FLEET AIR ARM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 May 1940, Page 5

FLEET AIR ARM

SPLENDID WORK DONE IN NORWAY IN SPITE OF HANDICAPS. MAN COUNTS FAR MORE THAN MACHINE. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, May 4. Much favourable comment is made in the Press on 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 men-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, but which the Air Force, lacking aerodromes from which to work, could not provide. And it reinforced the AnForce’s powerful night attacks upon Norwegian and Danish air bases used by 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 that counts far more than the machine. The ascendancy established by the young men of the Fleet Air Arm in their comparatively clumsy shipborne planes over the flower of the German Air Force is finite remarkable, and is rivalled only by their brethren of the R.A.F. in the same sphere.”