THREE-HOUR BATTLE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 64, Issue 80, 14 January 1944, Page 3

THREE-HOUR BATTLE.

GREAT CONFLICT IN AIR. GERMANS FIRE ROCKET SHELLS LONDON, Jail. 12. Three important fighter-plane factories were the targets for a great armada of more than 700 United States bombers which fought their way deep into Germany on Tuesday. With their escort of Thunderbolt and Lightning fighters, which made their longest trip yet over German territory, the bombers met, and fought in a three-hour battle, wave after wave of German fighters.

United States Army Air Force losses were G 4 bombers and fighters. Complete reports are not yet available, hut German losses are given, so far, at 100 or more fighters.

Three factories were smashed. The targets were at Brunswick, at Halberstadt (35 miles south-south-east of Brunswick), and Ockersleben (15 miles north-east of Halberstadt). The Commander of the United States Army Air Forces (General Arnold) says that the “huge air battle over Germany on Tuesday inflicted one of the hardest blows yet struck against the German Air Force, at a cost of approximately 5 per cent, of American aircraft. Three important fighter-plane factories were smashed and production wiped out altogether for months.”

United States European Headquarters say that the fighters which escorted the bombers flew farther into Germany on Tuesday than on any previous mission. Shepherding the bombers over the targets in northwest Germany, they knocked out 28 enemy aircraft. One group of long-dis-tance fighters, without loss, destroyed 14 enemy aircraft and damaged more than 20. This group flew more than 400 miles to the target, then engaged rocket-firing enemy aircraft in a violent combat while the bombers were dropping explosives.

Like a Naval Battle.

The British United Press correspondent at the United States Army Air Force bomber base says that Tuesday’s great air battle over Germany seemed like a great naval engagement to the men engaged in it. German fighters, flying in line abreast against the bomber formations, fired broadsides of rocket shells. The Germans even used smokescreens.

Some creAvs admitted that they never expected to return home when the German attacks developed fully. A Luftwaffe pilot, Lieutenant Westman, broadcasting over the Berlin radio, said: “The Allied air offensive is a veritable rolling over us day and night. Our pilots are undergoing the same experience as the German infantry in 1917, when the first British tanks appeared. The German air defence in the last 12 months has undergone the hardest test. We had to develop a new system of elastic defence. Our pilots have to wait to the very last minute for the leader to decide whether it pays better to go against the enemy fighters or against the bombers.”

Travellers who have arrived in Stockholm from Germany say that isolated planes bombed Berlin between 11.30 a.m. and 12.15 p.m. on Tuesday. Targets east of Berlin were also attacked. The main single attack was against Danzig.

The heaviest previous cost to the United States Army Air Force in a daylight attack was the loss of GO bombers in the raid against the ballbearing works at Schweinfurt. on October 14. Other heavy bomber losses wore: 59 against Schweinfurt and Regensburg on August 17, and 45 against Stuttgart on September G. The highest total of German fighters shot down in any American raid was 307 in the Schwninfurt-Regensburg attack.