strategic and Tactical Air Forces IT was, of course, our inborn instinct for things nautical which influenced us to build up a strong coastal air force at a time when fighters and yet more fighters must have appeared to be the only answer to the almost insoluble problem of how to beat Germany in the air. Now, even the name Coastal Command is a misnomer, since home-based aircraft patrol as far as the middle of the Atlantic. With the machines which fly from Iceland and Gibraltar there is now an area of some 14 million square miles regularly covered at such intervals that there is no sea area in which it is safe for U-boats to come to the sur face and take an easy spell or charge their batteries. Even on moonless nights our Leigh-light aircraft have a habit of suddenly appearing out of the blackness. Although all this Atlantic patrol work can be looked upon as an offensive attack against enemy submarines, it is, in fact, a defensive part of the big picture. An entirely offensive part of Coastal Command work is the continuous attack on the coastwise shipping which the enemy attempts to employ from Norway to the Bay of Biscay. It is not very spectacular work, when reduced to £gares, but the continual searching and striking in all v eathers (but mostly bad) against heavily defended targets, reflects the greatest credit on the personnel under Air Chiel Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas' command. Tactics have had to alter a good deal as the war has pro gressed. In 1940 Beauforts with torpedoes, and other air craft doing medium-height bombing* were getting good returns, but as the Germans increased their escort strength the number of hits decreased until a change had to be made. As a counter, the high-speed, low-flying attack with skip-bombing was tried for a while with considerable success. Skip-bombing is somewhat of an art in itsell. The bomb must be dropped at such a speed, height and angle that it will bounce off the water and enter the target ship In an horizontal direction. It is, of course, nothing more than a lethal adaptation of the small boy's seaside amusement of skimming stones along the surface of the water. When this type of attack became too expensive, Coastal Command had, for a while, to return to medium-level bombing and night bombing. With the advent of the torpedo-carrying, cannon-armed Beaufighter X, a new and very successful plan of attack was evolved. First, a number of anti-flak Beaufighters—usually two or three to each ship—would go in, smothering the target with fire from
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