German aircraft off Ireland in early April 1944 ?

[Laurent Rizzotti]

Hello,

In the chapter 5 of the bokk Sand and Steel (pages 115-116 of the French version I own), Guy Charland, an US soldier of 357th Infantry Regiment, 90th Infantry Division, describes how he crosses the Atlantic aboard a troopship called Dominion Monarch.

He says that the trip was uneventful until close the Irish coast when they met "two 4-engined Condors. Alert was given and AA gunners opened fire. He saw the aircraft fly on the deck between the ships, only some meters above the waves and close enough for him to see the pilots and the gunners in their turrets. One AA shell hit the wing of an aircraft and cut it, and it fell in the sea. The other turned back with a smoking engine".

By doing some research on the Net, I found that the Dominion Monarch on this tripo left New York on 23 March 1944 and reached Liverpool on 4 April (see https://www.90thdivisionassoc.org/90...7thhistory.htm, that describes the 13 day voyage as "without particular incident").

I found this story really strange. I checked Chris Goss book on the Condor and found no such loss. The aircraft behavious is also very strange for Condors, especially at this stage of the war, and will be more coherent for torpedo armed aircraft.

If something like that happened on the given date (first days of April), my guess is that it was probably a friendly fire accident with an ASW Allied aircraft flying too close of nervous AA gunners and being shot down.

Another possibility is that this soldier mixes events between his Altantic crossing and something he might have seen when crossing the Channel, as LUftwaffe used torpedo aircraft here and lost scores of them, not Fw 200 Condors but Ju 88s. Still a GI was not supposed to be an expert in German aircraft recognition. But the above web history of 357th says of the Channel crossing: "Ships and planes were everywhere. The big battle wagons were firing round after round into the coast, and the world’s finest airforce was operating at full capacity. So were some of the Luftwaffe. Burning ships could be seen in the distance and a flaming plane hitting the water was not an uncommon sight." This was in the early hours or morning of 8 June 1944.


If someone can add something to this case, I am interested.

[Chris Goss]

KG 40 had stopped low-level attacks in 1941 due to the risk. Also they would not have gone anywhere near any coastline due to the RAF. Torpedo aircraft stopped operating off western UK in 1942 so this writer has clearly got mixed up!