An early casualty of war

As promised, here are a couple of captures from the 1939 propaganda film The Lion Has Wings, which dramatised the RAF attack on Wilhelmshaven of 4 September 1939. The actual results of the raid were meagre; one Blenheim crashed into the fo'c'sle of the cruiser Emden, while the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was hit by bombs which failed to explode. Below are the corresponding scenes from the film (obviously model shots), which are nothing like what actually happened - it's pretty clear that the film makers were using their dramatic license to the full!

The first successful attack, by implication upon a pocket battleship:

The Lion Has Wings

The second attack, on what looks like a submarine:


The Lion Has Wings

Image source: Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Michael Powell, dirs. [The] Lion has Wings. Magna Pacific, 2002 [1939].

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