Stukas over Panama ("Operation Pelikan") ?

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Justo Miranda

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Stukas over Panama?

In addition during 1943 plans were hatched to fly two Ju-87B stukas from St Martin Cay near Nicaragua to bomb the Panama canal. These were to be taken there by U-boat.

I read this--on this very forum I believe--a fair wee while ago while hunting around Google for information on the V2's planned intercontinental succesor, and found it intriguing. Very reminiscent of the limited sub-launched Japanese floatplane ops against the American West Coast!

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=109947



u-boat with airplane mounted on it



<HTML>There are vague references to \"Operation Pelican\" whereby two were to be dissembled and stowed aboard two U-boats for transportation to the Caribbean, reassembly (where?) and a planned attack on the Panama Canal in Erich Gimpel\'s excellent book \"Spy for Germany\". Never heard of the attack on oil fields. Maybe the plans were related?





https://uboat.net/forums/read.php?3,7463,7473
 

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I moved this post to this section, as it isn't directly related to the Ju 87, but an interesting topic in itself.
Mentions of "Operation Pelikan", the German Plan to attack the gates of the Panama Canal, can be found on
a lot of sites, and maybe here Wikipedia actually may be the most reliable one, as most entries on other sites
seem to have been copied and pasted. Nevertheless, the most detailed mention probably can be found here
https://epdf.pub/spion-fuer-deutschland.html , (same book, as mentioned by Justo, unfortunately in German
language here only), but it may be the least reliable, too, as it was written long after the war as a novel, by a
former German spy, who didn't sell himself short.

Some sites cautiously just speak of "disassembled Ju 87, to be transported by ship", and honestly, I don't have
many doubts, that the parts of a Stuka could be transported by a Uboat (two were planned for transporting two
Stukas), but I had a look at some drawings and descriptions of German Uboats of the types VII, IX and XB and
cannot imagine, that from those parts, the aircraft would have had to be dismembered, even skilled mechanics
could have rebuild complete and flyable aircraft in a reasonable timeframe, in a location far away.
To me, it seems to have been an idea by people without any knowdedge about submarines, where every opening
in the fuselage has to be pressure-tight, and, in order to keep possible problems and risks low, as small, as possible.
No idea, of course, if there would have been a way to secretly transport two disassembled Ju 87 by (surface) ship,
to some point in South America.
 

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