AIR BATTLES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 July 1942, Page 3

AIR BATTLES

THIRTEEN DIVE=BOMBERS DESTROYED IN SINGLE ENGAGEMENT. SMASHING SOUTH AFRICAN FEAT. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, July 4. Almost every report of the fighting in Egypt makes a special point of the part played by the R.A.F. and the South African Air Force. ..It is clear that the work of the air forces in this battle is beyond human praise. A 8.8. C. observer with the Eighth Army has given the following account of how 13 out of 15 Stukas were shot down in a single engagement yesterday. “The enemy has begun his campaign to step up the activity of the Axis air force. In an effort to offset the damage he has been suffering at our hands, he sent out a force of 15 Stukas, strongly escorted by fighters. Their mission was to dive-bomb our forward troops at Alamein. “The Stukas had reached the target and were peeling off for their dive when the South Africans smashed down on them. They were flying Hurricanes and following their leader, Major Le Mesurier, Cape Town-. • They came in at full speed to break up the enemy formation. There was a fierce air battle immediately over the heads of our troops, who, as always on these stirring occasions, were watching from the ground, regardless of their own danger. It was all over in five seconds. Thirteen Stukas crashed to the ground in flames, falling among our forward positions where the troops were cheering and shouting. The fourteenth machine staggered out of the battle badly damaged, trying to get home. The fifteenth was the only one to escape. While this was happening, another Hurricane squadron which was acting as top cover for the machines below, went for the Messerschmitts and sent one crashing down. These Hurricanes prevented the enemy escort intervening so effectively that we did not suffer a single casualty in men or machines, and all returned unharmed. This was by no means the only air battle of the day, though it was the quickest and most deadly. Elsewhere, more dive-bombers were damaged and probably written off. The Messerschmitts suffered the same fate and so did the Italian Macchis. Fighter pilots, with their machines loaded with bombs, fought and won encounters with the bombs still on their machines and then went on with their bombing job. The enemy did his best to interfere in the air. Every one of our bombing forces was attacked, but so good was the fighter cover that not one day bomber was lost. Nor did all this activity reduce the protection gi*

ven by the air force to the men on the ground. 5 During the day, hundreds of tons of bombs were dropped among enemy forward troop concentrations, and when the first of the day bombing sorties went out in the early morning, they flew over thin grey pillars of smoke still rising from the wrecks of Axis transport and tanks hammered by heavy machines during the hours of darkness.