- 36 minutes ago
Canadian pilots flew straight at German flak on purpose because, in Coastal Command, the guns were not just an obstacle — they were the target. This World War II military history story follows 404 Squadron, the Buffaloes, and the strike-wing tactic that sent anti-flak aircraft in first so rockets and torpedoes could reach the convoy behind them.
From the Norwegian coast to the Hook of Holland and the fjords of 1945, the narration traces Sydney Schulamson, Alan Bundy, Chris Christen, and the crews who learned that head-on attacks could suppress gun crews in seconds. It also shows the brutal limit of that arithmetic, especially on Black Friday in Ford Fjord, when German box barrages and mountain terrain turned the tactic into a deadly trap.
If you enjoy narrated war stories, WW2 aviation history, Canadian military history, and documentary-style storytelling about Bristol Beaufighters, rockets, torpedo attacks, and anti-aircraft fire, this episode delivers a detailed look at how courage, geometry, and sacrifice shaped one of the most dangerous jobs in the war.
Created for listeners searching for WW2 stories, military history narration, Canadian war stories, and historical storytelling about air combat, Coastal Command, and strike-wing operations. It also suits background listening for fans of aviation history, battlefield tactics, and long-form war narratives about the Second World War.
From the Norwegian coast to the Hook of Holland and the fjords of 1945, the narration traces Sydney Schulamson, Alan Bundy, Chris Christen, and the crews who learned that head-on attacks could suppress gun crews in seconds. It also shows the brutal limit of that arithmetic, especially on Black Friday in Ford Fjord, when German box barrages and mountain terrain turned the tactic into a deadly trap.
If you enjoy narrated war stories, WW2 aviation history, Canadian military history, and documentary-style storytelling about Bristol Beaufighters, rockets, torpedo attacks, and anti-aircraft fire, this episode delivers a detailed look at how courage, geometry, and sacrifice shaped one of the most dangerous jobs in the war.
Created for listeners searching for WW2 stories, military history narration, Canadian war stories, and historical storytelling about air combat, Coastal Command, and strike-wing operations. It also suits background listening for fans of aviation history, battlefield tactics, and long-form war narratives about the Second World War.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00January 26, 1944.
00:03The Norwegian coast at Stadlandet, where the mountains fall straight into the water and
00:08the sea runs the color of gunmetal.
00:10Twelve Bristol bow fighters came in from the west at 150 feet above the waves.
00:16Below them lay a German convoy.
00:19Three merchant ships, the Fentz, the Orlanda, and the tanker Cloverin, with three escort
00:25vessels and a minesweeper spread around them like a fence.
00:28Those escorts carried no cargo.
00:31They existed for one purpose, to fill the air above that convoy with steel.
00:36Leading the Canadian half of the formation was a 28-year-old from Montreal named Sidney
00:42Shulamson.
00:43He had been a McGill student when the war started, and he had walked into a recruiting office
00:47the day Canada declared.
00:49Now he had six aircraft of 404 Squadron stacked behind him, each one loaded with rockets, and
00:56he was watching something happen ahead of his windscreen that almost nobody outside this
01:00job would believe.
01:02Six bow fighters were flying directly at the guns.
01:05Not around them.
01:06Not above them.
01:07At them.
01:08Noses down, throttles open, closing on the escort vessels head-on, presenting themselves
01:14to the German gunners at the shortest range and the flattest angle on the whole ocean.
01:20I want you to sit with that for a second, because everything in this story hangs off it.
01:26Every instinct a human being has ever had says the same thing about a gun that is firing
01:31at you.
01:32Get out of its way.
01:34Break left.
01:35Break right.
01:36Put distance between yourself and the muzzle.
01:39These men did the exact opposite, and they did it on a schedule, in a briefed order, with
01:44a name printed on the operations board that morning.
01:48The German gunners saw them coming.
01:5020mm and 37mm mounts swung forward and the tracer started.
01:55Flat, lazy looking streams of light that seem slow until they are close, and then are not
02:00slow at all.
02:02The lead bow fighters held their line.
02:04At a thousand yards, they opened up with four 20mm cannon apiece, and the water around the
02:10escort vessels tore open in white columns and the gun platforms filled with splinters
02:15and smoke and men going down.
02:17That was the moment Shulamson had been waiting for.
02:20He took his six Canadians in behind them, into the gap those cannon had bought, and he flew
02:25his own aircraft straight and level at a ship that was still shooting at him.
02:30That is what a rocket attack required.
02:32No jinking, no evasion.
02:34Hold the nose on the target, hold the speed, hold the dive angle, watch the water come up,
02:40and fire eight rockets at close range into a hull.
02:43Then fly over the ship you have just attacked, close enough to see the faces.
02:48They came off the target with holes in them, and turned west for Scotland.
02:53And then, somewhere out over open water on the way home, with his own bow fighter damaged
02:58and a course set for home, Shulamson looked back and saw a German fighter closing on one
03:03of the other squadron's aircraft.
03:05An aircraft that had already done its job, already taken its punishment, and had nothing
03:10left to fight with.
03:12He turned around and went back.
03:14The squadron record is blunt about the result.
03:17His fire was ineffective.
03:19He did not shoot the German down.
03:21What he did was make himself the more interesting target.
03:25And for the next several minutes, he flew for his life, with his navigator firing a machine
03:30gun out the back, while the man he had gone back for got away west.
03:35For that, Sidney Shulamson was given an immediate distinguished service order.
