"Zola" - and the little yellow bombs
Title
"Zola" - and the little yellow bombs
Description
An article explaining who Zola is and why an aircraft was so-named.
Date
1942-11-16
Temporal Coverage
Spatial Coverage
Language
Type
Format
One newspaper cutting
Publisher
Rights
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
Identifier
NParryWE220531-04
Transcription
Monday, November 16, 1942
“Zola” – and the little yellow bombs
ALL readers of the [italics] Daily Mirror [/italics] know Zola – the streamlined lovely who helps Buck Ryan in his hair-raising adventures with criminals and Nazis.
This is the story of another streamlined “Zola,” who is also at war with the Nazis, and whose adventures have been quite as exciting as those of the heroine of Monk’s famous strip.
For “Zola” is the name of a Wellington bomber which has been harrying the Rhineland for over a year and, though three of her original crew are now killed, is still on the active list.
When Wing-Commander R. W. Turner took delivery of “a spanking new Wellington” in September, 1941, his aircraft was allotted the letter Z. Now everyone knows that F stands for Freddie and V for Victory, but Z stands for Zebra, and he didn’t think that was good enough.
Then one morning, when he was reading Buck Ryan in the mess, the answer came to him. She should be called “Zola.”
Ground and air crews agreed, and before long a lovely oil painting of our Zola, painted and presented by Monk, was adorning the side of the aircraft
A WEEK or so later the crew painted beside Zola one little yellow bomb. That meant that “Zola” had done her first bombing raid and unloaded her bombs on the target area.
“It became our ambition to have Zola surrounded with little yellow bombs,” writes Wing-Commander Turner.
That ambition has now been realised.
Frankfurt, Aachen, Wilhelmshaven, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau lying at Brest, Ruhr and the Rhineland, Dortmund, Duisburg, Cologne, Essen, Bremen and Rostock have all felt the weight of “Zola’s” bombs.
When the Station Commander wanted to have a look at Essen, it was “Zola” who took him through the inferno of flak.
“One never sees anything like it anywhere else,” writes Wing-Commander Turner. “It seemed as if they had wheeled out every gun they had, and were just firing them into the sky anywhere.”
But “Zola” made three runs and brought her commander safely back to base in the dawn.
“Zola” was one of the first aircraft in the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, and went with the thousand who followed up with a raid on the Ruhr.
Gennvillers, near Paris, will remember “Zola” for a long time. “After finding an opening in the clouds,” writes her captain, “we did our run and dropped our bombs. There was a hell of a cry from ‘Trout’ (our American observer), who was down at the bomb window.
“ ‘We’ve hit the b- - - target!’ “
A petrol installation at Bremen can also be chalked up to “Zola.”
Wing Commander Turner has now completed his second tour of “ops” and is handing on the experience of his many flights with “Zola” to young crews at an Operational Training Unit.
Meanwhile, “Zola” is continuing the good work under a new D.F.C. Flight Commander in his absence.
But her old boss hopes that when she is taken off “ops,” she will be sent along to him to help him train more crews for our ever-increasing bomber offensive.
“Zola” – and the little yellow bombs
ALL readers of the [italics] Daily Mirror [/italics] know Zola – the streamlined lovely who helps Buck Ryan in his hair-raising adventures with criminals and Nazis.
This is the story of another streamlined “Zola,” who is also at war with the Nazis, and whose adventures have been quite as exciting as those of the heroine of Monk’s famous strip.
For “Zola” is the name of a Wellington bomber which has been harrying the Rhineland for over a year and, though three of her original crew are now killed, is still on the active list.
When Wing-Commander R. W. Turner took delivery of “a spanking new Wellington” in September, 1941, his aircraft was allotted the letter Z. Now everyone knows that F stands for Freddie and V for Victory, but Z stands for Zebra, and he didn’t think that was good enough.
Then one morning, when he was reading Buck Ryan in the mess, the answer came to him. She should be called “Zola.”
Ground and air crews agreed, and before long a lovely oil painting of our Zola, painted and presented by Monk, was adorning the side of the aircraft
A WEEK or so later the crew painted beside Zola one little yellow bomb. That meant that “Zola” had done her first bombing raid and unloaded her bombs on the target area.
“It became our ambition to have Zola surrounded with little yellow bombs,” writes Wing-Commander Turner.
That ambition has now been realised.
Frankfurt, Aachen, Wilhelmshaven, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau lying at Brest, Ruhr and the Rhineland, Dortmund, Duisburg, Cologne, Essen, Bremen and Rostock have all felt the weight of “Zola’s” bombs.
When the Station Commander wanted to have a look at Essen, it was “Zola” who took him through the inferno of flak.
“One never sees anything like it anywhere else,” writes Wing-Commander Turner. “It seemed as if they had wheeled out every gun they had, and were just firing them into the sky anywhere.”
But “Zola” made three runs and brought her commander safely back to base in the dawn.
“Zola” was one of the first aircraft in the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, and went with the thousand who followed up with a raid on the Ruhr.
Gennvillers, near Paris, will remember “Zola” for a long time. “After finding an opening in the clouds,” writes her captain, “we did our run and dropped our bombs. There was a hell of a cry from ‘Trout’ (our American observer), who was down at the bomb window.
“ ‘We’ve hit the b- - - target!’ “
A petrol installation at Bremen can also be chalked up to “Zola.”
Wing Commander Turner has now completed his second tour of “ops” and is handing on the experience of his many flights with “Zola” to young crews at an Operational Training Unit.
Meanwhile, “Zola” is continuing the good work under a new D.F.C. Flight Commander in his absence.
But her old boss hopes that when she is taken off “ops,” she will be sent along to him to help him train more crews for our ever-increasing bomber offensive.
Collection
Citation
“"Zola" - and the little yellow bombs,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed March 17, 2026, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/collections/document/44379.