We Flew from Germany on Clipped Wings

behind us a beautiful moonlight night. In half an hour we were at a height of fifteen thousand feet, where there were 72 degrees of frost. We were now flying along between towering clouds which stretched below us to the sea. We were going to do a reconnaissance of parts of North-West Germany. About two hours' from home we had calculated that we should be near our objectives so we started coming down through the clouds, which now thickened up and were becoming very black. Gunners who had been working their turrets and guns to keep them fit, now reported queer flashes of blue flame playing around the muzzles of their guns, and we could see the same blue flames on our wing tips-lightning.
As the temperature, increasing with our descent, approached freezing-point, a snowy type of ice grew on the control column, on the inside of the windows, and on the instrument panel. When we reached two thousand feet and wiped the stuff from the windows we found that we were just below the clouds-over Germany, a few miles inland. The navigator had done well. Heading towards our objective a searchlight beam snapped us, but was soon put off as we popped up into the clouds again. We came out of them and flew along at varying low heights to see what we could. The visibility was bad and the black clouds were still there, so I opened my window to see better. It was snowing. The navigator table and the instruments were soon covered again with half an inch of snow and ice. The front gunner could see nothing from his cockpit, but white snow, when he came back to see us his helmet and shoulders were buried beneath an inch of the stuff. Shortly afterwards a blinding flash, and a bump bigger than the others, took away our trailing aerial, and knocked all the snow off the instruments.

Realising that with conditions as they were we should see nothing more of value here, the tail gunner had already collected some pretty useful information, we set our course for another objective, climbing and circling to avoid a heavy cloud. At ten thousand feet, our gyro-horizon froze, and the tail gunner reported "Fighters on our tail," so we decided to go straight through the cloud. Gradually we climbed to nineteen thousand five hundred feet, when the airplane, which had been behaving queerly, became uncontrollable and dropped like a stone to one thousand five hundred feet. We thought we should have to land on the sea, so the navigator went back to prepare the rubber dinghy and collect the rest of the crew. However, as we got down to five hundred feet the engines began to pick up, and when the navigator returned to report "All O.K. for a landing" we were maintaining height at one hundred and tell miles an hour and it seemed that we might be able to make England. A small winking light shone on the sea and we circled this, turning left. The moon shone through in patches to reveal a choppy sea whipped up by a forty-mile an-hour gale. The left wing seemed definitely odd, and it was most difficult to straighten up on our course. I mentioned this to the navigator, who said: "Oh yes-when I was getting the dinghy ready I noticed that a bit of fabric had come off the wing." Later i learned that he had wisely kept to himself the full extent of the damage which must have horrified him at the time-the port wing was almost completely stripped of fabric, and there was a large lump missing from the starboard one. This did not stop him working out a careful course for home. Three hundred and fifty miles to go, flying at, five hundred feet to avoid the high wind and to make things safer for a possible landing, we encountered a couple of rain-storms which we could not go under or around. After two and a half hours of this the wireless operator obtained three good hearings from a station near the East Coast before our wireless ceased to function. Nearly an hour later we sighted land ahead and clear weather. It was not long before we found an aerodrome and landed at half-past three in the morning, never before so pleased to set our feet on the earth. There we had a look at the wings and almost died of fright.

These photographs illustrate the dramatic story in this thread by a New Zealander serving in the R.A.F Taken after the safe return of the airplane-an Armstrong-Whitworth "Whitley" heavy bomber. One wonders how any aircraft with wings thus battered could stay in the air, let alone reach its base. Fortunately the aileron control flaps on each trailing edge appear undamaged, but even so it was a fine feat of airman-ship that brought the "Whitley" home from enemy territory.



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However, the experience had not all been ours. We were soon talking with others who had been on the same trip: in one machine the tail gunner's eyebrows became frozen up when the aircraft was at twenty-one thousand feet, where there were 72 degrees of frost. They had also run into this electrical storm and had seen the weird blue flashes playing around the wing tips and guns, and some bigger flashes which lit up the whole aircraft. Two of the gunners of the other machines suffered from frostbitten fingers and another pilot described what he called a firework display, such as was seen by pilots in the Great War: "flaming onions" green balls of fire coming up from the ground as though someone were throwing cricket balls up at a terrific speed. He was able to avoid these and watch them fly harmlessly by into the clouds. This particular machine uncounted terrific headwind at the height it was flying-up to eighty miles an hour from the west. Because of this it took many hours to reach home. They landed in daylight with a broken wireless, having navigated the whole of the way back with a sextant.

 

A simply astonishing story, an excellent find there mate. The special effects read like something from the X-Files.....

 

Reading this again Dave, i see what you mean .. .