AERIAL SUPERIORITY

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 December 1940, Page 10

AERIAL SUPERIORITY

ESTABLISHED BY R.A.F. A letter recently received by a West Coast resident described experiences in Southern England, during the German air raids. The writer stated: "I found myself in charge of a 60mile sectoi’ of the defence line which I was being constructed in the South of England, and I spent three very I hectic months there. When we went down there we all expected that invasion was imminent and the work was pushed on with the greatest speed. I had a vast array of the most modern excavating equipment to control as well as ovei’ 2000 men. We all worked very long hours. The men worked 13 hours a day and 7 days a week. I started rhy day about 7 a.m. and usually finished in time to hear the midnight news on the wireless. I motored on an average about 120 miles every day and frequently walked between five and ten miles a day. “About the end of July the Germans started their mass air raids. I saw many air battles in the last war but nothing like the battles which are taking place in this one. We were right in the thick of the fighting and day after day the Germans came over in huge formations. We have seen as many as 500 planes engaged in a single battle. The performance put up by our fighters is belond praise. Time and again I have seen six Spitfires attack formations of 50 German bombers and send them crashing down all over the place.

“One evening on the South Coast I saw a formation of 30 German bombers with nine Messerschmitts circling above them cross the coast. They were flying at about 10,000 feet in six rows of five planes each row stepped up slightly behind the other. They were keeping perfect formation and the roar of their engines was terrific as they swept in as if nothing could stop them. Quite suddenly three Spitfires appeared from nowhere and dived straight into the German formation. The result was astounding. The German formation was scattered in a flash. We heard bursts of machine gun fire from the Spitfires and two German bombers came crashing down in the outskirts of the town. The remainder turned tail and made off across the Channel with the Spitfires diving and zooming all through them. The behaviour of the Messerschmitts was interesting. They made no attempt to come down and engage the British fighters and after circling about for a while they followed, the bombers across the Channel. This is no isolated incident and we saw many similar demonstrations of the ascendancy, of the R.A.F. Day after day we saw thrilling air battles and scores of German planes came crashing down. On my sector alone over 350 German planes had been shot down and their wreckage... was strewn all over the place.

DUMPING OF BOMBS “Our chief danger in the defence line was from bombs which were often dumped by the German planes when trying to escape from our fighters. ThWe usually'fell in fields and did no damage but some of them fell in little villages and farms and a numbex- of people were killed/. One day I was standing on a railway embankment where we were constructing a tank trap when a German plane dived out of a cloud and flew towards us. We saw two bombs leave the plane and we made a wild rush town the 80-foot embankment to the shelter of some trees at the bottom. The scream of the bombs got louder

and louder until it rose to a piercing crescendo and I felt certain they would drop straight on to us. We had reached the trees when we heard the crash of the bombs bursting on the other side of the embankment and when we climbed to the top again we saw two craters near the line but about a-quarter of a mile away from our job. It was my first experience of screaming bombs, and they certainly put the wind up me. At various places ordinary H.E. bombs have dropped much closer to me than this without producing the same nerve-wracking effect. “Our bombers are also doing their stuff. I was in a small village near Dover some weeks ago when the R.A.F. made their great attack on Boulogne. Hour after hour waves of our bombers swept overhead. We saw the searchlights on the French Coast and the anti-aircraft gun-fire bursting around them. Then the bombs came raining down and we could not only see them bursting but we felt the shock of the explosions as we stood on cliffs on the English side of the Channel. Huge fires were started and the damage done must have been enormous. | “The people are standing up to the air raids magnificently. I have seen them during air raids in many towns in the south east coast and there is no possible chance of their being bombed into surrender. I was in London when the first big mass, air raids took place. The raid in the afternoon of the 7th was the most destructive so far. Huge fires were started and the buildings in Oxford Street and Regent Street looked as if they were flood lit when darkness fell. I was on the Embankment about midnight watching the bombs fall in south London. I saw several fall in Lambeth just opposite the Houses of Parliament. Although the casualty list has been high and much damage has been done the Londoners are undismayed and determined to see this business through. “My experiences on the south east coast have' convinced me that our air force is on top of the Germans in a way that we never even approached at any time during the last war. Both our machines and pilots are immeasurably superior to the Germans, and I dont think there is the remotest possibility of the Germans ever obtaining control of the air and therefore, I don’t believe there is any possibility of our being successfully invaded.”