World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF EUROPE: No Yankee Trick

Last week the R.A.F. tried what it had rejected. Ninety-four Lancaster four-motored planes bombed the Schneider-Creusot gun works (chief works of the famed French trust & munitions cartel) and the Henri Paul power plant in daylight. There was no fighter protection. Only one bomber failed to return.

The British approach tactic was new. There was no formation. The 94 pilots flew so low through 300 miles of mist to Le Creusot that they saw Frenchmen waving. A sergeant pilot described the flight: “As we all took the hedges it was like the Grand National except that there were no falls. It was like flying over England, only more beautiful. People on the ground seemed stunned by the great flock of Lancasters and the noise. We saw no fighters on the way, but a duck came through the windshield with a wallop. My front gunner’s turret was filled with feathers and the hole in the windshield let in an awful draft.” And so precise was the R.A.F. timing that the first planes hit Le Creusot at 6:09 and the last dumped its load seven minutes later.

It looked as though daylight bombing was not a purely Yankee trick. Whether it will work in Europe’s misty winter, when ground targets cannot be seen through bombsights, is still argued.

The same week:

> The R.A.F. (probably 350 planes) smashed at targets in the bomb alley of the Rhineland, then concentrated on scarred Cologne. Fires could be seen for 20 miles. Eighteen planes were lost.

> The British fired the shipyards, coal, iron, lumber and cement center of Kiel. Pathfinder planes overcame poor visibility by dropping hundreds of flares. The bombers followed with 4,000 tons of explosive—more hell than Kiel had caught in any of the previous 69 raids. Ten planes failed to return.

> The Luftwaffe was yet to fulfill Hitler’s promise of punishment. It raided the British coast ineffectively. One German bomber flew over Reykjavik, Iceland, but dropped no bombs. Another devastated an open field near a fishing village.