 A Filey Story.THE CAPTURE OF THE THE CREW OF A GERMAN HEINKEL III AIRCRAFT BY THE FILEY DRIFTER,"SILVERLINE", ON APRIL 3RD 1940.The Silverline was one of the newly armed, with a Lewis gun and yet still "civilian", fishing crafts and had survived enemy action a few weeks previously when she had been bombed and machine-gunned. As they went on their way they had seen some Spitfires circling around, and heard the sound of bombing and machine gun fire in the distance. They saw a Spitfire and a Heinkel in combat; the two planes broke off the exchange going in opposite directions. Suddenly the Heinkel was swooping down out of the sky towards them. The crew thought the enemy aircraft was diving to attack. Tom Watkinson was the first to get to the Lewis gun, which had been installed on the ship's deck. When the aircraft was within range he pressed the trigger and a tracer of bullets hit the Heinkel, which caused the plane to swerve widely and crash into the sea a short distance away.
The boat's crew watched and saw the aircraft's crew of five crawl out of the cockpit of the slowly sinking plane, move to the tail and hold up their arms in a gesture of surrender. The Silverline proceeded to the wreck and as it got closer it struck one of the wings of the aircraft causing it to sink faster. The crew of the Silverline reacted with haste and got ropes over the side of the boat and hauled the aircraft's crew aboard, only one of whom, the navigator, was wounded. Once they were aboard, the pilot, who could speak excellent English, told that they had lost use of one of their engines and the other had been damaged in the battle with the Spitfire. The Spitfire had broken off the battle when it had been damaged itself. The bullets from the Lewis gun completed the job as far as the Heinkel was concerned, and they had also punctured its life raft. The aircrew would, therefore, have drowned if the Silverline had not rescued them. The Silverline returned to land, and during the journey back conversations took place during which the Germans gave Bob Watkinson a gold signet ring and Tom Watkinson a wristwatch. Presumably in appreciation of their rescue! When the German pilot was reproached about attacking fishing boats, he denied that he had done such a thing and that he was after bigger fish like merchant ships in convoys. He would say that wouldn't he! It does not alter the fact that several fishing vessels had been attacked at the same time that day, and in the same vicinity. The skipper had radioed details of their encounter back to port and when they reached there the airmen were handed over to the awaiting authorities and spent the rest of the war in captivity.
The damage to the Spitfire in the battle caused it also to come down into the sea. The pilot had given a running telephonic description of the action to his base on land. He was under the water before he got free but as he was wearing the regulation lifebelt he surfaced and was picked up soon afterwards by a patrol vessel. The Spitfire pilot was credited with the "kill"of the Heinkel. The Heinkel had come from its base at Lubeck-Bankenese on an armed shipping reconnaissance mission. Bob Watkinson died in 1965 and in the 1980s his son, also called Bob, decided to track down the owner of the ring given to his father. "My father always expected the German to return after the war" he was reported as saying and eventually the ring was returned in 1988 to its rightful owner, Rudolf Behnisch. Herr Behnisch had been given the ring by his father and never expected to see it again. When it was returned to him, he told Bob that he remembers the third of April every year as his second birthday, the day when eight ordinary Filey men saved his and his crew's life somewhere off the Yorkshire coast. As mentioned above, the tracking down of the Heinkel pilot, the owner of the ring, according to press and magazine accounts, was done by Bob Watkinson but Bob's son, John, informs me that this is not correct and similarly the report that Bob had said that his father expected the German to return after the war is also not correct. It was believed, locally, that the captured crew of the Heinkel had been sent to Canada as POWs and had been aboard a vessel sunk by a German U-boat, and all had been lost. It was not until 1987 that Bob was aware that the pilot had survived the war. In fact it was a reporter preparing an article about the "Silverline/Heinkel" incident for an aviation magazine that had tracked down the pilot, and later arranged for him to visit Filey. Like the previous story,"The Sinking of the Edith Cavell", this story has been passed down by successive generations of Filey folk. The experiences of the crew of the Silverline had widespread attention at the time and widespread coverage from the press.
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