Deep Sea Hunters: RAF Coastal Command and the War Against the U-Boats and the German Navy 1939-1945 by Marin Bowman

Author:Marin Bowman [Bowman, Marin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Bic Code 1: HBWQ, HISTORY / Military / Aviation, Bisac Code 1: HIS027140
ISBN: 9781473841444
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2014-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Queen of the Boats

The squadron leader of a Sunderland flying-boat who was used to flying over the ocean for fourteen hours on end remarked nonchalantly to the pilot of a Hudson: ‘You don’t need navigation on Hudsons - you are never out of sight of land for more than six hours!’

So Few; The Immortal Record of the RAF by David Masters

One hundred and sixty-three tired and hungry men in dark blue uniforms peered through the windows of a French train and stared glumly at an approaching town half-hidden in rain. It was Christmas Eve, but real Christmas cheer seemed far away and the war in Europe seemed very close indeed. The year was 1939 and the Germans were on the frontiers of France. The rain-wet town was Cherbourg and the men in blue were members of Australia’s first of eighteen Australian squadrons to serve in the European war. It was in July 1939, about the time Germany was preparing to sign a nonaggression pact with Moscow that British people first began to notice the unique Royal blue of the RAAF uniform. In that month a group of seven RAAF officers and fourteen airmen reached England to ferry back to Australia nine Short Sunderland flying boats, bought by the Australian Government to assist in the defence of the Commonwealth against the looming threat of war. But within weeks of their arrival, while the Australians were still learning to fly the thirty-ton flying boats, which the Germans called Fliegende Stachelschwein (Flying Porcupines), war was declared and they stayed to form the nucleus of 10 Squadron RAAF.

The Australians who spent that gloomy Christmas in Cherbourg in 1939 had left Australia in November to put 10 Squadron into the fighting line. It was the month Hitler escaped the bomb that wrecked the Munich Beer Hall, when the first German magnetic mine appeared and when the first German bomb fell on English soil. On the long sea journey to Marseilles (whence they went by train to Cherbourg) the Australians had a temporary taste of U-boat lookout, the task which, from the air, was later to occupy much of their time in the flying boats of 10 Squadron. But they saw no tell-tale swirl of water round a rising conning tower and on board the ship - the liner Orontes - the only incident remembered vividly was the burial at sea of an English admiral, who died on his way home to England. The RAAF men gave him his final guard of honour. During the voyage of these pioneers, an event of great significance in the annals of war in the air had taken place at Ottawa. There, on 17 December, representatives of the British Commonwealth of Nations signed the Joint Air Training Plan agreement - the great plan which, through the war years, provided an enormous reservoir of Dominion flying men which the enemy could never hope to empty. Out of this pool, following in the footsteps of the first group of Australians who

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