That was a task the Luftwaffe would have had to accomplish. The remaining handful of destroyers, cruisers and damaged battleships were in no position to defeat the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet. When the Kriesgmarine was heavily deployed in the invasion of Norway in April 1940, it achieved its objectives-at the cost of half of the German Navy’s twenty destroyers and three cruisers. Though before the war Hitler had an ambitious Plan Z to hulk out the Kriegsmarine with ten battleships and four aircraft carriers, that never came close to being realized. But those methods still relied on the other side having little ability to shoot back at the invasion force-and a little factor called the Royal Navy made that a very difficult issue to address. It’s fair to say Germany improvised in remarkably little time methods to land a large army on a nearby hostile shore. Obviously never used in an invasion of the UK, a few instead saw action crossing the River Bug during Operation Barbarossa. Petre retired from the RAF in 1919, but continued to have a keen interest in flying.By August 1940, Germany converted more 252 Tauchpanzer III and IVs as well as fifty-two floating Panzer II Schwimmpanzer light tanks, organized in four battalions. Petre, who had been commissioned into the Australian Military Forces as a Lieutenant on 6th August 1912, making him Australia’s very first military pilot! In December 1933, G-AAVB was re-registered to Major Henry A. He was 63 years old when he competed in his first King’s Cup Air Race and came second! In 1931, G-AAVB was sold on, transferred to Egypt and converted into a landplane, before being bought by Brigadier General Arthur Corrie Lewin, DSO, a distinguished Irish veteran of the Great War, who only discovered his passion for flying at the age of 57, and proved to be astonishingly good at it, flying solo from England to Kenya not long after he learnt to fly. He flew on across the Baltic to Tallinn, Estonia on the 10th September and then to Finland the following day, finally returning to Aberdeen, via Norway on the 22nd and finishing off with a tour of the British coast. On 4 September 1930, he set a new record by flying G-AAVB 1,040 miles non-stop from the Welsh Harp (Brent) reservoir in London to Stockholm, Sweden in 12 hours. (By the mid-twenties he was already giving military secrets to the Japanese and was eventually forced to retire from the Royal Navy when he was caught giving military intelligence to the Japanese in 1941, shortly before they declared war in the Pacific!) It was operated by William Forbes-Sempill, known as “Master of Sempill”, who had flown with the Royal Flying Corps, RAF and Royal Naval Air Service during WW1. It was first registered on 30th June, 1930, as G-AAVB, with the De Havilland aircraft company as a floatplane (the floats were made by Short Brothers). Prior to that, this little aircraft had an interesting history…. It had been impressed into military service as DR755 and delivered to 26 Squadron at Gatwick on 12th May, 1941, but still carried it’s civil markings on the day it crashed at Kenley. It swung on landing and was damaged beyond economical repair, although the pilot escaped unhurt. At 12.55pm, on 4th September, 1941, G-AAVB, a de Havilland DH80a Puss Moth attempted to land in a crosswind at Kenley after making the short hop from Gatwick.
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