"Master Plan"

"We have built up a defense force superior to any other in the world. . . . The German people . . . can go about their business with perfect tranquility. Their frontiers are guarded by the best Army in the history of Germany, the air above is protected by the most powerful Air Fleet, and their coasts are rendered unassailable by any enemy power."

Last week sardonic Berliners wryly remembered these Hitlerian promises, as waves of British bombers roared in from the west, shuttled across the capital. This was no skimpy hit-&-run attack. For nearly five hours one night, raiders swarmed overhead, dodging and twisting through the pink-orange-white pattern of bursting anti-aircraft shells, flying through the heaviest barrage Berlin had yet thrown up. With parachute flares to light their targets, they splashed bombs on the Tempelhof railroad yards, the Moabit and Wilmersdorf power stations, an airplane-engine factory in suburban Spandau, a gas plant in Tegel. In the ruins of factories and apartment houses 25 people were killed, 60 injured, according to the Nazis.

To battered Londoners this was satisfying news. German claims that hospitals had been the chief targets received little sympathy. But to British strategists the attack was just a phase of the "master plan" of Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Frederick Algernon Portal. As head of the Bomber Command, before his new appointment fortnight ago, he had been puncturing Hitler's boasts of German invulnerability with a threefold purpose: 1) to smash production and disrupt communications; 2) to render coastal ports useless as invasion springboards; 3) to crack German morale.

By Sept. 30 his planes had bombed objectives in over 200 towns. Concentrating on the Rhine Valley and the northern ports, British bombers blazed a path down the western rim of Germany, returning to key cities again & again. Freight yards and oil depots at Mannheim were bombed 16 times, oil refineries and an aircraft factory at Frankfort on the Main twelve times, the Krupp works in Essen 16 times. At Cologne and Soest, railways, munitions works, chemical plants were attacked 29 times. Even heavier were the raids on the ports of Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Kiel and Hamburg. Wherever there were railroad junctions, oil stores, munitions works, docks, factories, the British pilots had appeared, spattering a network of destruction across western Germany.

Last week R. A. F. bombers kept filling out the pattern, stepping up their intensity. They roared down the coastline smashing at docks & shipping from Norway to the Spanish border, pounding the big guns at Cap Gris Nez, blasting barges at Calais. As the week advanced, they gave the French ports their worst battering of the war. Diving through a howling southwester, a squadron of Blenheim bombers poured their loads into Boulogne, starting fires at the rate of one a minute. At Brest, new Fairey Albacore planes of the Fleet Air Arm plunged through a heavy anti-aircraft barrage to score direct hits on small German naval units at anchor.

At Cherbourg, the R. A. F. combined reconnaissance with bombing, directed the fire of British naval units which came in unexpectedly to attack. One R. A. F. officer gloated: "We were on the target when suddenly the Navy let fly. It was like 500 thunderstorms rolled into one. One of my pilots said that even the typhoons he had experienced in the Pacific Islands came nowhere near it. Every cloud flamed with bright amber color and we could see the bursts of the naval salvos in the docks. . . . The searchlights went quite drunk, waving aimlessly about the sky. The antiaircraft guns continued firing, but goodness knows at what. There was complete chaos down below."

Striking at Nazi troop and supply movements, the R. A. F. swooped over the German-held French port of Lorient, shattering two transports and killing 3,000 Nazi soldiers. Off Trondheim, Blenheim bombers of the Coastal Command fired a German supply ship, set two more ablaze in the North Sea.

From neutral nations reports were even stronger. Vichy ruefully declared that several French ports were completely demolished. Letters from Finland reported that as early as August "Essen and Duisburg were suffering badly from the frequency of air-raid alarms," described the razing of whole blocks in Hamburg.

What effect all this had on German morale was still a Nazi secret last week. But the continued evacuation of children from German cities showed that Britain's continued resistance, the constant bombing of Germany, and mounting civilian casualty lists were causing uneasiness. Since the outbreak of war 550,000 had been moved out of reach of British bombers. Last week 1,000 were taken out of Berlin in two days.

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