World Battlefronts: Rising Wind

Germany was taking it. The greatest air offensive in military history hammered day & night at her factories, her transportation system and the morale of her people. It had not yet reached the fury of a systematic 1,000-planes-a-night push against her 31 key cities (TIME, Sept. 7). Yet Germany was suffering vaster and more continuous blows than Britain took in the blitz of 1940’s autumn, and she was taking them from instruments vastly improved in destructive power.

She might be able to ride out the storm until she could spare planes from the Russian front for defense against the R.A.F. and U.S. Air Force; or until a deadly threat to some other theater, such as the Middle East (see p. 34), forced the Allies to ease their blows. But if the storm went on, if it increased normally with the steady addition of new planes and men to Allied air power, Allied airmen felt certain that Germany could be and would be critically hurt.

These were the thoughts in the back of many an airman’s head as fighters, light bombers and Flying Fortresses swirled over Europe by day and Britain’s big four-motored Lancasters, Stirlings and Halifaxes thundered over after nightfall.

The Russians had joined in the assault. and their effect seemed already considerable. Germany announced that its defenses had knocked down 130 Russian planes in a raid on Berlin. Moscow gibed at the statement as fantastic (which it was) but added that the figure was a fair estimate of the number of planes in the raid.

Big or small, the bombing of Berlin was no flash in the pan. The Russians were back over German-held territory night after night; they had slammed Warsaw, Stettin, Danzig, Königsberg and Budapest before the week was out.

Now that Germany was catching it in the rear areas, once deemed fairly safe from attack from England, she could start a new line of worry, get busy with air-raid defenses which probably had been rudimentary and slipshod (Russian pilots reported that Berlin was brightly lighted). She also got a new boss of her anti-aircraft defenses: General Friedrich Hirschauer, appointed to replace an unnamed officer who presumably had fallen down on his job.

General Hirschauer had a nice problem on his hands. The Luftwaffe had already let Germans know that as long as the Russians held out it would need the bulk of its strength on the eastern front. That put a bigger load than ever on the anti-aircraftsmen.. Yet the cities the Russians now bombed could not have adequate defenses, for the defenses were needed elsewhere. Chiefly they were needed in the tight Ruhr rectangle (15 miles wide and 35 miles long), where 51% of German industry is still concentrated.

Even concentrated there the defenses were not enough. Last week the R.A.F. kept at the Ruhr, hit Saarbrüken (pop. 131,000) with 200-300 planes in what the conservative British Air Ministry called a raid “of outstanding success.” Another night the heavy bombers swung farther east to Karlsruhe, on the upper Rhine, unloaded 200 or more bomb bays 450 miles from home, on one of the Reich’s great locomotive-building centers. Still another night, Bremen, one of the targets of the three 1,000-plane raids of early summer, caught it hot & heavy.

By day. the high-speed nimble equipment of the R.A.F. and U.S. force were at it continuously. It was the usual show, with the normal increase in intensity. Airmen watched it closely because the day workers were chiefly after Germany’s transportation—docks, locomotives, yards. Most of all they watched the U.S.’s day-raiding Boeing Flying Fortresses, which thundered in over Rouen and plastered the railroad yards, came back a day or two later to plaster a German aircraft factory at Meaulte and blast a Nazi airdrome at St. Omer. The B-175 still looked good. This week the four-motored U.S. precision bombers suffered their first losses. Against the heaviest fighter opposition they had met, B-17 gunners shot down five, claimed 13 “probable” hits on 25 other Nazi pursuit ships. But two Fortresses did not return.