Were any British trains attacked?

Discussion in 'United Kingdom' started by Dave55, Mar 7, 2019.

  1. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

    I've been watching a lot of British steam documentaries on youtube.
    Made me wonder if any trains were attacked during the war.

    I've read of trains being damaged or destroyed while in the yards but haven't seen anything about moving trains being targeted by the Luftwaffe like allied train busters did.
     
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  2. Swiper

    Swiper Resident Sospan

    Yup, quite often.

    The Southern Railway at War series of books is excellent in this regard. One case of an exploding boiler KOing one aircraft, another being shot down (or misjudging height) by the RHDR armoured train etc.

    Chris Goss' Tip 'n Run explores that campaign, with one captured pilot confessing they'd been instructed to target ‘cows, cyclists, motor-buses and railway engines’.
     
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  3. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

  4. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    [​IMG]
    The Engine that Brought Down a German Bomber


    By Jim Hollands

    On the morning of 27 November 1942 an English train driver and a German pilot set off to work. By the end of the day one of them would be dead!


    The Englishman, Charles Gilbert, took charge of his train in Ashford and set out on what he thought would be a normal day’s journey on the Southern Railway network.


    The German, Heinz Bierwirth, climbed into his Focke-Wulf 190 at Abberville – Drucat, headed on a wartime ‘sweep’ over Kent. He was accompanied by one other aircraft from his Squadron which was part of the Luftwaffe JG26 Group. Their target was Ashford Railway works. which they were ordered to strafe and cannon shell, plus any other railway targets they passed over. Heinz had been with his Squadron for several months and as he passed from the French coast out over the English Channel he may well have been thinking back to the 19 August when he was the first German Pilot to claim a victory on the day of the Dieppe Raid. It was a Spitfire he claimed to have shot down on that fateful morning. He may also have been pondering on a day exactly two months before, on the 27 September, when he had his first ‘confirmed’ kill, another Spitfire brought down 10k N.W. of Calais. His thoughts would have been brought back into sharp focus as Hythe and the English Coast loomed ahead.

    As they crossed the town they fired a burst, probably at the RH&DR station, and killed a man when one of the shells exploded in his front room. Then on, over the hill to Sellindge, where they strafed the Ever Ready Service Station, (now Bob Fisher’s Car Sales Garage). Then to Smeeth where damage was inflicted on rail track and Up & Shunt signals were destroyed.

    Ashford Railway Works came in range of the marauders and a locomotive was attacked in the Down Sidings. The fireman was injured. Another loco was also hit, this time the fireman was killed. A man in a nearby office was struck in the chest by a cannon shell. A farm at Kingsnorth was attacked, a farmer was hit in the leg and a sheep killed.

    Meanwhile Charles Gilbert in Tank Engine No.2365 was travelling towards Lydd at a sedate pace of 25mph when Heinz Bierwirth banked his aircraft and dived towards it. Shells and bullets poured into the engine, steam shot into the footplate area, badly scalding the fireman. The pressure blew the locomotive boiler apart, it tore away the chimney, dome and safety valves. The dome landed in a field 100 metres away. The explosion was so powerful it propelled a portion of the top rim of the chimney almost a quarter of a mile.

    At the precise moment the boiler exploded Heinz Bierman’s aircraft was passing overhead. Tank Engine No.2365 got it’s revenge on the Focke Wulf for the terrible damage it had suffered. It was also some kind of poetic justice that the Railway worker killed at Ashford was avenged by a railway engine that had set off from that same yard.

    The Engine that Brought Down a German Bomber – Rye's Own Magazine
     
  5. Dave55

    Dave55 Atlanta, USA

    I saw an American P-47 pilot being interviewed and he said basically the same thing, that they were to destroy all material in Germany.
    "Enemy cow, enemy house" etc. He didn't like it but did it. He said he was lining up on a yard with a woman, child and dog running for cover and couldn't bring himself to fire.
     
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  6. hutt

    hutt Member

    And here is the entry for this incident in the diary of 27th AA Brigade

    DSC05380.JPG
     
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  7. Shiny 9th

    Shiny 9th Member

    My mother who lived in London throughout the war recalled seeing a train, somewhere near Waterloo that has been damaged by enemy action of some sort. She just said their were people hanging out of it. I assume she meant they were dead. Didn't like to ask but highlights the ghastly nature of war.
     
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  8. rockape252

    rockape252 Senior Member

    Hi,

    See North-East Diary 1939 - 1945

    I recently browsed this site and there are various mentions of trains including the Flying Scotsman beeing machine gunned.

    Regards, Mick.D
     
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  9. Shiny 9th

    Shiny 9th Member

    I have found a reference to a train being attacked just outside Poole .It was taking a crowded set of carriages from Holton Heath back along the line, and was full of young female workers from the Admiralty Cordite Factory, going home at the end of a shift.It was deliberate but luckily the bombs all missed but shrapnel and the blast blew out every window, causing shock and minor injuries The train was on a bridge crossing a part of the harbour and very exposed.I will post further details when I unearth book.
     
