About This File
September Mourn v1
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Only very courageous - or foolhardy - pilots would have dared to fly through the curtains of fog and mist that blanketed the undulating lands along the frontier between northeastern Germany and Poland at daybreak on September 1, 1939.
Luftwaffe 1st Lt. Bruno Dilley and his wing-men, 2nd Lieutenant Horst Schiller and Sgt Gerhard Grenzel, were all thoroughly trained fliers, and they would be piloting Junkers 87 dive bombers, called Stukas. Their mission was of vital tactical importance to the German Army, poised to plunge into Poland that very morning to strike the first blow of World War II.
Dilley's objective was a pair of huge steel railroad bridges that spanned the Vistula River on the edge of the town of Dirschau. The Stukas were not to demolish the bridges, however; the High Command of the German Army wanted the twin spans intact so that German troops and supplies could speed across the Vistula in their intended Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, against the Polish Army. Dilley's task was to prevent the Poles themselves from blowing the bridges as a defensive measure. Polish Army engineers had already affixed explosive charges to the bridge structures; the three Luftwaffe pilots were to destroy the wires that connected the explosives with remote electrical detonators located within the Dirschau railroad station.
Severing slender wires with bombs dropped from planes flying at high speed was a difficult undertaking, to say the least. To increase their chances of success, Dilley and his wingmen had scouted the area, changing into civilian clothes and boarding the Berlin-Konigsberg express, which ran through a slim corridor of Poland between Germany and East Prussia and across the vital Vistula bridges. From the train the German airmen had seen the detonator wires for themselves: They were strung along the riverbank. To hit so small a target, the Stukas? normally used as dive bombers?would have to be flown horizontally at treetop level. It was a risky business at best, and the fog and mist on the morning of September 1 made it many times more hazardous.
At 4:26 a.m., Dilley, Schiller and Grenzel gunned their Stukas across a rough airfield near Elbing, East Prussia, and took off. Dirschau lay 24 miles away. If all went well, they would reach it in just eight minutes.
For six minutes the three pilots and the rear gunners sitting behind them in the Stukas' two-seat cockpits hurtled straight ahead through blinding scud, the planes' big 1,210-horsepower Jumo 21 ID engines roaring at full throttle. Even a small error in calculating altitude would have meant smashing into one of the borderland's rolling hills, and each Stuka carried a 550-pound bomb under its fuselage and four 110-pounders below the wings that would have made any contact with the ground instantly fatal.
Two minutes from the target, Dilley dimly perceived the silver gray water of the Vistula beneath his wings. He banked to turn downstream toward the bridges, his wingmen following in line-astern formation. All three skimmed along less than 100 feet above the river.
The moment he sighted the bridges glimmering through the mist, Dilley radioed his pilots, "target ahead," and eased his Stuka into line with the embankment to the left of the two spans. He pressed the bomb-release button on his control stick when his plane was barely 100 yards from the twin spans' girders, then jerked the stick back and to the left. The Stuka, relieved of its bombs, leaped over the bridges in a tight climbing turn to port. Schiller followed in carbon-copy style. So did Grenzel. As they swung away, they could see that their bombs had plastered the area where the wires were strung. The time was 4:34 a.m., 11 minutes before the Army's scheduled 4:45 attack.
MISSION DATE: Friday, 1 September 1939
GAME REQUIREMENT: IL2-FB-PF 3.04m
GAME TYPE: CO-OP up to 6 players
MISSION TYPE: Bridge Defence
FLYABLE PLANES: Ju-87B, Pz.11c
FLIGHT TO TARGET TIME: 8 minutes
MISSION INFORMATION: This mission by JR "Big Daddy" Jacobs