WESTERN THEATRE: Battle of Britain

Last month, when Germany unleashed her real air attack on Britain, she led with her chin in reckless massed raids of as many as 1,800 planes per day. Last week she showed that she had learned caution, punched craftily at Great Britain with not more than 1,000 planes in action each 24 hours, sent over in successive sections of 50 or 60 (two squadrons of 27, plus a few heavy Junkers 89 four-motored bombers).

”Sandwiches” of ‘Messerschmitt fighter-bombers usually came over first between layers of Messerschmitt fighters, to draw off R. A. F.’s fighter strength. Then fol lowed bomber squadrons, trying to slip past secondary defenses to strike at Lon don or to surprise R. A. F. bases, aircraft factories, Army camps. With their blows at military objectives they mingled many a savage shot below the belt, at civilian targets and morale. They experimented with “herringbone” formations, Indian file or chain formations, darting single attacks, converging attacks and their opposite, in which big formations dispersed in all directions. For the most part, the R. A. F.

parried all forms of attack successfully by day, seeming even to invite the Luftwaffe in over the land so that casualties would fall on British soil. Combats took place mostly at out-of -sight altitudes. According to British claims, the ratio of German craft shot down to British craft lost fell lower than two-to-one (25-10-15) during the week, then rose again toward week’s end to 63-10-22 and 85-10-37 as the Ger mans became more numerous on bright days with scattered clouds.

By Night. Chief new development of the Battle of Britain’s fourth active week was the institution of regular night raids on the two warring capitals, London and Berlin. The British had expected this. The Germans had not. Sharp was the surprise of Berliners, who had been told for a year by their High Command that no enemy attack would ever reach their midst, to hear bombs exploding and see fires raging within a few blocks of the Wilhelmstrasse.

Berlin dwellers had no specially constructed air-raid shelters. They had been told it would be enough to go to a rein forced room in their basements, or just stay indoors while anti-aircraft guns, with which Berlin apartment houses and office buildings ostentatiously bristled, would tear to bits any Britisher who dared the Reich’s might.

But with the serene contempt in which all good war pilots are supposed to hold ground defenses, however strong, the first British bombers slanted down through a hole in the cloud layer one night and, crossing Berlin from northwest to south east, dropped high explosives and incendiaries amid an angry inferno of bursting shrapnel and “flaming onions.” The raiders hit seven widely separated districts of Greater Berlin, including Gorlitzer Railroad Station in the southeastern industrial and freighting section. Even as civilians were dying that night in London, so died ten Berlin civilians, with 28 injured, by official German counts. On succeeding nights more British bombs fell, more Berliners died, as 100-lb. demolition charges tore down through apartment buildings, workers’ houses, mostly again in the southeastern quarters where lie huge Tempelhof Airport and some of Berlin’s main food, fuel, raw-material supply lines. As in London, subway service was disrupted. Berlin learned about sleepless nights and haggard mornings-after—and the High Command had some tall explaining to do.

Nazi officials exclaimed that British pilots were “very clever”—they kept changing their altitude so that gunners could not hit them! The British planes, they said, were painted with a wonderful thick black varnish that made them “invisible”: gunners could only shoot at their shadows on the clouds. This was the rankest rot. Most night bombers, German included, are given a coat of flat black on their under surfaces. And righteous though the German High Command’s rage was at the Britons’ “murderous” attacks on Berlin, they knew the enemy was aiming for military targets just as earnestly if not more so than Nazi pilots were over Britain. From many a long week’s experience elsewhere in Germany they knew, too, that the British effort over Berlin would be sustained and methodical.

R. A. F.’s pattern of bombings in Germany proper since June (extended last month to include Italy’s key motor, magneto and aircraft plants at Milan and Turin, and last week to Sardinia) spreads from the Lake of Constance on the Swiss border to Kiel on the Baltic, and now as far east as Berlin (see map). Relentless, consistent, it was stepped up by last week to at least 800 planes per night, neutral observers believed, carrying a nightly total of perhaps 2,500 tons of destruction from 16 British bases. Its purpose was the slow, sure crippling of German industry for a war that might run on for years. Repeated bombings of the same place time after time, until repairs are discouraged and the place and its function abandoned, are the kind of bombings that stick. The British pattern for Germany was unvaried for more than four months. Concentrated in the coal-seamed Ruhr district between the Rhine and Ems Rivers was a high percentage of Germany’s war industry—synthetic oil, steel, chemicals, munitions—and important transport arteries into the occupied areas of the Lowlands and France.

Repeatedly in British air communiques appeared such place-names as Essen, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Cologne, “the goods yards at Hamm . . . the Dortmund-Ems Canal.” By last week, after hundreds of bomb clusters had been dropped by the R. A. F. into the Ruhr, it would not have been surprising to hear that Germany was speeding the shift of much of its war production to more remote Pomerania, Bohemia, Austria and Silesia, as predicted by Reich Marshal Hermann Goring.

The port and naval facilities of northeast Germany formed another natural group of targets for the British, who had only to find Germany’s broad river,mouths at night to bomb Emden, Wilhelmshaven, Cuxhaven, Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel. The upper reaches of the Rhine and the Main guided them to Frankfort, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Waldshut. On the Weser lie Gottingen, Kassel, Rotenburg—all aircraft centres. On the Saale, tributary of the Elbe, were the big synthetic oil works of Leuna, the Zeiss instrument works at Jena.