03:39The citation called him a skillful, courageous, and determined leader whose example has inspired
03:45all.
03:46He was, at that point, still a flying officer.
03:49If what the Canadians did on that coast matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach
03:54the people who still look for them.
03:57Now, here is the question this whole story is built on, and I am going to be honest with
04:02you.
04:03The answer is not the one most people assume.
04:07Most people, when they hear that Allied aircrew flew straight into anti-aircraft fire, picture
04:12a bomber crew over Germany.
04:14Straight and level on the bomb run because the bombsite demanded it.
04:18No choice.
04:19Grit your teeth and hold the course.
04:21That is a true story, and it is not this story.
04:25Because what those six aircraft did at Stadlandet was not endurance.
04:30It was an attack.
04:31The guns were not an obstacle on the way to the target.
04:35The guns were the target.
04:37There were Canadian squadrons in Coastal Command whose assigned job, written down, briefed,
04:43rehearsed, and flown, was to locate the heaviest concentration of anti-aircraft fire available,
04:48and fly into the middle of it on purpose, and to be first.
04:53Remember that word, first.
04:56It is going to matter more than any other word in this story.
05:00404 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, called themselves the Buffaloes.
05:05Over the next 14 months, they would take that job further than almost anyone.
05:10And on one afternoon in a Norwegian fjord, it would cost them more than half of everything
05:14they put in the air.
05:16But the idea did not start with them.
05:18It started with a disaster.
05:2014 months before Stadlandet, Coastal Command tried this for the very first time, off the
05:26coast of Holland.
05:27It went so wrong that the man who led it never came home.
05:31And the men who had to explain why, were forced to admit that they had understood the
05:35problem exactly backwards.
05:37November 20th, 1942, 14 months before Stadlandet.
05:44The Dutch coast near the hook of Holland and a German convoy of somewhere between 12 and
05:4916 ships pushing north for Rotterdam.
05:53Coastal Command had never tried this before.
05:55The idea was new enough that it still had the smell of a drawing board on it.
05:59Instead of sending bow fighters at enemy shipping in ones and twos, the way it had been done
06:04since 1941, Number 16 Group had gathered two squadrons at a windswept field on the Lincolnshire
06:10coast called Northcoats and pointed them at a convoy together.
06:142-3-6 squadron with cannon and bombs, 2-5-4 squadron with torpedoes.
06:20One wing, one target, one hammer blow.
06:24On paper it was elegant.
06:25In the air it came apart in about 90 seconds.
06:28The bomb and cannon aircraft lost contact with the torpedo aircraft.
06:33The Spitfire escort that had been promised never appeared.
06:36And so a torpedo bow fighter pilot found himself doing the one thing his aircraft was least
06:41able to survive.
06:43Running in low, slow, and straight at a convoy whose escorts had nothing else in the world
06:48to shoot at.
06:49A torpedo drop is not a dive.
06:52It is the opposite of a dive.
06:54You come down to about 50 feet, you level out, you throttle back to a speed that would
06:58embarrass a trainer, and you hold that until the water is close enough to touch.
07:03For 15 or 20 seconds you are the easiest target in Europe.
07:07That is the price of the weapon, and every man who flew it knew the price.
07:11What made that price bearable was supposed to be the other half of the formation.
07:16The aircraft that would be tearing into the escort vessels while the torpedo men made
07:20their run.
07:21That half was not there.
07:23Three bow fighters were shot down.
07:25Two more crashed getting home.
07:27Five came back so badly holed they were written off flying.
07:31The entire result of Coastal Command's first strike wing operation was one tug sunk and a
07:36couple of armed trawlers slightly damaged.
07:39And the wing commander who led it, a man named Fraser, was killed.
07:44Now here is the part that matters, and I want you to hold on to it, because everything the
07:48Canadians did afterwards grew out of it.
07:51When they took that operation apart afterwards, they did not conclude that the plan was too
07:57complicated.
07:58They concluded something harder.
08:00They concluded they had understood the problem exactly backwards.
08:05Everyone had been treating the escort vessels as an obstacle, a hazard.
08:09Weather, essentially.
08:11Something between you and the merchant ship you had come to sink.
08:14Something you flew through and hoped about.
08:17And as long as you thought that way, the escorts got a free shot at you every single time, because
08:22nothing you brought to the fight was pointed at them.
08:25The correction was almost absurdly simple to say, and almost impossible to volunteer for.
08:31Stop treating the guns as weather.
08:33Start treating the guns as the target.
08:36Send aircraft whose entire job is to attack the anti-aircraft defenses first, before anyone
08:42else arrives.
08:43And accept that those aircraft will be the ones the whole convoy is shooting at.
08:48Early in 1943, they added a third squadron at North Coates for exactly that.
09:09An aircraft that could not sink a ship if you gave it all afternoon.
09:13An aircraft built to do one thing.
09:16Reach out at a thousand yards and kill the men standing at the guns.
09:20They called the job anti-flak.
09:24Two words on an operations board.
09:27On the 18th of April 1943, the North Coates wing went back to the hook of Holland to try
09:33it.
09:34Twenty-one bow fighters took off.
09:37Between 1535 and 1550, they attacked.
09:41And then every single one of those twenty-one aircraft landed back at North Coates.
09:45In the ten months that followed, that wing put 27,000 tons of German shipping on the bottom.
09:53The idea worked.
09:55And that is where Canada walks into this story.
09:58Not as a student of it, but as one of the units that had to prove it.
