Red-Cross marked He59s July 1940

[Bruce Dennis]

Originally Posted by mars

The rational was "they were rescuing Luftwaffe aircrews, who would soon back to air and attack us, so we would do our best to rescue them ourselves and take them POW, but we would shot down any Luftwaffe sea planes come to rescue them even those see plane marked with Red Cross"

Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding also made a similar comment in the battle of Britain: he would strict forbidden RAF to shot any Luftwaffe aircrews who bale out, but he agree that Germans had very right to shoot RAF pilots who baled out from their plane, if some Luftwaffe pilots did commit these action, they shall not be treat as war criminals

Hello Mars,
Enigma intercepts were decrypted that revealed instructions to have He 59 and Do 18 aircraft use their patrols for convoy spotting and tracking. As I understand it, these orders from Berlin were relayed by Luftflotte 3 and it was at this point that the decryption occurred. There were also a number of Enigma messages decoded giving the position and strength of coastal convoys that could only have come from aerial observation, and the only German aircraft in the area had been rescue craft. This tied in with reports from the WAAF listeners in Kent who were tracking the Luftwaffe Seenot flights and suspected the same thing, as the German Rescue aircraft were being sent to areas where there was no known air activity, hence no reason for ASR, and radioing reports of convoys/shipping while in the air.

The British Y service based in Kent listened to radio transmissions of voice and Morse messages. They learned, by meticulous analysis, the meaning of many of the three-letter and four letter codes in German use as well as the voice codes (kirchturm for height etc.). This applies to all of the German services they tuned in to, from the Luftwaffe to the Police. This was the job of the Y service, to listen to and write down the transmissions. If they could not interpret the meaning straight away, they would send the transcript to Cheadle or one of the other stations for decrypting. Y service did not decrypt enigma traffic, in fact very few people in the Y services knew about the Ultra codebreaking success.

At this time, July 1940, there was no D/F (direction finding) apparatus working with the Y service listening posts so while the WAAFs listening to the broadcast may have suspected the He59s were not in an area where a rescue was needed, they couldn’t prove it immediately. It was only possible to put the pieces together by taking the position of the convoy and comparing the radar tracks of shadowing aircraft, recorded at another RAF station away from the listening station, and comparing them to the radio transcripts later. All this took time, so the Enigma intercepts were separate confirmation of what had been heard by the RAF Y operators at Hawkinge, Kent, in July 1940. It caused quite a stir at the time because the role of the He59s and the small Air Sea Rescue surface craft of both sides were respected but the confirmation was via Enigma traffic and was conclusive.

No mention of the intelligence sources was permissible, so other reasons were given.

Hope this helps,
Bruce