Coastal Command was established in 1936, when the RAF was restructured into Fighter, Bomber and Coastal Commands
LOCKHEED HUDSON RECONNAISSANCE BOMBER. Designed and built in the United States, the Hudson has done valuable service with Coastal Command. It has a wing span of 65 feet 6 inches and a length of 44 feet 4 inches, and is armed with four machine guns, two in the nose, two in a turret on top of the fuselage.
BEFORE war broke out in 1939 only a few people had realized the possibilities and the extent of an air war at sea, and in spite of all their efforts they were unable to convince the governments of those days of its importance. So the Coastal Command of the R.A.F. started the war with a grave shortage of both personnel and aircraft. It was equipped with a few excellent flying boats and some that were not quite so good. Its principal land aircraft was the Avro Anson — a slow cumbersome reconnaissance bomber that has now reverted to its more natural function of trainer.
It was with this equipment that Coastal Command fought, and fought well, almost the entire air war of the first nine months of the war. The aircraft of Bomber Command at that time were confined mainly to dropping leaflets over enemy territory and gaining experience that was to be invaluable later on. Fighter Command aircraft during those early months had almost nothing to fight.
But Coastal Command, ill-equipped as it was, was in battle from the dropping of the flag. Within a few days of the declaration of war a Coastal Command Anson had sighted and attacked a U-boat.
Within a few hours of the first minute of the war Coastal aircraft were escorting shipping convoys and encountering their first combats with enemy aircraft. On the very first day of the war the Chief of Naval Staff requested that a Coastal Command pilot be specially commended for a most useful piece of reconnaissance work which he had carried out.
It was at this tempo that Coastal Command fought its war right up to the days of Dunkirk. And then came its greatest mass effort. The few aircraft that the men of Dunkirk saw hurtling into battle above them during the historic evacuation from the beaches were, in the main, the slow reconnaissance bombers of Coastal Command. Fighting was not their job, but Ansons pitted themselves against ten times their number and more of modern German fighters and more often than not the Ansons won. It was nothing at that time for three Coastal Command aircraft to report that they had engaged forty enemy aircraft, had shot down several and had driven the rest away, for the loss of one of their own number.
With grim humour the pilots coined their own unofficial motto — “Anson is as Anson does”. The commander-in-chief declared that they had proved to be his “secret weapon” at that critical time.
“Scarecrow Patrol”
Even before that time Coastal Command had pulled off the most successful bluff ever put over on Hitler, and the aircraft they used were not war aircraft at all, they were Tiger and Hornet Moths, the elementary trainers. These small and unarmed aircraft were put on to what was called the “Scarecrow Patrol,” which succeeded, with no weapon more lethal than a revolver, in keeping U-boat packs away from our coastwise shipping.
At the start of the war Germany had about sixty ocean-going U-boats which were either crossing the North Sea to seek out the East Coast shipping or were trying to slip out into the Atlantic.
To the cowering mouse any bird looks like a hawk, and to the U-Boat any aircraft spells danger. So Coastal Command sent out their fleet of Tiger and Hornet Moths over the. ships, and the very presence of a pair of wings in the sky was sufficient to force U-boats to crash-dive and keep even their periscopes below water for fear that the wake would give them away. The “Scarecrow Patrol” undoubtedly saved thousands of tons of British shipping. That was achieved by these trainer aircraft with an endurance of only about two and a half hours and a petrol consumption of not more than fourteen gallons for each sortie.
An instance of the thoroughness of these patrols was a report from one Tiger Moth of “an unidentified whiteish matter on the water and a bucket partly filled with dirty water floating near it” — the relics of a German U-boat sailor interrupted at his ablutions by the necessity of a crash dive.
While the Tiger and Hornet Moths were holding the fort in this way, however, Coastal Command was being rapidly re-equipped with aircraft which could kill as well as find.
They started to come into service just in time, for when in April and May 1940 the Germans went through Denmark and into Norway the first phase of the war had finished, and the second came in with a crash.
The first phase ended perhaps with one of the high lights of the war — the location of the German prison ship Altmark, and the rescue of the prisoners by H.M.S. Cossack. This stirring feat would have been impossible had not the Altmark been located first by reconnaissance aircraft of Coastal Command, which ceaselessly scoured the Norwegian coast, night and day, until they found the ship.