10:03404 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, had been formed at Thorny Island in Sussex on the 15th
10:09of April 1941 as a long-range fighter squadron flying Blenheims.
10:14They converted to bow fighters in September of 1942.
10:18In January of 1943, they moved to Devon and spent months over the Bay of Biscay hunting U-boats.
10:25And then, through most of 1943, the Buffaloes were handed the Mark 11C, the cannon aircraft,
10:32the one with nothing to sink a ship with, and given the anti-flak role in their own strike
10:36wing, while the torpedo-armed 144 Squadron carried the offensive punch.
10:42Read that again, because it reverses the picture you had in your head five minutes ago.
10:46At Stadlandet, in January of 1944, when Sidney Scholemsson watched six aircraft fly head-on
10:53into those escort guns, and then followed them in with rockets, the Canadians were not
10:58the new arrivals learning the trade.
11:00They were the ones who had spent the previous year doing that job.
11:03They had been the men in the cannon aircraft.
11:06They had graduated to the rockets, by teaching everyone else what it looked like from the front.
11:12But knowing the job existed is not the same as understanding it, because there is still
11:17an obvious question sitting in the middle of all this, and I have deliberately not answered
11:21it yet.
11:22If you are going to attack a gun crew, why fly at them head-on?
11:27Why the single worst angle, the shortest range, the flattest approach, instead of coming from
11:33the beam or the quarter, or anywhere that keeps you alive a few seconds longer?
11:38The answer is a piece of arithmetic, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
11:43Picture a man standing behind a 20mm gun on the bow of a German patrol boat off the Norwegian
11:49coast.
11:50A Vorpostenboot.
11:52Before the war she was a fishing trawler out of Cuxhaven, and somebody has welded steel
11:57plate around her forward mount, and called her a warship.
12:01He has done this before.
12:03He knows the drill, and he is good at it.
12:05An aircraft appears low on the horizon, and he swings the barrel onto it, and immediately
12:11his hands begin solving a problem that every anti-aircraft gunner in the world has to solve.
12:17He does not aim at the aircraft.
12:19He aims at the piece of empty sky where the aircraft is going to be when his shells arrive.
12:25That is called deflection, and getting it right is the entire craft of his trade.
12:30Judge the crossing speed.
12:33Lead the target.
12:34Walk the tracer into it.
12:36Hold.
12:36Hold.
12:37And then, on this particular morning, his hands stop.
12:41Because the aircraft is not crossing.
12:42It is growing.
12:44That is the arithmetic.
12:46And now I am going to take you through it properly.
12:50Because this is the answer to the first half of our question, and it is going to raise a much
12:55worse one.
12:56A flak gunner's whole solution depends on the target moving across his sights.
13:02Take that movement away, and you take away the skill.
13:06An aircraft coming directly at the muzzle has almost no crossing rate at all.
13:11There is nothing to lead.
13:13There is nothing to walk the tracer into.
13:16The target sits in the middle of the sight and simply gets bigger.
13:20And the only variable left is range.
13:23And range is the one thing changing faster than any human being can correct for.
13:29Here is the number I want you to hold.
13:31A bow fighter in a shallow attack dive is doing better than 250 miles an hour, and often
13:38a good deal more.
13:39At 300 miles an hour, an aircraft covers roughly 440 feet every second.
13:461,000 yards is 3,000 feet.
13:50Do that division.
13:52Under 7 seconds.
13:547 seconds from the moment the gunner has any realistic chance of hitting to the moment
13:59the aircraft is over his head.
14:01Now set that against the alternative.
14:04An aircraft attacking from the beam, from the side, stays inside that same lethal range
14:10for far longer, holds a steady crossing rate the whole time, and hands the gunner exactly
14:15the problem he has trained for.
14:17The beam attack looks safer.
14:19It feels safer.
14:21Every instinct says take the angle that keeps distance between you and the muzzle.
14:26The instinct is wrong, and the men who followed it are on the bottom of the North Sea.
14:32There is a second piece to it, and this one is about geometry rather than mathematics.
14:37Come at a ship head-on, down the line of the bow, and you present yourself to the fewest
14:42guns she has.
14:43The mounts on her far side cannot fire through her own superstructure.
14:47Come at her from the beam, and every weapon she carries bears on you at once.
14:52And there is a third piece, which is the one the Germans could never fix.
14:56A great many of the heavier naval mounts on those escorts were slow.
15:01The 37mm, in wide use through the middle of the war, was fed one round at a time by hand.
15:07A superb weapon at what it did, and hopelessly outpaced by a target that appears at a thousand
15:13yards and is gone in seven seconds.
15:16Now put a Canadian in the picture.
15:20Through 1943, a Buffalo pilot in a Mark 11C had four 20mm cannon in the belly of his aircraft,
15:27and nothing else worth mentioning.
15:30He could not sink a ship.
15:32He was not there to sink a ship.
15:34He came out of the sun at around a thousand feet, picked the escort vessel with the most
15:39guns on it, not the least, the most, and put his nose on her bow.
15:45Then he did the hardest thing in the job.
15:48He waited.
15:51Firing early is the natural thing to do when tracer is coming at your windscreen, and firing
15:56early is useless because at long range, four cannons spread their shells across an acre
16:01of ocean.
16:02So he held it.
16:03He let the ship fill his windscreen.
16:06And somewhere around a thousand yards, he pressed the button and put the combined weight of four
16:1120mm guns into a target the size of a garden shed.
