At midnight on June 7, 1940, as the French bomber Jules Verne approached Berlin, the crew was surprised to see the capital of the Third Reich illuminated. The commander of the operation, Captain Henry Dalier, instructed the pilot, Henri Jonett, to pretend to land at Berlin's Tempelhof airport, but then flew over the airfield and flew all the way low in the direction of Tegel. When Dalyay shouted, "Attention! By the time, they were close to the target - the skies above the Siemens plant. However, low-altitude bomb drops are dangerous because the aircraft can be accidentally injured by an explosion shock wave or shrapnel. Although jules Verne had a pylon for explosive bombs, it did not have a shelf for small incendiary bombs, so the flying mechanic Koneye and the bomber De had to open the passenger boarding door and throw the incendiary bombs directly by hand.
Jules Verne (jules verne) was a 19th-century French novelist, playwright and poet from 8 February 1828 to 24 March 1905. Verne created a large number of excellent literary works in his lifetime, represented as a trilogy ("Captain Grant's Children", "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", "Mysterious Island"), as well as "Five Weeks on the Balloon" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth". He is known as the "father of science fiction" and the "prophet of the age of science".
The explosion eventually awakened the German air defense system. For a moment, a terrible anti-aircraft siren sounded in the sky, searchlight posts dangled, and several anti-aircraft guns fired blindly. The bombers continued to fly low west at maximum speed. They confused the air defense system with irregular routes, and eventually crossed the French border, landing at Paris Orly Airport at 13:30 on June 8. After landing on the ground, Dalier and his heroic crew were exhausted but happy, and everyone immediately received congratulations from their superiors.
The first airstrike on Berlin was little known, even for most Berliners. After the bombing, the German Propaganda Department said the next day that the explosion in the area of the Siemens factory was part of an air defense exercise. Apparently, the news of the air raids was suppressed, because the air raids on the capital would have left Adolf Hitler, especially Air Minister Hermann Goering, with a lot of face. Goering patted his chest and promised: "The capital of the Empire will never be attacked by air." In France, the sense of victory from this highly dangerous airstrike may have satisfied the leaders' desire for revenge, but it was quickly overshadowed by the humiliation and chaos of France's gradual defeat and rapid surrender.
It was the first time hitler's opponents in World War II had dropped bombs on German soil. It was also during the British Campaign on 25 August 1940 that the British carried out their first real bombing of Berlin. That was because the night before, on the night of August 24, a German plane had dropped a bomb on London on the way back from the raid. While this may have been accidental, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill immediately ordered the RAF to retaliate against Berlin. So, on the night of the 25th, a formation of 81 Wellington and Hampton bombers went to Berlin, but only about half of the planes reached the german capital, which was obscured by thick clouds. The damage caused by the airstrike was minimal, with only one bomb killing the only elephant in berlin's zoo.
An enraged Hitler ordered Goering to change their air strike strategy. The Luftwaffe was no longer focused on wiping out the living forces of the RAF and instead focused on retaliatory bombings of British cities, especially London. This strategic adjustment caused by the British air raids caused the Luftwaffe to suffer a serious loss of morale and failed to demoralize the British. In September, Hitler was forced to cancel the Sea Lion plan to invade Britain.
The French Farman bomber, which first bombed Germany, was a high-monoplane, double-tail aircraft with a long tapered fuselage. Two large square compartments mounted under the external support beams of the wings house a pair of 720 hp tandem hispano-suiza 12-cylinder in-line engines. The fuel tank in the fuselage has a capacity of 3,091 gallons, giving it a range of nearly 5,000 miles.
At the beginning of World War II in September 1939, three Farman bombers were transferred to the French Navy as long-range reconnaissance aircraft and some modifications were carried out, including the installation of special radio and navigation equipment. The new bomb rack can hold eight 551-pound blast bombs. But the defensive weapon consisted of only an 8 mm machine gun mounted on a movable bracket in the turret on the back. The aircraft were also painted in camouflage.
On 10 October 1939, a Farman bomber plane departed from Bordeaux for Dakar and continued its reconnaissance flight over the South Atlantic. His goal was to find the German pocket battleship Earl Spey and an auxiliary cruiser. They are known to be hunting Allied ships in this area.
On May 10, 1940, Germany began to invade France. Jules Verne undertook its first convoy mission in early April. Between 13 and 31 May, it operated at the Lanvéoc-poulmic naval base near Brest, carrying out night bombing raids on German targets, mainly in the Netherlands, and one attack on the German city of Aachen. Due to the route taken to circumvent Luftwaffe interception and bypass German air defense positions, each flight lasted 8 to 10 hours.
On 3 June, the Luftwaffe bombed Paris for the first time. The French were enraged and decided to take revenge. But most of the Air Force's aircraft were obsolete or had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Moreover, German pilots honed their skills during the Polish and Spanish Civil Wars, with better piloting. Faced with many difficulties, the French Air Ministry issued an order to Captain Delier, who was stationed at the Bordeaux airport at the time, instructing him to bomb Berlin as soon as possible. Although it seemed like a suicide mission, Dalyue quickly devised a surprise attack plan that would take advantage of Jules Verne's only real advantage: its extraordinary range.
On June 7, the plane loaded eight 551-pound bombs and a box of 22-pound incendiary bombs. Take off at 15:30 and head north along the Atlantic coast. They flew along the English Channel, reaching the coasts of Belgium, the Netherlands and northern Germany and turning east. Jules Verne kept flying low to avoid detection. After crossing a stretch of the North Sea, they flew over southern Denmark, which had been occupied by germany since April. The bombers continued to fly over the Baltic Sea before heading south through a remote strip of land off the German coast.
Jules Verne then flew low in the countryside of Mecklenburg, with crew members struggling to find coordinates on the navigation map. But as they flew south, they suddenly saw a light on the horizon: Berlin. Dalier and his men had expected Berlin to be controlled in wartime, but to their surprise, Berlin was brightly lit, just like in peacetime. The Germans apparently did not anticipate the air raids, much less the baltic attacks. Then the above scene happened.
The heroes who returned victorious had little time to maintain the plane and get some sleep, and the new order came. On the night of 10-11 June, they flew along almost the same route along the coast, again crossing the southern part of Denmark and flying over the Baltic Sea. This time the target is the Heinkel aircraft factory in Rostock, near the coast. Jules Verne disappeared into the night again after a successful bombing and returned safely. Two days later, it bombed an industrial park south of Venice, and the next night it bombed an oil refinery near Livor. On both missions, the crew dropped leaflets as they passed over Rome.
While the heroic crew fought alone, the British Expeditionary Force managed to withdraw most of its troops from Dunkirk. The Wehrmacht defeated the French resistance. After the June 22 armistice, all three Farman bombers flew to uninhabited eastern France.
But as the Germans occupied the rest of France, jules verne came to an end on 8 November. Fighters from the French Resistance set it on fire to prevent the hero plane from falling into German hands. The last aircraft of this type eventually arrived in Oran, Algeria, controlled by the Vichy government, and was destroyed during the Anglo-American invasion, ending this unusual chapter in the history of World War II.
The Germans occupy Paris