Re: Terrain Challenge #51 (Score: 1)
by Lestayo on Wed Nov 16, 2011 2:33 pm
(User Info | Send a Message) | Ok!!! Well done.
It´s Dirschau.
Hardly thirty feet above the fog-enshrouded ground the Kette of three Junkers 87B Stukas roared through the slumbrous countryside. Their engines resonating through the river valley, they looked like three ugly predatory birds with gaping jawlike radiators, contorted, splayed wings, and taloned undercarriages. Dangerously close to the earth because of the fog, the Kette, led by Oberleutnant Bruno Dilley of Stuka Geschwader 1, sought out its target.
Only minutes before they had taken off from their advance base at Elbing to find the bridges over the Vistula River at Dirschau. They were not, as they had in Spain, to destroy the bridges. Instead they were to keep them open to enable the German Third Army in East Prussia to join with the Fourth Army moving in from the west through the Polish Corridor. The bridges were a crucial supply and transportation link and, it was known, they had been mined by the Poles in the event of a German attack. Once the alarm was given the bridges would be blown and the fine timetable of conquest would be upset.
Dilley's problem was to sever the wires which lay in the left embankment of the Vistula at Dirschau. The fog and the darkness, for it was barely dawn of Friday, September 1, 1939, did not make the mission an easy one. There were trees to skirt and landmarks to seek which disconcertingly slipped past or disappeared in a patch of fog before they could be properly identified. At least the river was in the right place. For an instant Dilley saw the indistinct forms of the bridges emerging from the mist. Snapping his head from left to right, he noted that the others had seen the bridges also. He kicked the rudder and leveled at the left embankment. It would be a low-level attack, not the classic Stuka peel-off and screeching dive, as Dilley, followed by the other two pilots, plunged at the riverbank, released his bombs, and pulled up in as steep a climb as possible. The engine whined in near protest and that sound was coupled with the explosions. The rear gunners in the Stukas watched as the earth shook and erupted in a gush of smoke and dust.
Dilley glanced at his wristwatch: four thirty-four. They had begun the Second World War eleven minutes ahead of schedule. It was a portent of things to come. Further: although they had hit their target and had, indeed, snapped the wires leading to the explosive charges on the bridges, the Poles had succeeded, by six-thirty, in blowing one of the spans which sagged into the Vistula. By then the war had officially begun.
The "incident" which had justified the unleashing of Fall Weiss ("Case White," the code term for the attack on Poland) had already been staged.
http://www.jcs-group.com/military/war1941tripartite/1939blitzkrieg.html |
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