The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

aircraft since the campaign had begun. On top of that, a large number more
were damaged or becoming increasingly hard to keep serviceable. Almost
every single unit was operating below full strength, most at between half
and three-quarters strength.
Stuka pilots were also finding that it was very difficult to successfully
hit enemy shipping. It was one thing wreaking havoc on a concentration of
troops in fine weather and with little opposition but quite another hitting a
narrow destroyer that was pumping out anti-aircraft fire, as Major Oskar
Dinort and the men of St.G 2 had discovered on the morning of 25 May,
when they had been ordered to attack British destroyers off the coast of
Calais.
Thick smoke had been the first obstacle but then, offshore, the air
cleared and they saw the tiny thin specks below. Oskar felt a thrill at the
prospect of attacking something new but he also wondered how they were
ever going to hit their target. They had never ever bombed shipping before;
they had not needed to. What was the procedure, he wondered? At thirtyeight,
he was a hugely experienced pilot: he had begun flying gliders in the
1920s and held the world record for gliding for nearly fifteen hours. Joining
the clandestine Luftwaffe in 1934, he had since seen action in Poland as
well as earlier working with Udet in the Office of Air Armament. Now,
though, despite his experience, he felt unsure how to carry out his mission.
He screwed up his eyes; the diffused light off the sea was blinding.
‘Attack by Gruppen,’ the Stuka commander ordered over the R/T.
‘Choose your own targets.’ At this, the other two members of Oskar’s
section turned their machines in behind him. Throttling back, they began to
lose height. Oskar knew that a dive on such small targets needed to be
started as low as possible – the 12,000 feet at which they had been flying
was way, way too high.
At what he judged to be the right height, Oskar rolled over his Stuka
and began his dive, aiming for the largest ship. Almost immediately, his
target disappeared out of his bombsight beneath his engine cowling. He
decided instead to make a ‘staircase’ attack. This meant diving until he lost
sight of the target, pulling out, re-sighting, then diving again. At last, he
began his final dive, the target now thankfully larger but still horribly thin.
As he hurtled towards it, his Jericho trumpet – the Stuka’s distinct siren –
screaming, the ship loomed ever closer, increasingly filling his bombsight
with every nano-second. But then suddenly it moved, veering rapidly away.