After the Germans went into Norway, Coastal Command North Sea patrols had to fly in face of high performance aircraft working from Norwegian aerodromes, and the Norwegian campaign itself put a very heavy load on the Sunderland flying boats and other aircraft working from Scotland and the Shetlands. On top of that, Coastal Command had no longer to protect shipping only against U-boats but also against enemy aircraft, and the Command’s first long range fighter squadrons, equipped with Blenheim fighters, did some magnificent work all along the Norwegian coasts at the limit of their radius. Beaufighters, however, have now superseded the Blenheims for this kind of work.
As an instance of the extra tasks that accumulated at about this time, British submarines were also active in northern waters, facing immense risks and sometimes, of course, casualties. Not always, however, was a submarine lost because it was hit. Sometimes, badly damaged though it was, it could struggle home provided it could stay on the surface. The danger to be faced, of course, was a further attack by enemy aircraft, and it was against that danger that Coastal Command protected these crippled submarines by ceaseless patrols over them in all kinds of weather. Many British submarines, including the Triumph, and the French submarine Rubis were given successful air escort in this way.
Another phase of the war began in June, 1940, and imposed a multitude of tasks on to those of anti-submarine protection of the Atlantic convoys and antiaircraft protection of the East Coast convoys. Aerodromes and harbours in Norway had to be bombed consistently by the American-built Hudsons which were turned suddenly from reconnaissance work into a strong bombing force. Farther south Coastal Command aircraft were thown into the melee along the Dutch and Belgian coasts and over the Channel, which culminated in covering the evacuation from Dunkirk.
Then, in July, 1940, came a new grim phase, one which was to continue for many weary months. The German occupation of France gave the enemy numerous aerodromes which threatened Britain and also new submarine bases on the French-Atlantic coast, which gravely threatened her shipping artery to America. Long range convoy escorts were provided to meet the air menace to shipping outside the radius of action of Spitfires and Hurricanes. Long range convoy escorts over the Atlantic had also to be increased to meet the wearing but absolutely essential U-boat hunts.
Another difference in this phase was the necessity of reconnaissance sweeps over the North Sea to prevent German surface raiders getting out into the Atlantic. On several occasions when raiders did try to get out it was aircraft of Coastal Command that spotted them and either drove them back unaided or assisted in turning them away.
Attack on the “Scharnhorst”
Before the Schamhorst earned her notoriety in Brest she was one of the raiders that tried to put out into the North Sea. A reconnaissance aircraft of Coastal Command spotted her, and Hudsons and Beauforts of the same Command immediately set out to the attack. Schamhorst was steaming at this time along the Norwegian coast. Besides her naval escort of destroyers she had an air umbrella of fifty Messerschmitts. The attacking forces of Hudsons and Beauforts were far fewer in number and they had to face not only the fifty Messerschmitts but the fire of the warship’s guns. Quite unperturbed by this they carried out their successive attacks and scored in all three direct hits on the Schamhorst, one of which seriously damaged a gun turret.
The Deutschland— now renamed the Lutzow — provided another instance of Coastal Command reconnaissance through the dirtiest weather. After she had attacked the Rawalpindishe was picked up by aircraft of the Coastal Command and shadowed over hundreds of miles.
Later on in the course of the war came the famous tracking of the Bismarck. It was a Coastal Command aircraft on reconnaissance that first reported her presence in harbour at Bergen. It was a naval aircraft, however, which reported that she was gone from Bergen only an hour or two after she had sailed.
She was shadowed across the North Sea while British naval forces closed in on her track, and she was picked up by a Sunderland flying boat just as she entered into the ill-fated engagement with H.M.S. Hood. The Sunderland was instrumental in directing other surface ships to the rescue of the few survivors of Hood.
Then the Bismarck was lost for twenty-four hours. The biggest air search in history was at once instituted by Coastal Command, while large naval forces were steaming from all directions towards the area in which Bismarck was believed to be. But still there was no trace of her. The weather had closed down and visibility was wretched. The aircraft were flying through storms and gales for hour after hour, far out over the ocean. To each of them must be given equal praise for the perseverance and endurance with which they carried out this task. But the one that had the good fortune actually to find the Bismarck was a Catalina flying boat which came upon her suddenly as it emerged from cloud and was at once under fire from the battleship’s guns. Although the Catalina had been hit, and suffered damage, it continued to shadow Bismarck for several hours until naval forces and naval aircraft could get close enough to deliver the death blow.
