Familiar Missions

Tucked quietly away on page 6 of the New York Times one day last week, marked by a tiny headline, was a flat denial of some news which had rated front-page banners in practically every paper in the U. S. the week before. The great "invasion attempt"--in which there were supposed to have been anywhere from 40,000 to 200,000 German casualties --had been made up out of whole cloth.

The story's fabrication came about as follows: one dull night the British Air Ministry got together some of the invasion-attempt rumors which had originated in Stockholm, Lisbon, Berne, "and perhaps Chicago and points west," and released them for publication--assigning the date Sept. 16 to Netherlands sources.

British newspapers picked up the tale, thought it fact, discovered that supposedly favorable weather obtained on the night in question, that Hermann Goering was advertised to have flown over London and that the R. A. F. had shot down 185 planes the day before. Said the Times's denial (from its London office): "The British Army has never seen a German soldier approaching these shores; the Navy has never attacked or seen any boats headed for England. The Air Force, in all its attacks on the so-called invasion ports, has never seen a German soldier in any German barges."

Nevertheless, the R. A. F. still pounded last week at the same so-called invasion ports. Raids continued on Berlin and the German censor released a picture of a bad fire set by the R. A. F. (see cut). The British also repeated familiar missions to industrial centres. For the first time they bombed the Skoda works in Bohemia.

But the main force of R. A. F. flights still fell on Antwerp, Dunkirk, Ostend, Nieuport, Le Havre, Calais and every intervening cove and roadstead.

Most Britons thought that invasion would not be attempted until spring; but there was nothing to prove that intermittent glassy, fog-brushed calms of late autumn and winter would not make pretty invading weather. This week Field Marshal Sir Cyril Deverell, onetime chief of the Imperial General Staff, warned that the invasion might come during the winter--that the Germans had a precedent in Moltke's winter attack on Denmark in 1864. Because a politico-military offensive was shaping up farther south did not mean that an offensive could not be simultaneously launched in the north.

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