From: (Nick)
Date: 28/09/03 00:47 GMT Daylight Time
Message-id:

-remove- (Mhoulsby) wrote in message
...
From: "Jerzy"
Message-id:
Right Nick, I`ve just heard on the radio that today we are commemorating
Polish pilots that fought in the Battle of England in 1940 on your side.
There were several squadrons of them. Over two thousand sacrificed their
lives in the air fight. The most famous was of course squadron 303.
Do you remember them today in England?

We most certainly do. The first time I visited the Polish club in my home
city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne was to play a chess match, some thirty years
ago.

Dear Mr Houlsby,

On 15 August 1940, the Luftwaffe launched a surprise raid against targets
near
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

"To support the fierce, predictable raids in the south with surprise raids on
airfields and industrial targets in the north-east appears to have been a
sudden inspiration emanating from Goering's Chief of Intelligence, Oberst
Josef 'Beppo' Schmidt. He was confident that all Fighter Command's resources
had been concentrated in the southern Groups and that the north-east was wide
open to attack....

For the Luftwaffe, this northern operation was stricken with grievous
misfortunes. The plan was, in addition to the Danish force ('some sixty
Ju-88 bombers'), for some seventy Norway-based He 111 bombers, escorted by a
Gruppe of twenty-one Me 110s...to attack airfields in the Tyne-Tees area....
As a feint, a force of Heinkel seaplanes was to precede the operation by
flying
towards the Scottish coast north of Edinburgh to draw any unlikely fighters
north and away from the main attacks.

'But the German bombers made a serious navigational error: they made landfall
seventy-five miles too far north, thus almost coinciding with the point of
the
mock attack. 'Thanks to this error'...'the mock attack achieved the opposite
of what we intended. The British fighter defence force was not only alerted
in
good time, but made contact with the genuine attacking force.'...

Dowding in his 'Despatch' made this comment on Stumpff's surprise assault on
the north-east: '...the bombers received such a drubbing that the experiment
was not repeated'."

--Richard Hough and Denis Richards (The Battle of Britain, pp. 173-4)

Inaccuracy in locating the target has not been confined to Usenet "flame
wars".

'England, that dear land of mists.'
--Charlotte Bronte (Villette)

--Nick


Right. The effects of that air raid can still be clearly discerned in the fact
that in several rows of terraced houses in Jesmond, a district near to the
centre of the city (shall we call these "files"...?) there is one "rank" along
which several houses, on several different streets, may be seen to have been
rebuilt, after the air raid, with different bricks from those used in the rest
of the terraces.

"Women are from Venus, Men are from Mytholmroyd" (John Morrison)