16:16Those gun platforms were not armoured in any meaningful way.
16:20They were open steel decks with men standing on them.
16:24And that is the fourth piece.
16:27The one that turns arithmetic into tactics.
16:30You do not have to destroy a gun to defeat it.
16:34You only have to make the man behind it stop laying it and get down.
16:39A gunner who is flat on the deck for 8 seconds is a gunner who is not tracking the torpedo
16:45aircraft coming in behind you at 50 feet.
16:47That is what the word suppression actually means.
16:50And that is why an aircraft that could not sink anything was worth its weight in gold to
16:56men who could.
16:57So, head on, from up sun, low, fast, first, holding fire until it feels insane to hold
17:05any longer.
17:06Not bravado.
17:07Not fatalism.
17:08The most sharply reasoned attack profile anybody had worked out in that war.
17:13Which leaves us with something that ought to be impossible.
17:17If the arithmetic was that good, the men flying antiflack should have been the safest crews in
17:22the strike wing.
17:23They were not.
17:25They died at a rate that outstripped everyone around them, and the Canadians who flew that
17:30role knew the figures perfectly well.
17:33The arithmetic was sound.
17:35It just had one condition buried inside it.
17:37And that condition was the whole bargain.
17:40May 19th, 1944.
17:42The Gironde Estuary on the French Atlantic coast, and the strike wing's first real engagement
17:48of that summer.
17:49The flack was fierce.
17:50One 4-4 squadron lost an aircraft in the first wave.
17:55The first wave.
17:56The anti-flack wave.
17:58The men who arrive before anybody else.
18:00A Canadian bow fighter carrying the code letter N pressed on, finished its attack, and came
18:07home dragging flack damage the whole way across the Bay of Biscay.
18:10Hold on to that phrase.
18:13The first wave.
18:14Because that is the condition buried inside all the arithmetic I just gave you.
18:19And it is the reason those beautiful numbers did not keep anti-flack crews alive.
18:24Everything in part 3 assumed a gunner solving a problem.
18:28Deflection.
18:29Crossing rate.
18:30Lead.
18:31Range.
18:32Take the problem away and the gunner is helpless.
18:35All true.
18:37Right up to the moment the gunner stops trying to solve anything at all and simply empties his
18:41magazine into the one aircraft directly in front of him.
18:45And that is precisely what he does.
18:47Because when the anti-flack aircraft arrive, they are the only thing in the sky.
18:52Think about what that actually means.
18:54Every gun on every ship in that convoy is manned, loaded, cool, undamaged, and has not
19:01yet fired a single round.
19:03Nobody is bleeding on the deck plates.
19:06Nobody is deaf.
19:07Nobody is lying flat behind a splinter shield wondering whether the next one is his.
19:12The defense is complete and the anti-flack crews fly into it at its absolute strongest.
19:18On purpose.
19:19By appointment.
19:20So that the aircraft 90 seconds behind them will meet something broken.
19:25That is the trade.
19:26It is not complicated and it is not noble sounding when you put it plainly.
19:31Somebody has to take the first, whole, undamaged weight of a convoy's fire.
19:36Because the men who come second cannot survive it.
19:39And the men who come first might.
19:41You buy seconds for the aircraft behind you.
19:44And the only currency you have is yourself.
19:47Every Canadian in 404 Squadron understood that trade.
19:51Because through 1943, they had been the ones making it.
19:55Now here is the turn.
19:57And it is the reason this story does not end where you would expect it to.
20:01By 1944, the Buffaloes had moved on.
20:04They had traded the cannon aircraft for rockets.
20:08First, the 60-pound high explosive.
20:10Then the 25-pound solid armor-piercing head.
20:14A lump of steel with no explosive in it at all.
20:17Designed to punch through a hole below the waterline and let the North Sea do the rest.
20:22On paper, promotion.
20:24The glamour half of the job.
20:26Let somebody else fly at the guns.
20:28Except the rocket attack turned out to be its own version of the same problem.
20:33You cannot loft rockets.
20:35You have to aim the aeroplane.
20:37Nose down in a shallow dive.
20:39Wings level.
20:40Speed steady.
20:41No evasion of any kind.
20:43And you hold that line all the way in until the target fills the windscreen.
20:48And then you fly over the ship you have just attacked.
20:51The Canadians had not escaped the head-on run.
20:54They had signed up for a longer one.
20:58June 6, 1944.
21:01While the landing craft were going in at Juneau, three German destroyers, Z-32, Z-24, and Z-H-1,
21:10came out of the Gironde estuary and turned north for the invasion beaches.
21:15Between 1820 and 1845 that evening, the strike wing found them.
21:21Fourteen bow fighters of 4-0-4 squadron went in, carrying the 25-pound armor-piercing rockets.
21:29Seventeen aircraft of 1-4-4 squadron went in ahead of them in the anti-flak role, with
21:35ten mosquitoes overhead.
21:37The Canadian strike leader was Sid Shulamson, the same man who had turned back over open water
21:43in January.
21:44The wing's own account of it is almost casual.
21:48Diving in close on the heels of the anti-flak elements, the three strike sections each took
21:54on a destroyer.
21:55Less than a minute for each wave to engage.
21:58Less than a minute.
22:00Read that again and think about what a German destroyer's full anti-aircraft armament does
22:05inside 60 seconds.
22:08Among them were squadron leader Bobby Shoals and flight lieutenant Ron Jackson in NE-355,
22:15a veteran crew flying into three destroyers' worth of massed automatic fire in an aircraft
22:21made largely of aluminum and optimism.
