Quick Thinking Necessary When Train-busting

Manawatu Times, Volume 68, Issue 206, 31 August 1943, Page 6

Quick Thinking Necessary When Train-busting

Down in the protruding corner of Brittany there is a stretch of 20 miles of railwa; liich is tending to become a major German neadache, says Stanley Baron, in the News-Chronicle. It serves both Brest and Lorient. Along it trundle some of those heavy 12-wheeled, four-cylindered locomotives —among the biggest on the Continent —which you used to see on the ParisLyons line on the way to the Mediterranean. In those djiys they were hauling anything up to and including the somewhat astringent wines of Algeria. Now there’s no wine and thanks to the R.A.F. practically no Lorient. But the trains still run, and must while any of the French Atlantic submarine pens which they serve remain in action. And it’s on this line among others that R.A.F. fighter squadrons have been sharpening up the practice of the science and art; of train-busting, so successfully that to one Mosquito squadron alone goes a tally of 43* locomotives hit and stopped since January. The same squadron has blown up 10 power stations. “They make lovely blue flashes when you plug the transformer and contact breakers, but locomotives are more fun,” says the squad ron navigator, who once hit and stopped four trains in 13 minutes on 10 miles oi line, then had the pleasure of hearing that his squadron-leader had afterwards blown up the breakdown engine coming out to haul them in. How do you attack a locomotive? Pilots are naturally silent about their individual methods, but there is no harm in saying the most successful “prang” is very rarely carried out head-on. Primarily the aim is to blow up the boiler, secondarily to give the engine an all-over wrecking dose which, if it does not produce a total casualty, will chew up rough parts, from the firebox to the valve gear, to give the repair shops weeks or months of work. There is another advantage about attacking from the side —it gives the French engine driver a split second in which to see the attacker coming and fall out of the off-side, leaving the stopped engine as a sitting target. Some pilots, if there are no flak wagons on the train, sny they like to give the driver a warning “poop” with the guns as thGy come in. The Mosquito has been a successful train-buster because its immense speed makes it difficult lor the defending train-gunners to range on it as it comes in at zero feet, and being highly man-

oeuvrable the pilot is able to bank out of the way of tbt upward exploding boiler as he crosses the railway line at the end of the attack. Then, if necessary, he makes a tight turn and conies

Applauding crowds sometimes give the train-buster difficulties The pilots say they will staud on railway embankments and cheer. Said one .of them: “I once had to make two feint attacks in the hope of making the crowd move, then I gave it up and flew around until the driver pulled the train clear.”

Another main difficulty in this specialised form of attack is navigating. At low levels it resolves itself into pure-and-simple map-reading. Ranging over the countryside from one railway lino to another looking for the distant smoke puff that makes a new objective, is like engaging in a 400 miles ail hour steeplechase.