The first German aircraft shot down by the British

On 26 September 1939, over the central North Sea, between Scotland and the Skagerrak, German aircraft attacked the main body of the British fleet, the Home Fleet, for the first time in the war. First, three German Dornier Do 18 flying boats appeared over the ships. Fighters from the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal drove them off and shot one of them down. It was the first German aircraft shot down by British airmen in the war, or at any rate the first whose destruction was beyond dispute. In the afternoon Luftwaffe bombers arrived. One bomb glanced off the battlecruiser Hood, and another fell close beside Ark Royal. On that basis German propaganda announced that the carrier had been sunk, a claim that quickly turned into one of the best-known embarrassments of Joseph Goebbels’s ministry.

Rescuing Spearfish

On 24 September the British submarine HMS Spearfish, patrolling the waters off Denmark, was badly damaged by depth charges from German warships near the Horns Rev shoal. She surfaced and could no longer dive, and she was several hundred kilometres from her base at Rosyth. The Admiralty decided to cover her return. On 25 September cruisers and destroyers put out into the North Sea from the Humber, and further north the main body of the Home Fleet under Admiral Charles Forbes sailed as well: the battleships Nelson and Rodney, the battlecruisers Hood and Renown, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, and escorting cruisers and destroyers.

It was a risky undertaking. On 14 September Ark Royal had only narrowly escaped the torpedoes of U-39, and since the sinking of Courageous on 17 September the Admiralty knew how easily a carrier could be lost. No one yet knew, however, how great a threat aircraft posed to warships. Before the war opinion had been divided: advocates of air power argued that bombers would sweep the fleet from the seas, while the admirals trusted in anti-aircraft guns. This day was the first test.

The Skua and the Dornier

Before noon on 26 September German flying boats of the 2nd Squadron of Coastal Air Group 506 (Küstenfliegergruppe 506), which were patrolling the North Sea, spotted the British fleet and began to shadow it. At about 11 a.m. the first three Blackburn Skua aircraft of 803 Squadron of the naval air arm (the Fleet Air Arm) took off from Ark Royal, followed by further flights of three. The Skua was a two-seat monoplane dive bomber that also served as a fighter. It was slow and not very manoeuvrable, but the sluggish Dorniers, armed with two machine guns, were easy prey for it.

Two of the flying boats were damaged and escaped. The third, coded M7+YK, was attacked by Lieutenant B.S. McEwen and his air gunner, Petty Officer B.M. Seymour. The damaged Dornier came down on the sea north of the Great Fisher Bank. Its four-man crew was taken prisoner by the destroyer HMS Somali, and the floating aircraft was sunk by gunfire. (Some sources mention that one of the airmen died of his wounds; others speak of four prisoners.)

In Britain the shooting-down was announced as the first victory of British airmen in the war. The RAF Museum describes it more cautiously: as the first Luftwaffe aircraft shot down in operations against Britain. On 20 September, over the Franco-German border (according to some sources near Aachen, according to others west of Saarbrücken), the air gunner of a Fairey Battle light bomber of No. 88 Squadron RAF, Sergeant F. Letchford, claimed a Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter shot down when German fighters attacked his flight. Sources differ as to whether this was a genuine kill: some accounts regard it as confirmed by the French, while others consider it a mistake. Beyond dispute, therefore, the Dornier of 26 September came first. It should also be remembered that “first” applies only to the British: Polish airmen had been shooting down German aircraft since 1 September, and French airmen over the Western Front since 8 September. The RAF, as an air force operating from Britain, scored its first victory only on 8 October, when a Lockheed Hudson shot down another Do 18.

The bomber attack

The Dorniers’ reports brought bombers over the fleet. In the afternoon aircraft arrived from I Group of Bomber Wing 30 (Kampfgeschwader 30), the first Luftwaffe unit equipped with the modern Junkers Ju 88, together with Heinkel He 111s of Bomber Wing 26. Knowing that the surviving Dorniers had passed on the fleet’s position, the air command aboard Ark Royal had the aircraft struck down into the hangars and the anti-aircraft guns readied. A bomb from one of the Ju 88s hit Hood at a sharp angle and bounced off her side, slightly damaging her external anti-torpedo bulge.

Four Ju 88s attacked the carrier. Three were driven off by anti-aircraft fire. The fourth, flown by Gefreiter (corporal) Carl Francke, went into a dive and released a bomb weighing, according to most sources, 1,000 kilograms. Ark Royal turned hard to starboard, heeling over steeply, and the bomb fell into the sea some thirty metres from her bow. A column of water swept over the deck, but the ship suffered no damage. The British fleet returned to its bases without loss, and Spearfish reached Rosyth the same day.

“Where is the Ark Royal?”

Francke had not seen whether he had scored a hit. On his return he reported a possible hit. A reconnaissance aircraft sent out later found British warships in the North Sea but saw no carrier among them. The Germans did not know that the fleet had been operating in two groups, and that the airman had come across the one without Ark Royal. That was enough. Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe high command announced the sinking of the carrier, and Francke was awarded the Iron Cross and, according to some sources, promoted as well. The press and radio of the Third Reich trumpeted the success to the whole world, and English-language broadcasts aimed at listeners in Britain, later associated with “Lord Haw-Haw”, spent the following weeks asking mockingly where the Ark Royal was.

The British had to deny the story before it could harm them in neutral countries. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, assured President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that the carrier was intact, and the American naval attaché was invited to see her with his own eyes. The British naval attaché in Rome was instructed to assure Benito Mussolini that the ship remained in service. At the beginning of October Ark Royal put out into the Atlantic and headed south, where she was soon hunting German raiders – which finally exposed the lie.

Significance

The clash of 26 September was a minor episode on the scale of the war, but it foreshadowed patterns to come. It showed that aircraft, although on this occasion they sank no ship, could reach a fleet on the open sea, and the near miss beside Ark Royal and the hit on Hood convinced the British that without fighter cover and strong anti-aircraft artillery their ships were not safe. These lessons would return in full force in the Norwegian campaign in the spring of 1940, at Dunkirk and in the Mediterranean.

The false announcement of the sinking of Ark Royal, for its part, became a cautionary tale for both sides. German propaganda announced her sinking several more times, until the ship acquired a reputation in Britain as a “lucky” one. She actually sank only on 14 November 1941, the day after being hit by a torpedo from U-81 near Gibraltar. The Skuas of 803 Squadron distinguished themselves again on 10 April 1940, when at Bergen they sank the German cruiser Königsberg, the first major warship in history to be sunk by aircraft in wartime. Hood herself, which came through the attack of 26 September 1939 with slight damage, was sunk in May 1941 in an engagement with the battleship Bismarck.