22:25They went back that night.
22:27Five bow fighters, airborne in the dark, engaging the destroyers again between 27 minutes past
22:33midnight and 43 minutes past, 16 minutes of attack, at night, at low level, against warships.
22:42One Canadian aircraft came home with the navigator's cupola shattered and a hole punched through
22:47the tailplane.
22:49And they kept coming back to those same ships.
22:51On the 24th of August, the wing caught T-24 and Z-24 at Le Verdun-sur-Mer and finished
22:59them,
22:59through intense flak from the harbor and the ships together.
23:03T-24 went down.
23:05Z-24 capsized alongside the quay.
23:09Flight lieutenant Chris Christensen force-landed in France that day and walked away from it.
23:14So by the late summer of 1944, this is where the Canadians stood.
23:18They had invented nothing and stolen nothing.
23:22They had simply been on both ends of the bargain, first as the men who flew at the guns to
23:27break
23:27them, then as the men who flew at the guns to sink what the guns were protecting.
23:32They were, by any measure anybody used at the time, extremely good at it.
23:38Which brought them to Norway, and Norway is where the arithmetic stopped working.
23:43Because the Germans had been studying these attacks for almost two years, and they had
23:47finally worked out that the way to beat them was not to build a better gun.
23:51It was to choose a better place to stand.
23:54October 15th, 1944.
23:58RAF Dallakey on the Moray coast of Scotland, and a Canadian pilot flying his first operation
24:04against a German tanker and her escort off the Norwegian shore.
24:08Flying officer Alan Bundy from Nova Scotia, with flight sergeant Wright in the back.
24:14He had been declared operational exactly one week earlier.
24:18He was also the first black combat pilot the Royal Canadian Air Force ever put into a cockpit,
24:24a fact that appears almost nowhere in the histories, and did not appear to matter in the slightest
24:29to the men who flew on his wing.
24:32Six days later, on the 21st, Bundy went into Haugesund harbor, not past it, into it.
24:41Two ships came out of that attack sunk.
24:43The Eckenheim at 1,900 tons, and the Vestra at 1,400.
24:48And every man who flew it understood what attacking inside a harbor meant.
24:54Guns on the water, guns on the quay, guns on the hillside behind, and only one way out.
25:00Norway was not the North Sea, and the Canadians felt the difference immediately.
25:06Now I want to show you the German side of this, because this is the part of the story
25:10where the enemy stops being scenery and starts being clever.
25:14The Kriegsmarine had been on the receiving end of strike-wing attacks for two solid years.
25:19They had studied them the way you study a disease, and by the autumn of 1944, they had arrived
25:24at a conclusion that was, in its own way, as sharp as anything Coastal Command had worked
25:30out.
25:30You cannot beat the head-on attack by building a better gun.
25:34The problem is not the gun.
25:36The problem is the seven seconds.
25:38So they stopped trying.
25:40The first half of the German answer was volume.
25:43Escorts were loaded with more automatic weapons per ton than any warships in the world.
25:48Purpose-built flak ships, Sperrbrechers, heavy hulls packed with barrels whose entire reason
25:54for existing was to make air attack unprofitable.
25:57And the German gunners did not stay in one place.
26:00When a convoy was threatened, the flak vessels were positioned to cover each other, so that
26:05an aircraft attacking one ship head-on presented its beam to two others.
26:09But the second half of the answer was the clever half, and it did not involve weapons at
26:14all.
26:14It involved geography.
26:17Look at the Norwegian coast on a map, and you see a fringe of islands and a coastline
26:22that looks bitten.
26:23Go closer, and you find the fjords.
26:26Glacial cuts, some of them a mile wide, with rock walls rising a thousand feet and more straight
26:32out of the water.
26:33And a German captain with an aircraft problem eventually noticed something about those walls.
26:39Everything the Canadians did depended on being able to dive at a gun and pull out over
26:43open water.
26:44Everything.
26:45The seven seconds, the zero deflection, the upsun approach, the breakaway across the target.
26:51All of it assumed a gun at sea level and sky in every direction.
26:56Now anchor your ship hard against a cliff face.
26:58The aircraft can no longer come at you from the landward side because the landward side
27:03is a mountain.
27:04It must come down the length of the fjord along the one line the terrain permits at a height
27:09the terrain permits.
27:10Its approach is no longer a choice.
27:13It is a corridor.
27:13And then put your guns on the slopes above the water.
27:17Read that again slowly because it is the whole reversal.
27:20A gun sighted 200 feet up a fjord wall is not shooting up at an attacking aircraft.
27:25It is shooting down at it.
27:27The bow fighter is not diving on the gun.
27:29The gun is looking down into the bow fighter's cockpit.
27:32And every one of those carefully worked out angles inverts.
27:36And here is the piece that finished it.
27:38The head on run beat the gunner by destroying his aiming problem.
27:42So the Germans stopped aiming.
27:44In a fjord you do not have to.
27:46You know where the aircraft has to fly because there is nowhere else it can fly.
27:51You put every barrel you own into that volume of air and you fire continuously and you do
27:56not track anything at all.
27:58They called it a box barrage.
28:00It is exactly what it sounds like.
28:02A box of steel hung in the sky in the only doorway available.
28:07Deflection does not matter to a box.
28:10Speed does not matter to a box.
28:12The Canadian arithmetic had one assumption at its heart.