Last week the R. A. F. made good a British promise to exhibit at Leipzig’s big 1940 industrial fair, by unloading bombs on the Leipzig railroad station. Junkers aircraft are made at Leipzig, also at Bern-burg and Dessau, which the R. A. F. duly visited. At Berlin, the first important industrial target hit was the Siemens-Schuckert electrical works.

Because the Reich has a highly developed motor-trucking system, R. A. F.

could not hope to paralyze German transport except at the Ruhr bottleneck, but the broad new Autobahnen (speed highways) helped guide night pilots to Augsburg (northwest of Munich), which in the 15th and 16th Centuries was one of Europe’s great trade centres and now has, besides the ancient palaces of its merchant princes, the Messerschmitt aircraft plant.

Luftwaffe’s pattern for bombing Great Britain began to become apparent with last week’s intensive night-raiding. Around London, the prime emphases were on the city’s seaward jugular, the Thames Estuary and London dock area, and on the city’s western and southwestern edges.

There lie London’s water-supply system, centred at Staines, and several trunk rail lines which, in the absence of an adequate motor-highway system, must feed and supply 8,600,000 people if the Thames jugular is constricted or cut.

While London’s lot created the biggest headlines, the Luftwaffe by night expanded and intensified its bombing pattern all over Great Britain. Liverpool and Birkenhead, the great shipping and shipbuilding centres of the west, received their first heavy bombings last week. So did Manchester, the Midlands textile centre. So did Derby, where Rolls-Royce engines are made for Britain’s Spitfire and Hurricane fighters. Other motor and aircraft factories at Birmingham and Coventry, attacked before, were attacked again & again. While the Germans hammered these targets, they continued pounding at seaports: Cardiff, Bristol, Portsmouth, Harwich, Dungeness, Hull. Only British stubbornness prevented the evacuation last week of such smashed-up places as Ramsgate, Dover, Southampton (see col. j). In the headlines appeared damage to such sentimental landmarks as St. Giles, Crip-plegate, in London where Oliver Cromwell was married and John Milton buried. Milton’s statue was blown from its pedestal before the church (see cut). Also damaged were the spire of Rochester Cathedral, Novelist Henry James’s house in

Rye. More significant was British admission of damage at airports like Farnborough, Maidstone, Manston, Weybridge (home of Vickers Wellington bombers).

But the British said only a few of their 400-odd air bases were shut down at any time, and none was abandoned.

As Germany’s attacks continued, without growing much heavier but with systematic aim and frequency, neutral observers watched Britain for signs of cumulative strain, for creeping paralysis such as preceded France’s sudden collapse under steady pressure.

Last week such signs were not evident in Britain. Railroad officials said their lines had not yet suffered any major dislocation. Lord Beaverbrook said production of fighters and bombers was never so high. Food was plentiful. Civilian morale was good. Life in London air-raid shelters was almost carnival—in its first fortnight (see p. 2p). But it was a weird, unnatural life, even for the birds, which awoke and sang when searchlights turned night into day. It was nerve-racking and man-consuming—air war of attrition in which the emphasis seemed to be shifting from losses of planes and pilots to losses of factories, losses of equipment, losses of transportation, losses of efficiency, losses of sleep.

As the war entered its second year, it was fought, at last, as it was originally pictured by its direst prophets, in a vast three-dimensional battlefield—over some 1,000,000 square miles of land and sea, in some 5,000,000 cubic miles of western Europe’s air space. In twelva months the Germans claimed to have destroyed 6,950 enemy aircraft while losing 1,050 of their own, to have dropped 5,000,000 bombs. The British said Germany had lost 3,945 planes in a year, to 1,012 British. Last week the Russian Army’s official organ,

Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), joined other observers in deflating the Luftwaffe’s boast of sky dominance, giving R. A. F. the edge to date in the Battle of Britain. President Roosevelt’s military observing mission to Britain (see p. 18) was reported ready to go home, supposedly well impressed with Britain’s ability to defend herself so far.

Entering the second year of war and the fourth week of their main attack on Britain, the Germans used their superior numbers to keep the R. A. F. constantly on the go, with “nuisance” raiders over Britain at all hours. A lot of their night flights were evidently for training, for extra pilots baled out of many planes brought down. Lest their morale be affected by repeated rebuffs from the defense rings around London, watchful agents of the Gestapo rode in many of the Luftwaffe’s formations. R. A. F. called them “German governesses” and took special delight when they were shot down.

On the Ground, the British tightened their defenses as the sky war raged on. They arrested scores of persons suspected of showing light signals to guide Nazi raiders.* They tested the Home Guard’s vigilance by turning loose fake parachutists, secret agents disguised as clergymen, tourists, milkmen, postmen, women, bummers. One “businessman” was detected when he asked the way of a wary countrywoman, a “girl” by the masculine way he handled a cigaret.

So that factory production might be interrupted as little as possible, “industrial watchers” from among their own ranks were posted by workers, to give the to-shelter alarm only when bombs, seemed actually about to fall. To get more sleep, British householders were encouraged to build new bombproof shelters directly attached to their dwellings, with water, light and other facilities let in from the home supply.

Freakish incidents kept the patient population amused. Sample:

>One man was blown out of his bed into his garden, where he landed unhurt beside a bitch licking her litter.

>On the Isle of Wight, a Messerschmitt plummeted straight down a well.

— *Paradise Lost, Book II. After an early, accurate raid on Bristol by night, British fliers spotted a line of small red lights, shielded so as to be visible only from directly above, leading straight to the harbor piers.