World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF EUROPE: Second Front in the Air

> Britain had opened her first offensive in Europe since World War II began.

> For the second time in the war a major drive was being undertaken solely through the air.

Last week these two simple but significant facts became crystal clear.

Britain’s bombing of Lubeck, its blasting of Rostock, its raids last, week on Kiel and Trondheim, its repeated daytime raids on Occupied France were not like the raids which the R.A.F. had made intermittently and hit-or-missly for two years. This was the Business. It differed in technique and, above all, it differed in scale from all British bombing that went before. It compared with Hitler’s blitz on Britain in the fall of 1940 —only it was bigger.

No responsible airman was ready to hop up and announce that the British blitz against Germany was going to knock the Nazis out of the war. It had run in full power for only a few days. It had shown no more than the first signs that its local but effective destruction could be broadened until it might cut the heart out of German production and transportation, and out of the morale of the people.

Yet it might happen. Britain finally had the tools. Its factories were in good production, and the Air Ministry had only recently announced that U.S. bombers were arriving in the British Isles at a tremendous rate. Planes were bigger. So were bombs. And the defense of Germany in these first few days was not to be compared with the tremendous fight put on by the youngsters of the R.A.F. in 1940.

In the great German blitz on England the conditions were geographically opposite. Britain was a concentrated target with a few industrial areas, all of which could be plastered with bombs. In Germany and Occupied Europe there were many more targets, and bombing must be dispersed. But this had its advantages for the attackers.

Defending the compact target of Britain in 1940, the R.A.F. could keep its pursuit together, use it with crushing concentration. The Luftwaffe’s job of heading off attacks from the wide reaches of German-held territory was more difficult. Germany had work for its fighters on the Russian front, and the few hundred that could be spared for defense against the R.A.F. had to be scattered.

The area that the R.A.F. could bomb spread vast across the face of Europe (see map). Because it was so big the pattern of bombing could be infinitely varied.

Within the 400-mile (average) radius of pursuit, Britain is using Hurricanes fitted with bombs to hop nimbly through the Nazi anti-aircraft barrages by daylight and throw confusion and small-scale destruction into industrial and military establishments and their defenses.

The Hurricanes are helped by bigger fellows—light and medium bombers, big enough to carry more bombs, yet handy enough to work close to the ground. They work by daylight, too. At dusk the big guns go out—four-motored Stirlings and Halifaxes with better than 10,000 pounds of bombs in their bays. They can range far across Germany, will probably range farther before the summer is out.

For even the short nights of summer should be no insuperable barrier to long-range operation of big bombers. With plenty of fighters on hand the R.A.F. can send off its big guns by daylight, provide them with pursuit escort until darkness, pick them up at dawn on the way home.

The R.A.F.’s technique is new in other respects. Instead of trying for pinpoint targets and bringing bombs home if they cannot be found, the R.A.F. is now going after the whole industrial districts of towns like Rostock, which they hit four nights in succession (TIME, May 4). Moreover the weight of bombs dropped on Rostock because of bigger planes and repeat visits was 800 tons compared to the 530 tons dropped on Coventry.

This increased weight and repetition amounted to an improvement not merely in size but in bombing. If half a town’s essential services—fire-fighting equipment, water supply, sewers, light, even housing —is knocked out, it may be able to pull itself together. If three-quarters, for example, is destroyed, the town may no longer be able to fight fires and repeated bombing may force the population to abandon home and work.

Reconnaissance photos made after the raids on Rostock and Lübeck indicate that this is at least partially the case. They show enormous destruction. Travelers on an airliner from London to Stockholm reported they had seen the red glare of Rostock’s flames for 250 miles across the Baltic.

Triphammers’ Trips. After the Lübeck and Rostock raids the four-motored bombers swung into Norway, turned up with 75 heavy bombers over Trondheim, where the Tirpitz and Prinz Eugen are holed up. Under a bright bomber’s moon, the raiders went after another target —a big submarine base just completed after two years of work by Danish vassal labor. Few days later the returns came in from agents in Sweden: two years had been wasted. The base was reported a ruin.

The bombers struck at Paris, at the Gnôme-Rhône engine works and the old Goodrich rubber plant at Gennevilliers. They whacked at the big Diesel engine plant at Augsburg, at naval installations at Kiel.

The Germans took it with surly indignation. No longer did the Nazis promise five-for-one, or 100-to-1 retaliation. Their only answer was the “Baedeker raids” (see p. 26). The British, for once in the position where they could dish it out, made no more “Britain-can-take-it” talk. Only one newspaper called the bombing of York “wanton.” The rest unemotionally reported “York suffered heavy bombing —,” let it go at that.

Not so the Germans. News stories passed by Nazi censors told of a wholesale uproar among the civilian population of Rostock. German editorial writers recognized the damage that had been done, to morale and to production. Prize piece of pabulum for the gullets of the master people was the editorial in Dr. Alfred Rosenberg’s Archiv für Rassen und Gesellschafts-biologie.

“During air attacks the thickly populated areas of towns and cities are bound to suffer most. Those areas are inhabited by people who are usually poor and who are not likely ever to improve their lot and who are no great asset to the community. . . . Continuous explosions of heavy bombs are bound to unhinge mentally those whose nervous systems are not as strong as they should be. Aerial bombings should therefore enable us to discover a number of incipient neurasthenics who, in the interests of race selection and social hygiene, should not be permitted to reproduce their kind. After they have been sent to institutions, their offspring should be sterilized.”

This summer the R.A.F. hopes greatly to improve the racial strain in Germany.