There was one other noteworthy clash with a German surface raider. This was again the Deutschland, but by then she had been renamed Lutzow. She was putting out through the Skagerrak and heading for the Atlantic where most important British convoys were steaming in from America, when a Coastal Command Hudson on reconnaissance discovered her. She was surrounded by destroyers.
Torpedo-carrying Beauforts of Coastal Command were at once dispatched to engage her. Two of them came across her off the south-west coast of Norway, and they carried out at only a few feet above the sea one of the most daring attacks of the air/sea war. “Skidding” over the stern of one of the protecting destroyers they flew into the right position for the attack and launched their torpedoes. It is certain that one of the torpedoes secured a direct hit amidships. The other almost as certainly found its mark, but bad weather and the necessity for avoiding the hail of anti-aircraft fire from the ship prevented the second Beaufort crew from observing the exact result of their attack. It was sufficient, however, to accomplish its purpose. Coastal Command reconnaissance aircraft were arriving now in relays, and they reported the Lutzow had turned back and was endeavouring at a much reduced speed to regain a German port. One of these aircraft, a Blenheim fighter, shadowed her for many miles, right up the Skagerrak. The torpedoes had not sunk her — it would be a lucky torpedo indeed that could sink a modern battleship — but they had forced her into port for repairs. The Atlantic convoys which she had set out to attack, however, went their way unmolested, and another telling blow had been struck against German naval power in the Battle of the Atlantic.
All this, however, still lay in the future for Coastal Command which, as the Germans swept westward, found itself ready to meet the many more gruelling demands which were to be made on it.
Special efforts had been made to reinforce this Command of the R.A.F. in anticipation of the ever heavier role it would have to perform in the near future, and many of its aircraft were brought across to Britain from America.
LOCKHEED HUDSON RECONNAISSANCE BOMBER Designed and built in the United States, the Hudson has done valuable service with Coastal Command. It has a wing span of 65 feet 6 inches and a length of 44 feet 4 inches, and is armed with four machine guns, two in the nose, two in a turret on top of the fuselage
It had been re-equipped almost as an air force within an air force. By the end of the first two years of war Coastal Command was flying bombers, reconnaissance bombers, flying boats and fighters. It was equipped with Sunderland, Catalina, London, Lerwick and Stranraer flying boats together with squadrons of American-built Northrop seaplanes. Its land aircraft included Lockheed-Hudsons, Beaufort torpedo-bombers, Blenheim bombers, Liberators, Blenheim fighters, Beaufighters and a few Ansons not yet turned over to training. Later it was using modern four-engine bombers such as the Halifax.
The primary performance of Coastal Command had remained, as it had always been, visual and photographic reconnaissance, but to that basis had been added striking power. The enemy had felt that striking power when he went into Norway and down through Denmark, Holland and Belgium. As he spread into France he felt it even more strongly, for Coastal Command aircraft met him over the Channel and Dunkirk. They also took part in the bombing of the ports which he was occupying.
American Lockheed Hudsons of one squadron alone hammered at Rotterdam night after night until they could report that nearly all of the oil installations which had been left there by the Dutch were now destroyed. Hudsons and Beauforts ranged at that time to Ostend, Calais, Boulogne, Cherbourg, and battled away at the harbour installations and the shipping. At the time of the Dunkirk evacuation itself, Coastal Command added Army Co-operation to its variety of tasks, and day after day its aircraft skimmed the battlefields around the allied perimeter, attacking tanks, armoured columns and gun sites, and shooting up enemy troops on the ground.
Then, as the threat of invasion deepened with the passage of months, it was the invasion preparations in the Channel ports that became the targets. They were bombed by day and by night. The invasion barges and the shipping being constantly harassed and destroyed. Soon it was the submarine bases at Lorient to which Coastal Command turned its attention, and they not only destroyed many of the installations but bombed several U-boats in harbour there.
Two Services
But all this time the primary task of reconnaissance and of convoying shipping had continued without a break. Even in the stress of these months of warfare, Coastal Command had conceived and developed two major services, not only directed to the war effort, but to the whole technique of flying in the future.
The first of these two major services is called Regional Control. The greatest enemy of the Coastal aircraft is not Germany but the weather. And the fight against the weather goes on without the slightest pause. There have been occasions when the only aircraft in the air in the whole of western Europe have been those of Coastal Command, battling their way through storms on a reconnaissance flight.