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  10. jonheyworth

    jonheyworth Senior Member

    I wouldn’t say frequent but it certainly happened and caused casualties, several trains were hit by bombs too . 50 odd dead ( don’t quote me exactly as I’d have to check ) right outside temple meads
     
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  11. pete mully

    pete mully Member

    My mother who was traverling by train from london to liverpool told me the train she was on was machine gunned whilst if was moving this would be sometime around (1941 1942 my mother was in a carrage with other people she was also deaf so the first thing she knew about it,was seeing bits of the woodwork from the carrage breaking away flying through the air and people getting hurt by the pieces of wooden /splinters from off the carrage not sure if any one died she herself fortunately was unarmed.
     
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  12. CornwallPhil

    CornwallPhil Senior Member

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  13. Pat Atkins

    Pat Atkins Well-Known Member

    Anecdotal, and not precisely dated, but... my father was caught crossing the road in Brighton when a tip-and-run 109 ("its underside was a lovely duck-egg blue") strafed the London Road viaduct; as a Boy Scout and thus vital to the war effort he assumed Göring had sent some great ace after him, naturally. Years later he admitted there was a train on the line which might have been the real target. He thinks this was probably in 1942.
     
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  14. ltdan

    ltdan Nietenzähler

    Locomotives were considered war-important targets and were fought accordingly. In Poland, France and later in the SU, this was a standard procedure to disrupt enemy troop movements and frontline supplies.
    During the BoB, conditions were somewhat different, as the fighters were usually fully occupied with escort duties and had relatively little flying time overhead.
    This changed in 1942 at the latest, when the Schnell-Kampf-Geschwader (SKG) were put on GB (hit-and-run raids). Here, locomotives were considered targets of opportunity, which were usually attacked on the return flight after the bombing run - if such an opportunity arose: The Lw did not have air superiority, so railroad lines were rarely flown over in search of worthwhile targets.
    In short: These were rather "luxury targets", so attacks must have been rare. Even more so in comparison with the devastation caused later by the Allied fighter-bomber swarms.
     
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  15. Harry Ree

    Harry Ree Very Senior Member

    German road and rail transport systems became targets of opportunity from the spring of 1944 when the USAAF fighters, improved as long range bomber escorts into the heart of Germany were able to carry out strafing attacks such as these in addition to attacks on airfields.

    The practice was adopted by the Allied Tactical Air Forces on a seek and destroy concept from Normandy onwards, throughout the Northern Europe campaign .(There are abundant newsreels illustrating strikes from aircraft cameras. The Falaise Gap strafing of German columns boxed up in the countryside with no exit to safety is a well known example.)

    For the Luftwaffe, the hit and run campaign which ran from March 1942 until 6 June 1943 involved southern coastal targets from Great Yarmouth in the east to targets as far as Cornwall. These raids did not adversely affect the Allied prosecution of the war and were categorised as nuisance raids. However they could not be sustained when it became dangerous to mount daylight sorties. Hitler's commitment to the Mediterranean defence took preference when he envisaged the the threat to Festung Europe would be the Med. North Africa fell in early May 1943 and it signalled the end of the nuisance raids. Luftwaffe units involved were then withdrawn to the Mediterranean theatre of war as was Hitler's want.
     
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  16. ARPCDHG

    ARPCDHG Member

    Brighton's most significant bombing raid of the Second World War severely damaged London Road Viaduct. At 12.30pm on 25 May 1943, Focke-Wulf fighter-bomber aircraft dropped several bombs on Brighton, five of which landed on the railway. One demolished two arches and one pier at the west end of the viaduct, two arches west of the Preston Road span, leaving the tracks spanning the gap in mid-air. Despite this, a temporary repair allowed trains to start using the viaduct again within 24 hours; in less than a month, the service was back to normal. Until the arches were fully repaired in September 1943, however, a 15 mph (24 km/h) speed restriction was enforced and Preston Road could be seen through the gaps between the sleepers where the brickwork had been blasted away. The replacement brickwork, darker than that of the main structure, can be seen from the road below.
     
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  17. ARPCDHG

    ARPCDHG Member

  18. Pat Atkins

    Pat Atkins Well-Known Member

    Yes, turns out Dad remembers that day too. The FW190 which got the viaduct had (surely inadvertently) bounced the bomb through a house before it hit the span, apparently. Thanks for the link - looks like an interesting read.

    Pat

    Edit: apologies to the OP for diverting the thread.
     
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  19. Blutto

    Blutto Banned

    A bit of an aside, but my father once related how they had to abandon their omnibus for a ditch in 1940 to avoid attention from the 'hun'. They had picked the wrong time to be driving past RAF North Weald aerodrome!
     
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  20. Guy Hudson

    Guy Hudson Looker-upper

    Screenshot 2021-08-07 at 20.22.06.png
    Screenshot 2021-08-07 at 20.22.20.png
    Nottingham Journal 11th November 1941
     
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