28:15That the man behind the gun was trying to hit you specifically.
28:20And a box barrage does not care who you are.
28:23There was one more consequence, and it was the cruelest of the three.
28:27A strike wing works by saturation, 30 aircraft arriving at once, so that no gun crew can concentrate
28:34on any single one of them.
28:35A narrow fjord will not accept 30 aircraft at once.
28:39It will accept them one at a time.
28:42Which means the rest of the formation has to wait.
28:45Orbiting.
28:46Inside the fjord.
28:47In sight of every gun in it.
28:49The Canadians did not have any of this written down in the winter of 1944.
28:54What they had was a growing sense of it.
28:56On the 7th of December, Bundy ran into Messerschmitts and Fock Wolfs off Ailesund, and the fighter
29:03threat that had faded over France came back hard.
29:06On the 9th, he helped put a merchant ship called the Havda on the bottom at Uthweir.
29:12On the 6th of January, his engine failed, and he put his bow fighter down at Milltown and
29:16wrecked it.
29:17By February, the Dalakie wing had four squadrons on it, Canadian, British, Australian, and New
29:24Zealand, and they were being fed targets in fjords at a rate nobody had seen before.
29:29On the 9th of February, 1945, a reconnaissance aircraft landed at Dalakie at 1 o'clock in
29:35the afternoon with a report of a German destroyer at anchor.
29:39Thirty minutes later, 45 aircraft were airborne.
29:43Thirteen thirty hours, February 9th, 1945, RAF Dalakie.
29:49Forty-five aircraft got off the grass in the space of a few minutes.
29:53Eleven bow fighters of 4-0-4 squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force.
29:58Eleven from 4-5-5, Australian.
30:01Nine from 1-4-4, British.
30:04New Zealanders from 4-8-9.
30:06Ten Mustangs of 65 squadron for top cover, and two Warwick's trailing behind with lifeboats
30:12slung under them, which tells you what everybody expected.
30:16The split was the usual one, and I want you to notice it because it is the bargain from
30:20part 4 written into the loading sheets.
30:23The Canadians and the Australians carried rockets.
30:26The British and the New Zealanders carried nothing but cannon.
30:301-4-4 and 4-8-9 were going in first, with weapons that could not sink anything, to break
30:36the guns for the men behind them.
30:38The target was the destroyer Z-33, a Narvik-class ship, already damaged, working her way south
30:44along the coast for repairs.
30:46The plan was sound.
30:48Make landfall well clear of the target, cut inland over the mountains, and come down the
30:53fjord from behind, so that the wing arrived out of the high ground with the guns looking
30:58the wrong way.
31:001540 The formation crossed the Norwegian coast.
31:051550 The outriders, the reconnaissance mosquitoes running ahead of the strike, reported back.
31:11They could not see the ships.
31:14That single sentence killed nine aircraft.
31:17Z-33 was no longer where the morning's reconnaissance had put her.
31:21Her captain had taken her deeper into Fort de Fjord and tucked her hard against the steep
31:26southern slopes near a village called Bjorkadal, close enough under the rock that the mountain
31:31itself was part of her armor.
31:33Other vessels had moved to the northern shore, breaking the pack ice ahead of them with gunfire
31:39to get there.
31:40Three flak vessels sat in the middle of the fjord between them, and at that same moment,
31:45at Herdla, Focke-Wulf 190s of Jaggeschwader V were getting airborne.
31:51Wing commander Colin Milson, an Australian of 25, was leading.
31:56He had a formation of 40-odd aircraft strung out over a mountain valley, a target that was
32:02not where it was supposed to be, and about 90 seconds to decide.
32:07He reversed the attack.
32:09Instead of coming down the fjord from behind, the wing would have to turn and come back up
32:14it, into the length of water the Germans had chosen, from the direction the Germans had
32:19prepared for.
32:211610.
32:23Milson took the first section in.
32:26Everything the Canadians knew about attacking a ship stopped applying inside the next 15 minutes.
32:32The fjord was too narrow to take the wing.
32:35The whole point of a strike wing, 30 aircraft arriving at once so that no gun crew can pick
32:41a target, was physically impossible in that water.
32:45Aircraft could not attack abreast without colliding, so they attacked in 1s and 2s, and the rest
32:51of the wing orbited above the fjord, in full view, waiting their turn.
32:56The three flagships put up a box barrage into the corridor.
33:00The destroyer fired.
33:01The shore batteries on the slopes fired down into the fjord, at aircraft below them.
33:06There was no zero deflection advantage in there.
33:10There was no 7 seconds.
33:12There was a queue.
33:14Pilot Officer Bill Blunderfield and Pilot Officer Bill Jackson took a hit that removed the tail
33:20of their bow fighter.
33:21The aircraft went into the water and exploded.
33:25Flying Officer Harold Smook and Warrant Officer Duckworth were last seen going into the cliffs
33:30of the fjord.
33:31Flying Officer Lynch and Flying Officer Knight were chased down and crashed.
33:36Knight had been on the squadron less than three weeks.
33:40Flying Officer Smyrnios and Flying Officer Cochrane went in.
33:44Nobody saw how.
33:46Flying Officer Philip Myrick, 22, and Pilot Officer Claude Burgess, 27, came down near a place
33:53called Steinin.
33:54It was their first operation.
33:55Flying Officer Roger Savard, who already had a distinguished flying cross, got his shot-up
34:01bow fighter out of the fjord and put it down wheels up on the ice.
