FREE FRENCH AIRMAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 April 1942, Page 4

FREE FRENCH AIRMAN

FINE SCORE OF ENEMY PLANES. SIXTEEN BROUGHT DOWN. Captain Jean Morlaix is top-scorer among the Free French airmen fighting side by side with the R.A.F., with a score of 16 enemy planes brought down. The French airman’s delight is to swoop in over the French coast, and send a German crashing down on to the land where he does not belong. His sixteenth victim he brought down on one of his lonely stalking flights off Cape Gris Nez. “Look out! German planes approaching you,” came the warning lover his radio. “O.K. I’ll wait for them.”

Two Messerschmitts 109 bobbed out of the clouds. He let go a short burs as he flew straight for them. Pieces flew off the leading Messerschmitt. At 200 yards he turned, in time to see the first German plane going down into the sea, its pilot following by parachute. The second made off for the French coast.

Captain Morlaix has been flying a number of years. When war broke out he volunteered immediately for air cervice, but red tape held him from the front. Then came the collapse. On June 19, 1940, he received orders to report at headquarters at Nantes. But Morlaix wanted to fight on. He took a look at an abandoned British transport plane, climbed gn board “to inspect,” and before it was realised what he was doing he was up in the air on his way to England.

Captain Morlaix defended London on night flights during the heavy blitz. A German plane flashed through the beam of a searchlight. Captain Morlaix was after it at once, and down the German went in flames.

Caught on one of his lonely flights by three Germans, he played touch with them all the way across the sea from Zeebrugge. In addition to his 16 controlled victories, he has to his score four probables and three damaged enemy planes. He has also sunk two enemy mine-layers. General de Gaulle on November 14 decorated Captain Morlaix with the Croix de la Liberation.