Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The Mosquito

The mosquito was an amazingly accurate aircraft. Because it could come in so low, the thing could hit targets very accurately. It flew so fast and so high that German pilots had a lot of trouble trying to capture the thing.

In early 1944, the German prison at Amienes in Northern France held several hundred French Resistance prisoners. The Resistance got word that the Germans were about to begin mass executions. (This is Operation Jericho.) They had a Mosquito squadron come in on the deck at noon. The first bomber was to drop a bomb right on the building where the guards had lunch. Kaboom. Apparently, they hit it right on the money. The next planes put thousand-pound bombs on the prison walls. Hundreds of French Resistance fighters got their freedom. Two-thirds of them were recaptured, but that must have been quite a sight.

In a Dutch city in early 1945, the Dutch Resistance asked the RAF if they could take out Gestapo Headquarters. To discourage bombing of the building, those lowlife Gestapo bastards arranged for there to be a bread line directly across the street. Mosquitos came in at low level and blew the Gestapo headquarters straight to hell. Not a single person across the street was harmed.

In April of 1945, very late in WWII, the Danish Resistance put in a request that the RAF bomb Gestapo Headquarters in Copenhagen. The Gestapo made their headquarters directly across the street from an elementary school. Mosquitos came in and they blew Gestapo headquarters to hell and back. Unfortunately, one of the planes crashed, and a bomb was dropped on the wrong place and there were about a hundred civilians killed, most of them were grade school children. I can’t imagine what the poor pilot who dropped that errant bomb must have thought.


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