34:05He survived and spent the rest of the war a prisoner.
34:08His navigator, Flying Officer Middleton, died of his injuries.
34:13That is 6 Canadian crews.
34:16404 Squadron had put 11 aircraft into that fjord.
34:19And through all of it, the Falk Wolfs were coming in, 12 of them, flying through their
34:24own flak barrage to get at the bow fighters, which tells you exactly how badly the German
34:29pilots wanted this.
34:31Flying Officer Nelson and Warrant Officer Gracie in NT-916 turned into them and shot one down.
34:38The Germans lost four or five fighters.
34:41One of them was flown by Lieutenant Rudy Lintz, 28 years old, with 69 confirmed victories, killed
34:47by a Mustang over the fjord.
34:501625.
34:52It was over.
34:53Nine bow fighters and one Mustang destroyed.
34:56Seven of those nine shot down by flak, not fighters.
35:00Fourteen Allied aircrew dead, four prisoners.
35:04Z-33 was damaged and stayed afloat, and eventually reached Germany.
35:08The men who came home named it themselves, Black Friday.
35:14It remains the worst single day any Coastal Command strike wing suffered in the entire
35:18war, and more than half of the loss was Canadian.
35:22The squadron adjutant wrote it down that evening in the plainest words available to him.
35:27Today's losses were a staggering blow, and a keen sense of personal loss is felt by every
35:32member of the squadron.
35:35So the Germans had solved it.
35:36They had found the one place where flying straight at a gun was not clever arithmetic, but simple
35:42arithmetic of another kind, and they had proved it in fifteen minutes.
35:46Which makes what 404 Squadron did next almost impossible to explain, unless you finally understand
35:53what these men actually thought they were doing.
35:55And that is not a tactical answer at all.
36:00March 24th, 1945.
36:03Six weeks after Black Friday.
36:05The Norwegian coast again.
36:08Squadron leader Chris Christensen was leading.
36:10He commanded A flight of 404 Squadron.
36:13He had a distinguished flying cross.
36:16He had force landed in France the previous August and walked out of it.
36:20And he had flown into Ferdafjord on the 9th of February and come out the other side.
36:25He and his navigator Toon were never seen again.
36:29The same day, another Canadian bow fighter went down with a crew that had barely arrived.
36:33And Alan Bundy flew the squadron's last two bow fighter sorties of the war in an aircraft
36:39coded V and brought it home.
36:41Now sit with the shape of that.
36:43Six weeks after losing more than half the aircraft they put into a fjord, the Canadians
36:48were back over the same coast, doing the same job, in the same way.
36:52Not because they had found a counter to the box barrage.
36:55They had not.
36:56Nobody ever did.
36:58You cannot outmaneuver a volume of air.
37:00So we have arrived at the real question, and it was never really a tactical one.
37:05Arithmetic explains why the head-on attack was correct.
37:09It does not explain why a man flies it a second time after watching it fail.
37:14The answer is in something I asked you to remember in part one.
37:19First, every one of these operations had an order of arrival written into it, and every
37:24man on the airfield could read that order off the board at briefing.
37:28Some aircraft carried weapons that could sink a ship.
37:31Some carried weapons that could only hurt the people shooting.
37:35And the ones that could only hurt the people shooting went in front.
37:39That is what these crews were actually thinking about in the last 30 seconds of an approach.
37:45Not the geometry.
37:47The aircraft behind them.
37:49Because here's the thing about the bargain that no diagram ever captures.
37:54It is not abstract.
37:57You have eaten breakfast with the men in the second wave.
38:00You know which of them got married on his last leave.
38:04You know which one is 19.
38:06And the difference between that man coming home and that man burning on the water is whether
38:11the gun crew on the forward mount of a flagship is standing up or lying down when he arrives.
38:17You are the reason they are lying down.
38:20That is the entire job.
38:22There is one more fact here, and it is the one that turns this from a story about tactics
38:27into a story about people.
38:29Not a single man in any of those cockpits had been ordered into the Air Force.
38:34Canada conscripted men in the Second World War, and not one conscript ever flew in operation.
38:41Every pilot, every navigator, every gunner in the Royal Canadian Air Force was a volunteer,
38:46and the anti-flak role was not a punishment posting handed to men with no options.
38:52Crews flew it, survived it, and went back to it.
38:56And they could have stopped.
38:57The system provided a way out, and it was deliberately made humiliating.
39:01A man who refused to fly was stripped of rank and badges, and sent away with a phrase on his
39:06file
39:07about lack of moral fiber.
39:09It was a cruel machine, and it was designed to be.
39:12But it existed, which means that every single morning, every man who walked out to a bow fighter
39:17with four cannon and no bombs was making a choice about the men who would be 90 seconds behind him.
39:22That is the answer to the question in the title.
39:25They flew straight at German flak on purpose, because the purpose was somebody else, and
39:31because the alternative was letting somebody else pay for it.
39:36Everything after Black Friday follows from that.
39:39In the spring of 1945, the squadron gave up its bow fighters and converted to the Mosquito
39:44under Wing Commander Pierce, and on the 3rd of April moved to Banff on the Aberdeenshire coast,
39:50joining a wing of five Mosquito squadrons, three British, one Norwegian, and the Canadians.
39:56The Banff wing did not stop attacking flak. It industrialized it.
40:00Norwegian Mosquitoes ranged ahead as outriders to find the ships.
40:04Anti-flak Mosquitoes went in ahead of the strike aircraft with cannon and bombs to break the defenses.