In order to help these aircraft to get back safely to land in conditions of “non-flying” weather. Regional Control was devised. It is a system of co-ordinating the standard blind approach landings and the international Q-code of call signs. It is an organization which can pick up a returning aircraft in the thickest fog, lead it away from its fog-bound home base, direct it to quite another part of the country, and bring it down safely. It has already saved the lives of hundreds of air crews. When peace comes again and its secrets can be made known to the world, it will revolutionize bad weather flying for civil aviation.
The second service devised and carried out by Coastal Command in conjunction with the Admiralty, which is now incorporated in the Directorate-General of Aircraft safety, was the Air/Sea Rescue Service. The waters that divide Britain from her Continental enemy are friendly indeed, but to returning aircraft at night, badly damaged perhaps, the crews weary and suffering from strain, the water is an enemy. A number of aircraft in these circumstances have “come down in the drink”. Many of them have subsequently been saved and brought safely to shore by the Air/Sea Rescue Service. This co-ordinates all the air searches for lost crews that are floating somewhere in a dinghy with the small fleet of high-speed launches which operate from points all round the coast; and if no highspeed launch is available the Air/Sea Rescue Service ropes in the lifeboats, any ships nearby or any naval forces. Once the lost crew in its dingy has been located by a searching aircraft, every possible expedient is used to get a surface vessel to them.
AIR/SEA RESCUE SERVICE AT WORK. Many airmen, who have been forced to land in the sea owe their lives to the vigilance of the Air/Sea Rescue Service which was conceived and developed by Coastal Command. It employs high-speed launches which work in conjunction with patrolling aircraft.
In addition to the ceaseless watch kept by patrolling aircraft and the constant sweeps of the high-speed rescue launches, the Air/Sea Rescue Service maintains a fleet of floating rescue stations.
These are anchored at intervals in waters above which the activities of British aircraft are most thickly concentrated, and any airmen who are forced to abandon their machines over the sea and take to their rubber dinghies, can paddle to these stations and there find food, warmth and comfort until they are rescued.
The stations are painted bright yellow and red so that they can be readily recognized from the air. They are well equipped with blankets, food, reading matter and first-aid equipment, and there is a wireless set in each. The sterns are made to slope down into the sea so that the airmen can easily climb abroad and drag their dinghies after them. They are visited regularly by the Service’s launches. These floating stations have been the means of saving the lives of hundreds of airmen —both friend and foe — who have been fortunate enough to bale out in their vicinity.
These are both humanitarian services, but Coastal Command has developed no less formidably in the opposite direction, that of a striking force. The motto of the Command is “We search and strike”. Much of the time must necessarily be occupied by the search, but the strike is by no means forgotten. It is the Coastal Command which thinks always in terms of the offensive.
HOUSEBOAT FOR R.A.F. PILOTS. The Air/Sea Rescue Service has anchored floating rescue stations, like this one, in the Channel. Here pilots who have been forced down in the sea can find shelter and comfort until rescued by one of the high-speed launches.
The most vivid instance of this great offensive spirit is the constitution of the squadrons of Beaufort torpedo bombers. They are the most effective striking force of the Coastal Command, and it is certain that they have one of the most hazardous jobs to perform.
The Beauforts, with the torpedoes slung beneath them, rarely fly at higher than 200 feet, and they make their attack at close range from a lower height than that. Coastal Beauforts scour the enemy coastline (and more than the enemy coastline) from Greenland, through Norway, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium and France, down to Bordeaux and far out into the Bay of Biscay. They are the mobile force of the Command. They prefer to fly in bad weather, for it gives them cover from the ships’ gunfire, and they direct their torpedoes either by day or night at the shipping with which Germany must necessarily ply up and down the European coast.
With every dislocation of the already overcrowded European railway services, the enemy is forced to attempt more and more coastal transport. A 6,000-ton merchant ship, for instance, can carry as much as ten long goods trains, so the advantages of coastline transports are obvious.
The disadvantages soon became equally obvious to the German seamen, and the gravest disadvantage of them all was the Beaufort torpedo bomber of Coastal Command. One squadron alone, early in its torpedo career, sank 31,000 tons of German shipping within a month, and more than 20,000 tons within seventy-two hours. At the end of a year that squadron alone had sunk, or seriously damaged 103,000 tons of German shipping. But the feat was soon eclipsed when Coastal Command squadrons sank or shattered 100,000 tons of German supply shipping in about seventy-two hours, and kept on adding to the total day by day. In a matter of months nearly 400,000 tons of German shipping had been sunk or disabled.
