CRASH DIVE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 December 1943, Page 4

CRASH DIVE

BRITISH BOMBER SINKS > U=BOAT BOTH LOCKED TOGETHER IN DEATH GRIP. INCIDENT OF ATLANTIC BATTLE. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 9.35 a.m.) RUGBY, December 7. A suicide crash dive by a British bomber on to the deck of a damaged U-ooat, to make sure of destroying the enemy, is reported in a Canadian Navy statement, according to an Ottawa Press message. A sole survivor was picked up in the Bay of Biscay by the Canadian destroyer Iroquois. He is Sergeant A. A. Turner, a tail gunner, who was floating for several hours, wounded, in a rubber dinghy. He said a Wellington bomber spotted a surfaced U-boat and dropped bombs square on the target, but not before the submarine’s guns got in some telling shots. “When our pilot realised that we were going to crash he decided that the Nazis should go too. He man-

oeuvred the plane and crash-dived right on the U-boat, and submarine and plane vanished beneath the surface locked in a death grip.” Canadian destroyers and corvettes helped the Royal Navy and the R.A.F. to blockade the German submarine fleet in the Bay of Riscay just before Britain acquired new bases in the Azores. The blockade was so successful, states the Canadian Navy Minister, that the' modest Allied losses in the North Atlantic were more than balanced by the heavy toll of U-boats. In the Bay of Biscay alone the losses inflicted on U-boats were so great on some occasions that the sea seemed to be alive with submarine survivors.