NEW AIR METHODS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 61, Issue 152, 9 April 1941, Page 9

NEW AIR METHODS

HEAVY ITALIAN LOSSES.

DESTRUCTION ON THE GROUND

Destruction of nearly 500 Italian aeroplanes on the ground stands out as one of the chief reasons for succes of Britain’s Egyptian-Libyan campaign, wrote Edward Kennedy, Associated Press staff writer, from Libya on February 18.

Execution of this policy is credited largely to Air-Commodore Raymond Collishaw, a Canadian, who commands the Royal Air Force in the desert. In the 600-mile advance from Matruh Egypt, to the Tripolitian frontier, the R.A.F. adopted tactics which proved so important to the success of the Germans in their conquest of the Lowlands and France last year. It smashed Italian communications, pounded strongholds like artillery, strafed retreating columns, spotted troop concentrations and patrolled the air over British ground forces. . But just as important, if not more so, in the opinion of military observers, were operations against Italian airfields where lie as evidence of the force of the British attacks a sizeable air armada reduced to junk before it had taken to the air. By actual count, at one of Libya’s leading airports—Benina—there were 100 wrecked aeroplanes. At El Adem there were 87, at Berna 40 and at each of three others 22. The numbers ranged to a few as seven seaplanes destroyed at the seaplane base of Bomba. Air-Commodore Collishaw is the exponent of this “destroy ’em on the ground” method of aerial warfare. An ace in the first Great War, Collishaw was given the task of directing the desert air warfare under direction of Air-Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, commander of the British Mediterranean Air Force with headquarters at Cairo.

No respecter of tradition, the bristling, square-jawed Collishaw added his ideals to general headquarters’ commands, with the result that Italian airsuperiority, which was estimated at perhaps two to one at the start of the campaign, was reversed. Explosion on Impact.

“Collie,” as his flyers call him, introduced a new weapon in his war against aeroplanes on the ground. He ordered his flyers to use a bomb originally in-' tended almost exclusively for destruction of troops rather than material. Instead of the delayed fuse type designed to pock an airfield with craters and wreck hangars, Collishaw’s men loaded up with bombs which exploded on impact and sprayed shrapnel radially 1000 yards from the explosion point. Such missiles did little damage to the airport buildings or fields, hut the sharp fragments of metal punctured fuselages, propellers and even motors, thus putting Italian aeroplanes out of service.

Collishaw, who brought down 60 German aeroplanes in the last war to rank second among all British Empire pilots, began his career as an officer in the Canadian Navy, where he^served for six years in the prosaic duty of fishery protection. Ho transferred to the British naval air service at the outbreak of the last war, and from 1916 on commanded squadrons.