Every sortie in a Beaufort means flying point blank into a hail of anti-aircraft fire, for the German coasters are always escorted by flak ships — sometimes as many as five flak ships to a single merchant vessel. The Beaufort makes its run in at a very low height above the water, and pilots often report that they have managed to turn away only just in time to miss hitting the bows of the ship they have attacked with their torpedoes.
The Beauforts sink ships with torpedoes by night as well as by day, picking them out as dim shadows on a dark sea, or black shapes creeping across the moon’s path. These torpedo attacks on supply ships are the normal run of torpedo dropping, but the Beaufort crews are always ready and eager to hunt bigger game.
There was one instance when it was feared that the German battleships Scharnhorst or the Gneisenau might attempt to put out from Brest where they had been held for many months by bombing attacks. A Beaufort attack with torpedoes right inside Brest harbour was decided upon and brilliantly executed. The attacking aircraft had to run the gauntlet of terrific anti-aircraft fire both from the ground defences and the guns of the battleship, yet it pressed home the attack successfully and almost certainly scored a direct hit with its torpedoes. Such an attack is a typical example of the way in which Coastal Command pilots generally press home their attacks in face of most violent opposition and regardless of their own safety.
At one stage in the war a squadron of Blenheims and a squadron of Beauforts were tactically placed so as to command the English Channel, and they were told that their task was to deny the Channel to enemy shipping. Those ships that the Blenheims missed — and since they attacked from about thirty feet high they did not miss many — were then pursued with torpedoes from the Beauforts.
TORPEDOS FOR THE BEAUFORTS. Beauforts carry a single torpedo which is stowed under the fuselage. It is jacked up into position from special trolleys which are being handled by the ground staff at a Coastal Command station. Aircraft torpedos are slightly more robust than naval ones.
Scarcely a month after the beginning of these operations the crews of both squadrons were complaining that Jerry never seemed to send them targets any more. The English Channel had been closed, at any rate for the time being, to the Germans.
Similar operations followed soon afterwards off the Dutch islands where there were concentrations of German supply ships. At one stage a newly formed Canadian squadron, flying Hudson aircraft, was set to cover this stretch of the coast. When they had been operating for a little less than a month they had scored certain hits on nine German vessels with a total tonnage of approximately 30,000.
After the outbreak of the Russo-German war another stretch of European coast became an attempted channel for German supply shipping. This was the south-west corner of Norway, around which the Nazis tried to send, by sea, supplies to their armies on the North Russian front. Another Beaufort squadron was given this route to look after, and its successes were as great as
those of the sister squadron which guarded the whole of the English Channel.
There is another way of striking at enemy shipping. The Germans used it against Britain, and Britain in return used it against the Germans. This method is to lay mines from aircraft in the coastal shipping routes which the enemy must use. Much of this work was done by aircraft of the Coastal Command or naval aircraft working under their orders. Little is heard of these operations. Their results are seldom announced, often indeed are not known at the time; but night after night the mine-laying crews, without any public acclaim and without even the visual satisfaction of a bombing raid, face conditions that demand a courage and a fortitude as great as any that can be shown in the air. The mine laying must be done with precision, at places most likely to catch the German coastwise shipping as it creeps nervously along through in-shore waters, usually under the protection of coastal batteries.
Some of the aircraft which lay these mines used to have open cockpits, giving almost no protection against weather, and in them the air crews sat for hours at a time, almost unable to move, in temperatures well below zero.
The mines themselves must be laid so close in-shore that the air crews often find themselves automatically, though quite needlessly, talking in whispers as they approach. One aircraft, while flying up the coast, was accompanied for several miles by flashes of light from the cliff's — the pocket torches of the German gun crews running to their guns. After the mines have been laid there follow the hazards of a return journey over the sea, often in terrible weather with the thought of petrol shortage just below the surface of the mind.
These are the jobs which Coastal Command pilots refer to as “stooge jobs”. They find them boring and extremely dull.
