How Much Is Enough?

Berlin, Munich, Nuernberg, Stuttgart, Essen--everywhere the wings of the R.A.F. shadowed the moon and destruction followed for the Herrenvolk below.

Essen, city of some 700,000 people, which turned out precise and coldly beautiful machinery of war, was gasping with a thousand wounds. A single lightning raid, the R.A.F. reported, had razed the entire center of the city early last week, wrecked 75% of the giant Krupp arms factories (TIME, March 15). More than 450 acres of buildings, plants, machinery and human dwellings were in ruins. A week later the bombers came again, hit even harder with more than 1 ,000 tons of bombs.

Nuernberg, the ancient walled town of Cobbler-Poet Hans Sachs and Painter Albrecht Durer, is ringed with war plants. Historic buildings, including Duerer's home (see cut), airplane factories, U-boat engine works, tank factories and railroad centers, crumbled under R.A.F. bombs.

Munich is Naziism's birthplace and an old city of art treasures and Nazi Party shrines. But in its suburbs are Messerschmitt plane factories, the Bayerische Motorenwerke (aircraft engines and motor vehicles), many other war factories. In their fifth raid on the Bavarian capital, the R.A.F. shattered its museums and arms industries alike.

Stuttgart is the old city where, in the heyday of the Nazi Party's rise to world power, the Auslandsdeutschen--Germans living abroad--met each year to plan their fifth-column tactics. Last week a half hour's raid left extensive areas of Stuttgart afire, presumably including the Daimler-Benz motor plants, the Bosch ignition works, the mass-production auto factory of Opel and many other war-important industries.

The Bitter Score. For German propaganda there was one refuge: in the cultural monuments and historic buildings which were ruined, together with the military objectives. The Nazis played this theme for what it was worth--and it was undoubtedly worth as much to sentimental German citizens as it had been to Britons who had been hardened in bitterness and vengeance by the Luftwaffe's blitzes. But bitterness and anger, even if they balanced fraying nerves, could not undo the destruction. Munich's twin-spired Frauenkirche might be wrecked, Hans Sachs's Nuernberg gone forever, Stuttgart's fine baroque palaces burned out, but there was another score, and Germans knew more of it than the British told:

>Thirty key German towns attacked, 2,000 factories or installations of importance seriously damaged;

>Eighty-six raids by 100 aircraft or more during 1942; 37 major attacks in the first months of 1943;

>37,000 tons of bombs dropped on Germany in 1942; 10,000 tons dropped in February 1943 alone; 4,000 tons dropped in the first ten days of March;

>More than a million Germans rendered homeless.

The Fortress Europe was being softened. Perhaps the most pertinent comment on bombing, on the scale and in the manner practiced to date, was that after so many months of softening, Hitler's Fortress was still uncracked.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.