IN THE AIR: Punches Held

The slow hum of Zeppelins at night was World War I’s high horror note for civilians of Britain and France.* This war’s note was so confidently expected to be the shattering bellow of dive-bombers that congested areas of France and England were evacuated before war was declared. Through last week, no such note was heard except for a non-bombing visit toward Paris by a few Nazi reconnaissance ships, who retreated as soon as spotted, and a jittery performance near Britain’s big Thames-mouth base at Chatham.

Although the British censor passed several conflicting reports on this affair (see p. 25), a later “official report” set the gossip straight. A German squadron had indeed started over Chatham. Home fighters had indeed gone up. But so prompt were they, so excited their brother gunners below, that when they returned (after scaring off the German eagles) their own guns powed them. One British pilot crashed dead.

Actual extent of Allied and German flights in the war’s first week no one on the west shore of the Atlantic could tell. From official communiques, however, it appeared that except for Germany’s Polish push, the one big show of the week was put on by England.

One cloudy afternoon Dutchmen heard the drumming of war engines as a big flight of bombers sped east across The Netherlands, safe from anti-aircraft fire above a thick overcast. From their course, air-wise Dutchmen (who protested this violation of their neutrality) concluded they were headed for three Nazi naval bases (Wilhelmshaven, Cuxhaven, Brunsbüttel), clustered in a 50-mile circle around the North Sea mouth of the Kiel Canal. They were right.

Warned by the rumble of approaching motors (and probably by espionage reports), Nazi anti-aircraft men, crouched beside their guns, had no targets until the British raiders burst from the overcast in a driving rainstorm. Out of formation peeled the raiders. Down they dropped in screaming power dives, slamming heavy bombs at some of the juiciest bombing targets in Germany: men-of-war and vital establishments in docks, fuel storage, ammunition supply.

Before German pursuit could get into the air the raiders had crawled back into the overcast and headed for home, after a lively half hour or so with every machine gun and anti-aircraft cannon in the area whanging away at them. Next day Britain announced that severe damage had been done to a battleship lying alongside the mole at Brunsbüttel, that hits had been made on a second man-of-war off Wilhelmshaven. Few days later an unconfirmed dispatch from Switzerland said the 26,000-ton Gneisenau had been sunk. Germany denied it, said its anti-aircraft men had knocked down five of the twelve British raiders. Britain announced there had been “some casualties.”

Other air activities of the week summarized thus:

> A British bombing attack on the German base-island of Sylt off Denmark’s southwest corner. Obvious object: to destroy the extensive anti-aircraft establishment there, pave the way for other raids on the naval bases. No results were announced but this week German civilians were evacuated.

> French (and probably British) bombers visited over Germany’s industrial Ruhr and steel mills at Essen, apparently to test their defenses. No details.

> Repeated pamphleteering raids were made by British squadrons over the industrial (munitions) areas of northern and western Germany. Some of the literature landed in Denmark by mistake.

> Belgian pursuit pilots, protecting their neutrality, got into a dogfight with two British bombers, forced down one, shot down another. One of the Belgian ships went down in flames after its crew had bailed out. Britain made an apology, its second in the week for British pilots who apparently had lost their way. (In the earlier instance the apology was for a pilot who dropped a bomb on an apartment in Esbjerg, Denmark, apparently during the raid on Brunsbüttel.) Neutral observers began to wonder whether the navigation training of British airmen, confined to the narrow limits of the British Isles, had been adequate.

> Like the pamphleteering flights, British and French observation planes ranged over Germany, while German reconnaissance crews looked over French terrain to get information for Nazi intelligence maps. No losses were reported and the lie was given to German boasts that no hostile airplane could cross Nazi anti-aircraft defenses.

> Millions of people in north Europe with gas masks at their belts or dangling from their elbows, fingered these grisly disguises, put them on when alarms sounded, but never needed them. War’s worst horror did not come; no gas fell anywhere.

> Parisians viewed with satisfaction their “artificial fog” defense—strata of titanium tetrachloride (used in skywriting) laid over the city by planes, blown over it from towers.

Impartial observers were compelled to conclude this week that Britain and France, and also Germany, were withholding their main air-power for definite reasons. Allied reasons apparently were: 1) to wait for the U. S. to clarify its neutrality stand, on which Allied plane replacements depend heavily; 2) reluctance to invite German “atrocities”; 3) delay until objectives on the Western Front were truly defined and prepared; 4) delay in the hope that the German people could be disaffected from A. Hitler by the War of Pamphlets.

German reasons apparently were: 1) to delay action on the Western Front until Poland was carved; 2) to keep the Allied populations’ war fever low, so that peace-after-Poland might more possibly be won.

Meanwhile intelligence maps on both sides were being marked and flagged with the information brought home by far-ranging reconnaissance. It has been a long time since French military planes flew over Germany, or German over France, and there were many changes to be photographed, sketched or observed before both sides were ready to begin real firing.

When it comes, men on the ground and men in the air will work together in the tactical teams that both sides have trained to develop. While artillery is preparing for the advance of infantry, low-flying attack ships will sweep from their airdromes in great flights to batter relieving troops with machine-gun fire, bomb supply trains in the rear areas.

Before the attack pilots, flying the contours of the ground and sweeping out from behind barns and copses, have finished their work, some of them will have blasted anti-aircraft establishments to make life easier for the big bombers, far above them. From the bombing flights will whistle 500-and 1,000-pound streamlined, explosive-laden fish, aimed for bridges in the communications lines, factories, heavily built fortifications.

Far above the bombers, trying to keep the sun at their backs, will be the pursuits, single-seaters in battle formation. Their job: to protect bombardment in its egg-laying. When the enemy pursuit rises to knock the bombers out of the air, hurtling through the bursts of its own anti-aircraft fire, when it locks horns with the protecting pursuit in swirling mass dogfight, military textbooks can be thrown away. For when the day’s bloody work is over, the military schools will have fact for the next fight, instead of theory.

*Unconfirmed was a report last week that the Graf Zeppelin was blown up at her moorings in Friedrichshafen