Little has been said so far about the biggest battle of all which is being fought by Coastal Command — the Battle of the Atlantic. Little can be said, for it is not only in area the biggest battle the world has ever seen, it is also the most secret battle of history. It is waged over an area of more than 600,000 square miles (a battle front that no German or Russian general has ever dreamed of). In essence it is a simple battle. Britain is trying to bring convoys laden with supplies, and often with troops, from the New World to the Motherland. The Germans, using U-boats, aircraft and surface raiders, are trying to sink those convoys.
In detail the battle is by no means simple, but this is the main battle of Coastal Command. Its job is to hunt out the U-boats from the air, to sink them if possible, and certainly to locate them; its job is to meet the incoming convoys and give them unceasing escort from the air; its job is to fight off the long range Focke-Wulf aircraft which sweep from southern France to Norway, in an effort to find and bomb the convoys.
During the first two years of the war alone aircraft of the Command flew a total of approximately fifty million miles over the sea (equal to more than half the distance to the sun). They escorted 8,200 convoys, most of them deep-sea convoys, involving 31,000 operational sorties on this task alone. Enemy naval units or supply ships were attacked 760 times, and the total of enemy tonnage sunk, or so damaged as to be permanently unserviceable, was 295,000 tons.
Aircraft of the Command made 305 attacks on U-boats, nearly all of them in the course of the Battle of the Atlantic. They destroyed seventy-five enemy aircraft actually approaching to molest convoys, and drove off more than 500 of them, often heavily damaged. Today Coastal Command has an area of five and a half million square miles of sea to patrol. Many pilots who are serving with the Command have a total of much more than two thousand operational flying hours to their credit in their log-books.
Perhaps the most astonishing feat in the Battle of the Atlantic was the surrender of a German U-boat to Coastal Command aircraft. The U-boat was sighted by a Hudson on its routine patrol and was forced to the surface by bombs.
The Hudson Attcks
Almost immediately the whole crew started to pour out of the conning tower, probably in an effort to man the guns, but the Hudson immediately attacked them with machine gun fire, and after four such attacks the U-boat crew surrendered, waving a white shirt and a piece of white board to make their intention clear. The Hudson continued to circle the U-boat with guns trained to resume the attack if necessary, while signals were sent off to base to bring other aircraft to the relief, and surface vessels to take charge of the U-boat.
U-BOAT SURRENDERS TO A HUDSON. This U-boat, as explained in the text, was forced to surrender by a Coastal Command Hudson, which called up naval forces in order to secure the prize. The U-boat was afterwards brought into port intact. This was the first submarine ever to surrender to an aircraft, but since then pilots attached to squadrons of Coastal Command have brought quite a number of German U-boats to the surface by dropping depth charges or bombs.
After three and a half hours a Catalina arrived to take over from the Hudson. She stood jailer in the air for a further seven and a half hours before the first naval vessel could get to the scene. In spite of a heavy gale that was running, the Navy got the U-boat crew off and brought the U-boat intact into port. Coastal Command aircraft kept up air escort for a further forty hours until this was accomplished. This was the first under-water craft ever to have surrendered to an aircraft. Once a Coastal Command flying boat was forced to land in the middle of the Atlantic at the height of a gale and remained afloat for seven hours before being reached by a surface vessel. On more than one occasion flying boats have landed alongside torpedoed seamen, drifting exhausted far away from land, and have brought them safely home.
The aircraft of Bomber Command have their objective to bomb, their definite task assigned to them, and then their sortie is over. Aircraft of Fighter Command have short flights of extreme skill and hazard, packed with excitement, and then they land, but the average sortie of a Coastal Command Catalina, for instance, lasts for eighteen hours. Sometimes they fly for a complete day and night. One Catalina returning to its base at night found the weather unfavourable for alighting, so it flew back to sea and stayed there until daybreak when it could come down in comfort and safety.
These flights are conducted day by day and night by night far out over the sea. For the most part they are not spectacular but they are invariably gruelling, wearying, a supreme test of airmanship, and a tremendous physical strain. That is typical of most Coastal Command flights either in flying boats or in land aircraft.