40:10Mustangs worked over the shore batteries.
40:12Most of what the Canadians flew in those last weeks were low-level attacks on exactly the things that had
40:18killed their friends in February.
40:19Coastal batteries, flak emplacements, and warships in narrow water.
40:24On the 2nd of May, with the war in Europe measured in days, reports came in of U-boats running
40:30north through the Kattegat.
40:31Thirty-five aircraft went out from Banff. They caught two of them on the surface, and one, a small coastal
40:37boat, went down under rocket fire.
40:40Twenty-three days later, 4-0-4 squadron was disbanded, and on the 18th of May, a Dakota brought some
40:47of them back.
40:47Roger Savard, who had put his aircraft down on the ice of Forte Fjord and lost his navigator,
40:53walked off it a free man after three months as a prisoner.
40:56So did Wing Commander Chuck Willis, who had been shot down over that same coast in March of 1944, and
41:02had been gone for 14 months.
41:04The squadron they came back to had four weeks left to exist, which leaves the men themselves.
41:10And one bow fighter pilot from Montreal who turned around over open water in January of 1944 and went back
41:16for somebody he did not have to go back for.
41:19What happened to him afterwards says more about all of this than any of the numbers do.
41:23Go back to the beginning for a moment.
41:26January 26th, 1944, off Stadlandet.
41:30Six bow fighters flying head-on into the guns of a German convoy, while a Canadian named Sidney Schulamson watched
41:36them from behind with rockets under his wings.
41:39You saw that scene in part one, and it looked like madness.
41:43It is not madness.
41:45You now know exactly what those six aircraft were doing, why they were doing it from that angle, who they
41:51were doing it for, and what it cost when the Germans finally found a stretch of water where it could
41:56not work.
41:57Schulamson finished the war a squadron leader with a distinguished service order and a distinguished flying cross, around 50 operations,
42:05at least a dozen enemy vessels destroyed, and the distinction of being the most highly decorated Jewish servicemen Canada produced
42:12in the entire war.
42:14One of his officers put the thing about him very simply.
42:17The guys on my squadron would follow me into hell and back, he said.
42:21They had a lot of faith in what I could do.
42:24They took him off operations before the end, and he spent the rest of the war as an instructor.
42:29Think about what that actually meant.
42:32The man who had worked out how to put rockets into a ship spent the last part of the war
42:36standing in front of rooms full of 20-year-olds, explaining how to hold an aircraft steady while a warship
42:42shoots at it.
42:43Everything in this story, the arithmetic, the bargain, the order of arrival, was passed on by men like him to
42:50men who had not flown it yet, in classrooms in Scotland,
42:53on the understanding that some of them would not come back.
42:57He went home to Montreal.
42:59After the war, he helped find aircraft and recruit pilots for the new Israeli Air Force.
43:04He married in 1989.
43:07He died on the 25th of January, 2007, 63 years almost to the day after he turned that damaged bow
43:15fighter around over open water and went back for a man he had never been ordered to save.
43:20Alan Bundy flew 404 Squadron's last uninterrupted operational sortie on the 23rd of May, 1945, a weather reconnaissance.
43:30No guns firing at anybody.
43:33Two days later, the squadron he had joined as the first black combat pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force
43:39ceased to exist.
43:40The others stayed where they fell.
43:43Philip Myrick was 22, Claude Berger was 27.
43:48It was their first operation.
43:50They lie in the Allied plot at Haugesund, in graves numbered 15 and 19, a few feet apart, on a
43:57coast neither of them had seen before that afternoon.
44:00And Forte Fjord kept them.
44:02For 40 years, the people of the villages along that water lived with what they had watched from their doorsteps
44:08on a February afternoon.
44:10Aircraft coming up the fjord, one at a time, into a wall of fire, and the ones that did not
44:16come out.
44:17On the 8th of May, 1985, they put up a memorial.
44:21Not a government, the villages.
44:24In 2008, a Canadian marine archaeologist named Rob Rondeau went down into that fjord and found them.
44:31A tailwheel, a hydraulic header tank, pieces of bow fighters that had been sitting in cold, dark water since 1945.
44:42They are in a small museum at Nostal now.
44:45In that June, a memorial stone was laid on the floor of the fjord itself, where the aircraft went in.
44:52So here is the answer, as plainly as it can be put.
44:56Canadian pilots flew straight at German flak on purpose, because the man who goes first is the only one who
45:04can make it survivable for the man who goes second.
45:08The head-on attack was not courage substituting for thought.
45:12It was the sharpest piece of thinking anyone did in that war about how to beat a gun.
45:19And when the Germans finally found the one place where that thinking failed, in a narrow fjord with the guns
45:26above them, the Canadians went back anyway.
45:30Not because they had a better answer.
45:32Because the order of arrival had not changed, and neither had the reason for it.
45:37Somebody had to be first.
45:39They kept putting their hands up.
45:41Thank you for staying with this one to the end.
45:43These stories take a long time to research, and they only reach people if the people who value them help
45:48carry them.
45:49So if you think what the Canadians did on that coast deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it
45:55find its way to somebody else.
45:57And if you would like to hear more, we are here every week.
46:01One last thing, and I mean it sincerely.
46:03If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War, in any service, in any uniform,
46:12I would be honored to hear about him in the comments.
46:15Some of the best things ever written under these videos came from families who simply wanted a name said out
46:21loud again.
46:21Thank you for your time.