I immediately order formation to be rejoined, to be turned down on account of some being otherwise engaged, already. To make matters worse, the rest of the formation now abandons me, falling away below. What are these people doing?



Not much, seems to be the answer. So I fly along behind them, to see what they do next. Are they going to join in on the attack on those ships?



It doesn't look like it. In between ignoring my repeated orders to rejoin formation, they start to wheel around the sky.



Down below, it looks like somebody has sunk the last ship in line!



I orbit the patrol's beat for a while, waiting to see if the others go down or the RAF arrives. Neither of these things happens.

Finally, I've spent the allocated time on station and turn for home. It's at this point that the other 109s decide to rejoin me.



They are not just following the same route - they are now following me again. Most of them, anyway. The third schwarm - the ones who seem to have decided they were ship killers - don't show up.



Crossing Dover on the way out, with no enemy aircraft upon which to vent my frustration, I'm tempted to drop down and attack the Dover balloon barrage. Which apparently 109s did from time to time, in real life.

But I decide not to, and am glad I didn't when the port's flak greets us with a short but particularly accurate barrage.



We escape unscathed and the White Cliffs are soon falling astern.



Out over the Channel and with the RAF now unlikely to catch us, I throttle back and put the nose down, leading the boys back to Audembert.



On return, I learn that we have lost one aircraft from the second schwarm and no less that three from the ship-killing third. Their surviving pilot is claiming not one but two ships sunk, from just under 800 rounds fired, only 120 of which could be from his two 2 cm cannon.



I don't care what I saw; and propaganda value be damned, they can say what they like on the Deutsche Wochenshau. But there's no way I'm going to be adding my support to those claims. I value my unit's credibility, if nothing else.

Maybe that schwarm had been secretly modified to carry invisible bombs, so secret that nobody told me about them. Maybe their claims are rubbish. Maybe the ship I saw sinking was actually one or more of the missing 109s going in. I don't think so, though. If they had survived, I'd have had the lot of them transferred to Stukas, and that's being kind. They should really all be up before the same court martial as the dummkopf who assigned us this mission.