WESTERN THEATRE: Invasion Delayed

Thirty-one years ago this week, on July 25, 1909, a speck low in the air over the English Channel approached the Dover chalk cliffs from the French shore. Larger & larger it grew until watchers on the British side could clearly distinguish a man steering a gimcrack monoplane. He landed safely, and the British rushed to join the world in congratulating Aeronaut Louis Bleriot upon passing one of aviation’s epochal milestones.

Last week watchers on Britain’s south and east headlands scarcely needed to look up to identify skein after skein of German aircraft which, from bases in Nazified France, swept over the Channel and swooped upon British shipping or soared on over Britain to bomb inland objectives. So experienced had many a British “spotter” become that by ear he could tell a squadron of death-pregnant German Heinkels, going out to work, from a flight of British Blenheims returning from work. Meanwhile the Germans adopted new technique: sending a swift, lone leader at high altitude to lay a smoke trail to the objective, which the bombers followed at out-of-sight altitude. This technique was doubtless devised primarily for the benefit of new, sketchily trained German pilots who are sent out en masse with only rudimentary flight instruments simply to follow-their-leader, get home as best they can after unloading over assigned targets.

When British fighters repeatedly broke up their bomber formations prematurely (on one occasion six Hurricanes dispersed 40 Dorniers attended by 40 Messerschmitts),the Germans tried the system of sending ships over singly or in groups of two and three, striking at numerous places the same day. This plan thinned out Germany’s casualties but it also thinned her bombing.

Closely as they scanned the sky toward Germany, the British scanned even more closely the water and the harbors across it from which Adolf Hitler’s invasion attempt might come. The July moon waxed full. The tides were just right (flood after midnight). By press and radio Germany threatened invasion ever more loudly and instantly. Still it did not come. Some guessers said that, after disagreement in his High Command, Hitler was waiting for the weekend of Aug. 4, anniversary of Britain’s 1914 declaration of war, when the moon would be dark. Only troop move he made last week was to occupy, unopposed, the islet of Ushant off the tip of Brittany, westernmost fragment of France, 125 miles south of England’s southwest tip, Land’s End.

Britain consoled herself last week that invasion was not yet imminent because of the nonarrival of Germany’s Air Force in daily waves of thousands instead of scores. Such mass bombing was a prerequisite for landing troops in Britain by any means. Britain now had at least 2,000 first-line fighting planes and perhaps twice as many bombers. These must be removed from the air, preferably by smashing them on the ground, or by so devastating their fields, fuel bases and shops that they could not rise. To extinguish Poland’s large but surprised Air Force took 5,000 planes of the Luftwaffe less than 48 hours. To knock out 300 Dutch and 200 Belgian airplanes took less than 24 hours. The French Air Force (5,500 planes) gradually disintegrated during twelve days of bombing in the Battle of France.

In the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe faced its first really tough test. German pilots learned at Dunkirk, where R. A. F. definitely established local control, that they and their machines were individually inferior to the British. But the British had not enough planes to maintain superiority all over Britain if the Germans came over in thousands.

A map of Luftwaffe’s, preliminary “educational” bombings of Britain, from June 18 to last weekend (see p. 17), shows some of the targets which Germany considered most important. The bombed towns are those mentioned in German communiques (the British do not name exact sites). In some cases the Germans may not have hit where they thought, but, other places have also been bombed, by accident, by bombers in a hurry to unload and start for home. In these bombings according to British admission 336 civilians were killed and 476 seriously wounded, less than a normal month’s toll in traffic accidents.

The pattern shows that Britain’s vast industrial Midlands section, from Birmingham and Coventry north to Leeds and York, had been molested only lightly. Her west-coast ports north of the Bristol Channel were untouched. Only a few of her aircraft factories had been attacked. R. A. F.’s widely scattered bases had received attention but nothing like concentrated attack. Chief targets were naval bases, commercial ports, oil dumps on the southwest, south and east coasts, and munitions plants in the north (Middlesbrough, Billingham, Greenock). London was bombed only around its fringes, suggesting the efficacy of its balloon barrage. Remarkable was the Germans’ failure to attack Sheffield, where many of Britain’s biggest guns are forged.

German strategy would be to draw defenders away from Britain’s airfields by intolerable attacks on other targets, if need be on heavily populated areas. A threatened destruction of London, such as the destruction of Rotterdam (in which 54 German planes killed 30,000 people and reduced the centre of the city to rubble in 7^ minutes, according to official Dutch announcement), might force the R. A. F. to come to the metropolis’ defense. But if British airfields were left undefended, their shops, hangars and planes on the ground would be destroyed and in a short time the R. A. F. would cease to be a factor in the fighting.

Big difference between Rotterdam on May 14, and all large British cities last week was that the latter were heavily ringed with well-manned, well-munitioned anti-aircraft batteries. On the other hand, Germany was prepared to send bombers in flights of 540 instead of 54, if needed, to destroy London, Liverpool, Hull, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, etc., simultaneously, at whatever expenditure of her own lives might be necessary to annihilate British lives. Prospects were that the 10,000 or 15.000 attackers Germany was prepared to send and spend might well knock out Britain’s 7,000 (at most, all types) defense planes sooner or later, and probably sooner.

Recognition of what Britain faced overhead was expressed last week in one more shake-up of her defense command. Brave but inflexible General Sir Edmund Ironside, 60, was eased upstairs with the rank of Field Marshal, to make way for Lieut. General Sir Alan Francis (“Wizard”) Brooke, 57, as Commander in Chief of the Home Forces. General the Viscount Gort, Commander in Chief of the B. E. F., unassigned to a new high post since his return from France, was made only Inspecting General of Forces for Training, while to replace Sir Alan as field commander in the south of England, Lieut. General Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, 56, was named. The latter was the hard-bitten infantryman who helped wrestle Narvik from Germany’s Lieut. General Eduard (“Bull”) Dietl only to see it yielded due to pressure in the Lowlands.

In World War I, General Brooke invented a barrage map for directing artillery fire which came into wide use. He is called Britain’s best-informed tank and anti-tank man, “Wizard” because his knowledge of gunnery is so well-rounded he is also an anti-aircraft ace. Spectacled, dark, pinched, with a close-clipped mustache, he looks more like a “City” broker than the soldier-sportsman that he is (in the Army since 1902). His fox-hunting Irish father was Master of the Pau pack (supposed descendants of hounds with which Wellington’s officers hunted in Spain). Sir Alan, who was born and raised in France, is one of the Empire’s finest wing shots and anglers, and he once rode down and speared a wolf from horseback.

While Sir Alan prepared to spear German sky wolves, the R. A. F. last week continued its lambasting of their lairs across the Channel. British pilots stalked Germans home to spot their fields for future visits by British bombers. Wherever they saw barges—at Rotterdam, Boulogne, in the River Lys at Armentieres—they poured down bombs. They blasted out a section of the important Dortmund-Ems Canal, to which much traffic has been diverted since the railroad was wrecked.

They smashed at Copenhagen’s docks and shipyards. They played havoc at a favorite old spot, the many-railed freight yards and junction of Hamm. At Bremen they smacked the big Focke-Wulf aircraft plant where a new twin-tailed fighter with “swallowed” engine is being turned out, said to fly 400 m.p.h. Each side was “softening up” the other and a report from far-off Turkey carried by travelers from Germany indicated the kind of damage both sides were already suffering. According to the accounts the Rhineland populace was thoroughly terrorized by R. A. F.’s incessant raiding, especially at Essen, home of the vast Krupp plants.