THE AIR,BALKAN THEATRE: Try for a Knockout

IN THE AIR

Wearing tin hats and carrying gas masks, interviewers for Dr. George Gallup’sBritish Institute of Public Opinion lately went among the bomb-battered British people asking: “In view of the indiscriminate bombing of this country, would you approve or disapprove if the R. A. F. adopted a similar policy . . .?” The long-suffering British people divided 46% for, 46% against, 8% undecided, on giving the German people their own Luftwaffe’s frightful medicine. But that was several days ago. Something happened last week in Coventry which probably changed the score.

It was a bright moonlight night. Enough German planes were feinting at London to keep the night-flying defenders there preoccupied. Meantime wave after wave of heavy-laden bombers passed around and northwest to Coventry. All night they kept at it until they had dropped over 500 tons of high explosive, 30 tons of incendiaries on the old city where Lady Godiva once rode naked to protest against high taxes. Coventry, “Britain’s Detroit”—a city of 200,000 on the southern edge of the Midlands—became one solid, seething mass of fire. Not just the motor and airplane factories on the outskirts, but the entire heart of the city, square miles of workmen’s homes in long neat rows; block upon block of shops and banks and pubs and offices; lovely old St. Michael’s cathedral—all fell under the most concentrated rain of destruction yet loosed from the skies by mankind. What the Nazis had done to tiny Guernica in the Spanish war, to Warsaw by degrees and to a section of Rotterdam in one short blast, the Germans now did to Coventry. In the morning, what had been a thriving city was a smoldering pile of rubble where dazed, stunned survivors wandered aimlessly, and rescue parties from other cities scrabbled in the ruins to dig out hundreds buried dead and alive.

The crushing horror of the blasting of Coventry was that it suggested the same thing could befall other British cities. It was evidently a blow for which supreme force had been gathered, a try for a knockout before U. S. production should begin to give Britain the edge over Germany. Also it was punishment (the Germans said) for British audacity in bombing Munich last fortnight while Adolf Hitler was there, and for disturbing Russian Premier Molotov’s visit with bombs upon Danzig and Berlin, and for again plastering the Krupp works at Essen. The only mystery was why, if the Germans could thus destroy a small city at will, they had not long ago destroyed Britain’s industrial towns one by one. Perhaps they lacked the resources to keep it up regularly.

But after Coventry, it was London’s turn again and the most massive night at 20 tack yet launched upon the capital poured down another five or six hundred tons of death. Only a providential overcast prevented this happening to London two nights in a row. Although London’s antiaircraft defense is far heavier than any other British city’s, Luftwaffe was apparently ordered and geared to shoot the works.

The R. A. F. replied to Germany in savage kind, but still it conserved its bombs for military objectives. Upon the railway stations ringing Berlin the Britons dived and dumped revenge. They gave Hamburg its fiercest visitations to date, aiming not only at docks and shipyards but at stations, freight yards, power plants back in the city. The Germans said 223 persons were killed in Hamburg, which began to sound like “indiscriminate bombing,” though it did not approach Coventry’s casualties, which exceeded 1,000. Coupled with other intensified R. A. F. work elsewhere, as at Le Havre where a munitions train was blown up. demolishing a reported 500 houses, the Hamburg and Berlin raids made the week the hottest on both sides during the entire air war.