29. A Raid to Disrupt Nazi Celebrations
Hermann Goering was scheduled to step up to the lectern at the Air Ministry Building and deliver his speech at precisely 11 AM. His nemesis that day was the twin-engine de Havilland Mosquito light bomber, nicknamed “The Wooden Wonder” because it was constructed almost entirely of wood. One of WWII’s most versatile and successful airplanes, the Mosquito was a fast plane that could carry up to 4000 pounds of explosives. It relied on agility and speed to avoid and escape enemy interceptors rather than fight them off. They were well suited for pinpoint attacks and special operations, so when RAF commanders decided to raid the Nazis’ January 30th celebrations, they assigned the mission to Mosquito squadrons.
As soon as the mikes went live and Goering began to speak, a flight of three Mosquitoes from No. 105 RAF Squadron roared in at low level over Berlin. Their target was the headquarters of the German state broadcasting company. The growl of their engines – along with the sounds of antiaircraft fire and the explosions of flak shells as Berlin’s defenders tried to shoot them down – accompanied Goering’s words as they were transmitted live across Germany. That presented the radio engineers with a dilemma: broadcast the cacophony of the raid, or kill the transmission. They shut down the broadcast, then dove for cover.
