Daylight Air Clash Over Bethune

Northern Advocate, 23 May 1941, Page 5

Daylight Air Clash Over Bethune

LONDON, May 22.

A small force of aircraft of the Bomber Command made a successful surprise attack on the Heligoland naval base on Wednesday afternoon. One bomber is missing. Another force of Bomber Command planes, with a large escort of fighters, attacked a power station and oil refineries near Bethune, in occupied France. Enemy fighters intercepted the force shortly after it had crossed the coast, and a number of combats occurred, but tire enemy was unable to prevent the success of the attack. Direct hits were observed on both objectives.

British fighters shot down four enemy fighters, and our bombers one. Six British fighters and one bomber are missing.

R.A.F. Superior

The proportion of six R.A.F. fighters lost to five Germans in yesterday’s raid on Bethune, provides a striking comparison with the battle over Britain last autumn when, despite the concentration of the whole German air armada, German losses uniformly ranged from threefold to five or sixfold of those of the RA.F., again proving the greatly superior British quality in both pilots and machines. The violence of yesterday’s action can be judged from the description by a wing-commander who led the squadron’s escorting fighters.

Drove Them Away

He said: “I know when we used, to attack fighter escorts in the Battle of Britain, it almost invariably ended in the enemy bombers being left to the mercy of our fighters, but today we managed to drive away the Messerwith the bombers. We saw one lot ot with the bombrs. We saw one lot of enemy fighters climbing up to attack our bombers, and another lot of about nine dived down on the rear section while more attacked us. At one time we had to .fight with ten Messerschmitts and three of them were shot down. A. Czech sergeantpilot got one. The Germans continued, to make attacks on us all the way back to England.” No Raids on Britain

There were no raids on Britain during the night. London had its 11th quiet night in succession. Bad weather is believed to have kept the German Air Force on the ground. There was some activity in the coastal areas yesterday by enemy aircraft, a few of which flew inland. No boml?s were dropped.