A cross section of the Coastal Command aircraft actually in the air on any one day would provide as magnificent a variety of flying as any in the war. Up beyond the Arctic Circle there would be perhaps a long range Hudson traversing the ice-packs, flying around the towering masses of an iceberg or skimming the desolate mountains of Greenland. South of that rules the Atlantic, and here Coastal Command aircraft gather thickly. Many of them are circling round and round the ocean convoys — Catalinas, Liberators, Hudsons. Closer in roam the long range fighters, particularly the Beaufighters which are in themselves a romance of the air war. They are the latest and most modern of the long range fighters of Britain. Some of them, manned by Coastal Command personnel, were sent down to Malta when the order went out that the convoys must get through: and get through the convoys did. One force of Beaufighters down there shot up thirty-six enemy aircraft in Sicily without loss to themselves, in one hour. No less striking has been their record over waters nearer home. The first Beaufighter that ever went out over the Atlantic met a Focke-Wulf Kurier within the first two hours of its flight. The pilot got the huge enemy raider into his sights and pressed rhe gun button. Before he had time to take his finger off the button
which command a very wide field of fire again the Kurier was falling to pieces in the air in front of him.
To continue the picture of Coastal Command aircraft in the air on any single day; over the Atlantic and around Iceland, the hunt for the U-boats is proceeding for mile after mile over the dull sea. Coastal Command aircraft are flying on pre-determined routes, with every member of the crew staring fixedly at the sea. Once in a while the conning tower or the periscope of a U-boat is sighted, and, with a swift dive, down go the bombs. That part of the picture can be repeated all over the eastern Atlantic, from the north-west approaches far down in the Bay of Biscay; from the Bay of Biscay farther south still off the European land masses to Gibraltar; and from Gibraltar still farther to the south off the west coast of Africa where the Coastal Command aircraft still relentlessly pursue the U-boats and still guard the convoys.
But on this one day we have picked out — on any day — the real concentration of Coastal Command aircraft will be over those waters that surround the British Isles and stretch to the coast that the enemy has occupied. Beaufighters are scouring the North Sea; Beauforts, in little flights of three, are dodging up and down the Norwegian Fjords and skimming round the islands where the Nazi shipping lurks.
There are Hudsons along the Danish coast and Hudsons flying farther south still, past the Friesian Islands and into the Heligoland Bight, off Holland maybe Hudsons or Beauforts will attack the enemy shipping, and farther westward at the same time there would be Hudsons, Blenheim fighters or perhaps even an Anson or two searching over the minefields for some dinghy that may contain the crew of a bomber which crashed after last night’s raid on Germany.
All down through the English Channel it would be difficult to miss the aircraft on reconnaissance nosing into the harbours, slipping along the coasts, photographing, reporting back. There will be a Beaufort or two searching the Channel Islands, while farther out to the west will fly the Sunderlands, the Catalinas, the Liberators, the Halifaxes, the Wellingtons and the Hudsons, guarding yet more of England’s precious merchant shipping.
You will certainly find Coastal Command aircraft somewhere along the Brittany coast and far out into the Bay of Biscay. The flying boats may be taking down to Gibraltar, and so out to the Middle East, some generals or some important Government officials. Coastal Command men are in the Far East. And as a fringe to all this scene are the photographic reconnaissance aircraft whose boundaries are set wider still, far over Europe to the North Sea or down to the Mediterranean in the south.
There is no exaggeration about that picture, a typical day’s flying of Coastal Command. It happens every day, and it continues throughout every night. A man could almost count on his fingers the number of hours since the start of the war when there have been no Coastal Command aircraft flying anywhere. And all this has grown from the handful of aircraft and the small fleet of flying boats with which Coastal Command began the war. It started almost as an ancillary command, but from the first day of the war it forced recognition that it was an essential army of Britain. Now it has grown into a huge force covering a greater area, as a single Command, than any other complete air force in the world, including the Luftwaffe. It fights a battle on a gigantic scale over a huge area, and it fights essentially the “bread and butter” battle of Britain, for if the battle of the ocean is lost and supplies cannot get through, then indeed all is lost. But there is not one scrap of evidence to show that that battle will be lost, and a Coastal Command grown as strong as it stands today is the best guarantee of that victory.
BEAUFORTS SWEEP THE NARROW SEAS. These Bristol Beaufort torpedo bombers are on an offensive patrol against enemy shipping. This work calls for great courage and judgment on the part of the pilots, who have to descend to within a few feet of the sea in order to release their torpedos.
You can read more on “ American Help for the R.A.F.”, “Army Co-Operation Command” and
These are both humanitarian services, but Coastal Command has developed no less formidably in the opposite direction, that of a striking force. The motto of the Command is “We search and strike”. Much of the time must necessarily be occupied by the search, but the strike is by no means forgotten. It is the Coastal Command which thinks always in terms of the offensive.
