NOTABLE SUCCESSES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 133, 6 May 1940, Page 7

NOTABLE SUCCESSES.

THE FLEET AIR ARM. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, May 4. Much favourable comment is given in the Press to the recent considerable successes of the Fleet Air Arm operating off Norway. The Times says: “There can be. no two opinions upon the achievements of the Fleet Air Arm in the Norwegian campaign. Naval aircraft are no match—on paper—for shore-based 'planes, for their design is based primarily upon the performance of purely naval duties and, moreover, they are subject to severe limitations, caused by the necessity of working around and being stowed in a ship. “Despite these handicaps, the Fleet Air Arm in the last few weeks has .not only discharged its particular function, giving air protection to mcn-of-war in the theatre of action, but it has gone some way to supply for the army operating in Norway the air support it needed, hut which the Air Force, lacking aerodromes from which to work, could not provide. And it reinforced the Air Force’s powerful night, attacks upon Norwegian and Danish air bases used bv the enemy, by bomb attacks upon Trondheim and the aerodrome at Varnes, in which all hangars and a large number of enemy 'planes were destroyed. “These exploits are a convincing demonstration of the truth of the maxim that in war it is the man counts far more than the machine. The ascendancy established by the young men of the Fleet Air Arin in their comparatively clumsy shipborne 'planes over the flower of the German air force is quite remarkable, and is rivalled only by their brethren of the R.A.F. ill the same sphere.” ■