World Battlefronts: Houses on Vesuvius

To the German people a Munich journalist recently gave this philosophic advice: the German spirit must be trained to face the breakup of all that was formerly called life. The German people’s whole existence as town dwellers is now in suspense. Nietzsche’s theme of living dangerously must be accepted. Nietzsche said: “Build your houses on Vesuvius.”

If they looked across the French border last week, the German people might have seen the crater of a new volcano. The U.S. had broadcast to the French, for whom we have “only feelings of greatest sympathy,” a warning: “Listen: To all inhabitants of the occupied zone living within a two-kilometer radius [about a mile and a quarter] around the factories working for Germany, we recommend [that they] evacuate their homes. . . . The objectives which are liable to be attacked by our bombers are all factories making or repairing planes, tanks, vehicles, locomotives, firearms or chemical products.” Two days later, with 500 Allied fighters as an escort, 115 U.S. bombers thundered over Lille.

Vesuvius. Nazi planes in thick swarms rose to meet them. The greatest daylight air offensive thus far over the Continent was met by one of the greatest defensive waves of fighters. On Sept. 15, 1940, when some 400 Nazi planes attacked Britain, R.A.F. fighters knocked down 185 and turned a tide. This time there was another tide-turning.

German planes felled only four of the 115 U.S. bombers, the crew of one of which was saved. U.S. pilots left the Fives-Lille steel & engineering works a pyre of fire, said they saw smoke rising 2.000 feet into the sky of France. The bombers had not only held at arm’s length the best fighter planes Germany has, but they had felled at least 48, probably destroyed 38 more and damaged 19, while the” Allied fighter escort accounted for five.* The figures were so incredible that the Bomber Command withheld them until they were triple-checked. They added up to little less than a revolution in aerial warfare.

For some two months Flying Fortresses have pounded at industrial centers in Western Europe. In sorties over some 30 towns they have tested their punch. The raid on Lille proved that their punch is deadly. Said the British Press Association’s air correspondent: “[The raid] again supports the U.S. claim that their Flying Fortresses are more than a match for any fighter the enemy is known to possess.”

Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitt 109-Fs had run head-on into the terrible fire power of 50-caliber heavy machine guns, which outrange the German fighters’ 20-mm. cannon. Beside the Fortresses were Liberators (four-engined B-24s), making their debut in a Western Europe mass raid. With a lower ceiling than the Fortresses, Liberators fly faster, carry four tons of bombs on their extreme range of 3,000 miles to the Fortresses’ three tons over 3,500 miles. Redesigning will give both planes room for an even greater load, which they already have the power to lift. After Lille, the shape of things to come was clear: eruption by day, as well as by night, of the volcano over Germany.

The Silent Passengers. Actual damage to the Nazis’ precariously balanced economy (see p. 27) has never been reliably assessed. Back from a visit to Germany last summer, a Swiss correspondent reported that he had found little damage to the Krupp works at Essen or to other German armament industries.

Since June 1, Allied raiders have visited Europe on an average of almost every other night. Most of these were 200-300 plane raids. The London Times claimed that the battering of such important railway towns as Kassel, Nürnberg, Osnabrück and Mainz, of such rail centers as Cologne, has forced the Germans to use barge canals and coastal waters. Last month, announcing that R.A.F. bombers were dropping 8,000-lb. blockbusters, the Air Ministry declared that photographs showed 270 acres of Karlsruhe and 370 acres of Düsseldorf laid waste. Other cities have been blasted just as intensively. Armament factories, shipbuilding yards and U-boat yards are known to have suffered.

But inevitably the chief victims have been the dwellers on Vesuvius. By the end of August 1,000,000 Germans were said to be homeless, a total of five and a half square miles of German cities wiped off the map. The same Swiss correspondent wrote in the Zurich Volksrecht:

“The thickly populated working-class districts of Germany are reported to have suffered the most. … [In Cologne] everywhere burnt-out ruins were outlined against the sky. Whole streets had been annihilated. People told me that 20% to 25% of Cologne’s houses had been destroyed and 200,000 inhabitants were homeless…. In trains there is, for Germany, the unusual aspect of silent passengers wrapped in their own thoughts.”

Until last week the German High Command kept from the people the fact that U.S. bombers were in action over France. After the Lille raid it told them out of the corner of its mouth: “A number of bombers equipped with several motors, including such of American make, were shot down with only one of our planes lost.” There was much left unsaid which the silent passengers would learn about.

*A curious statistic, explained by the fact that Axis planes avoided the500 Allied fighters concentrated on the bombers, and by the fact that the bombers got seperated from their escort in bad weather. None of the Allied fighters was destroyed.