The Sinking of the Lancastria by Jonathan Fenby

Author:Jonathan Fenby [Fenby, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

The JU-88 was the pride of the Luftwaffe, having only come into service in 1939. It had angled wings and a complicated hydraulic system. Able to dive at 425 miles an hour, it could carry 6600 lbs of bombs, and was armed with four cannons as well as twin machine guns. The fully glazed nose provided the pilot with 180 degree vision. A Plexiglas panel below his seat improved the view as he swooped on the target. The plane was renowned for its steadiness as it dived – and the release of the bombs was accompanied by a howl from a hooter attached to the altimeter.

The crews chosen to man the JU-88s were an elite group. Peter Stahl, the former test pilot who had been among the first to fly them, was ‘as proud as anything’ to have been picked for the job. The four-man team consisted of a pilot, bomb aimer/navigator, wireless operator and gunner. The pilot could operate all commands from his seat, and fly single-handedly if necessary. With all the controls around him, Stahl felt like an organ player. The plane, he wrote in his diary, was ‘almost like a temperamental star or diva: the JU-88 seems to know that it is beautiful and interesting, and behaves accordingly’.5

Approaching the west coast of France in the afternoon of 17 June, the pilots of the Junkers set the propeller blades at the best pitch, switched on the auxiliary fuel pumps, shut the radiator flaps, adjusted the altimeter, and fixed the contacts for the moment when they would pull out of their dive at an altitude of 2500 feet. The radio operators clicked the electric power to set the bomb fuses, and readied the automatic release gear. The crews checked their harness belts. The pilots rotated the trimming wheel to the diving marks, and activated the reflector sight to regulate the brightness of the aiming circle.

Below him, Stahl saw a large fleet of ships of all sizes in the wide estuary of the Loire. Furious anti-aircraft fire came up from the ground as he lay back from the main pack of Junkers to prepare his final approach. French single-engined Morane fighters flew in to attack them – a plane from another German squadron was hit, going down with its port engine on fire. A British Hurricane fighter piloted by 20-year-old Norman Hancock, who would later become a wing commander, followed one JU-88 for a long way, firing at it but not scoring a hit.

The dive-bombing technique which Stahl and the others had learned in training had been refined in the reality of war. The pilot throttled back the engine until it was almost idling; then he pulled the levers to activate the hydraulic dive brakes, at the same time setting the adjustable tailplane to such an acute angle that the plane dipped its nose with a jerk. The next moment, the JU-88 would shoot down towards the targets which grew larger in the sights as the pilot corrected the diving angle, looking upwards while he did so because that was now where the horizon was.

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