Airplanes vs boats

[leo]

Iv'e read about Oberleutnant zur See Friedrich Chrstinsen and his battle with the British sub C25. I am sure that German subs were attacked by Aliied aircraft. Were there any battles between airplanes and surface ships?

[Droops]

Gray and Thetford describe an action where a group of German seaplanes attacked some small British vessels. These were fast, small, lightly armed ships, similar to torpedo boats I believe, armed with Lewis guns which could be fired at the attacking planes. At any rate, this group of over ten planes attacked about six ships. A running battle ensued where most of the boats eventually became disabled, with the remaining boats picking up the crews of the disabled vessels. The survivors eventually made it to Dutch waters and were held there.

A lot of French and American flying boats were used for antisubmarine duties, and the British employed DH6's as well for coastal patrol duties. You read, from time to time, about these flying boats dropping bombs on a submarine. Most of the time, this simply chase the sub away, but that apparently was considered to be a success.

I'm still in the early stages of reading up on aircraft actions over the sea, so I'm sure that others will be able to describe a lot more than I.

VBR,

John

there were some actions as well in the adriatic:June 1916-Austrian saplanes attacked and damaged a destroyer and 2 torpedo boats of the Italian navy.On Sept 15, austrian seaplanes sank the french submarine Foucault.The Russian destroyer Stroiny was sunk in 1917 after a german plane attacked it and several attacks on U-boats occurred in the Black Sea from Russian seaplane bases

[Volker_Nemsch]

The German raider/armed merchant ship "Wolf" was equipped with an own aircraft, a Friedrichshafen FF 33 E named "Wölfchen" (little wolf).

The aircraft had no guns but it helped to capture some alliied vessels. They flew straight over the enemy ship and dropped notes. On these notes there was the order to surrender, wait for the German ship and not to use the radio transmitter. Additionally the crew wrote that in the case of resistance bombs would be thrown instead of notes. They were succesful with steamships but there were problems with sailing ships (the notes hit the sails and then bounced off into the sea, so they needed several attempts to "inform" the crew on the ship).

This is a case of a "succesful" attack (with paper).

[Dave_Kent]

Hello Leo:

You might want to track down a copy of NAVAL AVIATION IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR, Layman, 1996.

Appendix 2 "Ships Sunk, Permanently Disabled, Captured, Interned or Otherwise Incapacitated by Direct or Indirect Aerial Action" lists some 28 Naval and Merchant surface ships (14 each) and 12 Submarines which were victims.

Dave